Hidden traces of humanity: what AI images reveal about our world

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect

W hen faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results.

As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms.

Back in the summer of 2023, I tried it, using a browser-based version of Stable Diffusion and an AI application called Clip Interrogator, which translates any image into a text prompt. It took about three minutes to play two rounds of the game. I kicked things off by typing “Eat Poop You Cat” (why not?) into a field that encouraged me to “Enter your prompt”. Then I clicked “Generate Image”.

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