Sometimes when I’m bored, I like to experiment with AI and test its limits. First, I had AI generate a list of chimeras, animals that are two types of bodies combined into one, like a minotaur has the body of a man and the head of a bull. There is one chimera that has always made me wonder whenever I heard of it, and that is the manticore.
Here is the original image that the AI-generated showing a manticore.
Here is after I made some minor edits. The face, I had to keep pushing and pushing the AI to make it look more human, it kept just making the original look bloated. Finally, the AI popped and said, “Here, here is a manticore with the full head of a person and output this:
Now this, this is a thing of nightmares. I laughed so hard when I saw this because it blends the beauty of hyper-detailed fantasy art with that of what appears to be CGI and its uncanny valley mystique. It takes an entity that one takes for granted, but upon scrutiny doesn’t quite match up. It puts a human face on a myth.
Manticores ride that uncanny valley, I think even in our imaginations. It’s a human, but yet not a human. It makes me wonder where this fear comes from. It reminds me of the science that has been coming out recently about ancestor trauma, where trauma can embed itself into the DNA and be passed along through generations. Imagine a species similar to homosapien sapiens but a predator toward us. It reminds me of this very interesting episode of The Why Files.
I imagine that’s where the fear of the uncanny valley comes from. A beast of our nightmares.
Leave a comment and let me know what bothers you about the manticore image. Or, if you decide to watch the video, let me know your thoughts on my theory about the uncanny valley.
Take care.