From the introduction:

A friend asked me to create album art for his band. He told me,

“Do whatever you want as long as it’s not Ronald McDonald shoving George Bush’s head into a toilet.”

I’ve thought about this prompt for two decades.

Artwork and song lyrics created with OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT.

As an artist who believes that the systems we create shape our daily lives, I understand technology as a tool to put those systems into practice. I experienced this at an early age. My family owned personal computers in the 1980s, and as a teen in the early 90s, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and email lists connected me with other young people around music in ways that radically changed the course of my life.

I wondered what technological development would create a similar shift. It was 2022, and we were in the middle of a worldwide viral pandemic. One caused by genetic material, not 1s and 0s. Simultaneously, Artificial Intelligence was trickling into mainstream discourse. I didn’t understand it at all, but the more I read about it, the more destabilizing it seemed. It now feels quaint to look back at this perspective in 2026, with company CEOs setting their personal P(doom) at 10% and the US administration calling data center build-out essential to averting an existential national security risk.

Out of nowhere, I remembered the Ronald McDonald and George Bush brief from 20 years prior. It was a total non sequitur as my work at the time utilized stickers, flowers, and vintage magazines. Not exactly the source material to create a 1980s graphic design fever dream.

The brief was protecting against an impossible outcome…but what if it wasn't? Could I generate this artwork? Projects are my preferred way of learning new skills, so I started experimenting with DALL-E.

The images produced by the model were disjointed—a mish-mash of drawing styles from the millions of images ingested by the system. DALL-E struggled badly with images of two figures interacting, so much of the work became manual: compositing heads onto bodies with Photoshop, extending backgrounds beyond the model's default square crop. Eventually I used ChatGPT to help me construct more targeted prompts.

Since these drawings were for an album cover, there naturally needed to be song lyrics for this fictional band. And the lyrics generated by the LLM were quite bad! Trite, formulaic, and derivative. You can almost read the tokens being predicted. Over the course of the project, OpenAI was constantly tweaking the ChatGPT model. Words which once produced output were suddenly verboten. The ground was constantly shifting.

This booklet records the moment the AI industry first stepped onto the cultural stage. The tools have changed, the policies have changed, and the impacts seem murkier than ever.

Paul Morgan collaborated on the booklet. The lyrics were laid out using newspaper clippings from the Clarke Historical Library Digital Michigan Newspapers Database at Central Michigan University.

Published by Current Editions -> Available

From the introduction:

A friend asked me to create album art for his band. He told me,

“Do whatever you want as long as it’s not Ronald McDonald shoving George Bush’s head into a toilet.”

I’ve thought about this prompt for two decades.

Artwork and song lyrics created with OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT.

As an artist who believes that the systems we create shape our daily lives, I understand technology as a tool to put those systems into practice. I experienced this at an early age. My family owned personal computers in the 1980s, and as a teen in the early 90s, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and email lists connected me with other young people around music in ways that radically changed the course of my life.

I wondered what technological development would create a similar shift. It was 2022, and we were in the middle of a worldwide viral pandemic. One caused by genetic material, not 1s and 0s. Simultaneously, Artificial Intelligence was trickling into mainstream discourse. I didn’t understand it at all, but the more I read about it, the more destabilizing it seemed. It now feels quaint to look back at this perspective in 2026, with company CEOs setting their personal P(doom) at 10% and the US administration calling data center build-out essential to averting an existential national security risk.

Out of nowhere, I remembered the Ronald McDonald and George Bush brief from 20 years prior. It was a total non sequitur as my work at the time utilized stickers, flowers, and vintage magazines. Not exactly the source material to create a 1980s graphic design fever dream.

The brief was protecting against an impossible outcome…but what if it wasn't? Could I generate this artwork? Projects are my preferred way of learning new skills, so I started experimenting with DALL-E.

The images produced by the model were disjointed—a mish-mash of drawing styles from the millions of images ingested by the system. DALL-E struggled badly with images of two figures interacting, so much of the work became manual: compositing heads onto bodies with Photoshop, extending backgrounds beyond the model's default square crop. Eventually I used ChatGPT to help me construct more targeted prompts.

Since these drawings were for an album cover, there naturally needed to be song lyrics for this fictional band. And the lyrics generated by the LLM were quite bad! Trite, formulaic, and derivative. You can almost read the tokens being predicted. Over the course of the project, OpenAI was constantly tweaking the ChatGPT model. Words which once produced output were suddenly verboten. The ground was constantly shifting.

This booklet records the moment the AI industry first stepped onto the cultural stage. The tools have changed, the policies have changed, and the impacts seem murkier than ever.

Paul Morgan collaborated on the booklet. The lyrics were laid out using newspaper clippings from the Clarke Historical Library Digital Michigan Newspapers Database at Central Michigan University.

Published by Current Editions -> Available