Meet Bob (Kind of)

I’ve had trouble finding the right featured image to go with my current story series “The Monster in My Building.” I suppose I could have tried looking for an ominous image of an apartment building (though honestly that didn’t occur to me until now.) But I wanted to use an image of Bob, the series’ titular monster. The trouble is, Bob’s look is rather unique.

I settled on a copyright-free image of a bird-looking monster, though it doesn’t look exactly like Bob as I’ve described him and is only meant to convey the idea of Bob. At my real-life job, though, we have access to the AI image-generating software Stable Diffusion, and after chatting with one of my co-workers about it I decided to attempt to generate an image of Bob.

Did it work? Well…no, not exactly.

But nevertheless, I managed to generate some images I quite like.

This one almost looks like it might be a person in a Bob suit. I like how the lack of wings and human-like shape makes this “Bob” eerily undefinable, you can’t quite tell what he is supposed to be. And the oversized feet are kind of cute. I can picture him waddling around the building with his head wobbling back and forth.

This one is the most realistically bird-looking. It does look like a stork, but not a Maribou stork. I don’t think Stable Diffusion really knows what that is. I liked the fluffy, almost hairy look of the feathers on the neck, as well as the unnervingly oversized hook on the beak. Even though the “real” Bob has neither.

This one looks the most monster-like. I like how this “Bob” looks like it’s lurching out of the elevator towards you. Its over-sized, droopy wings are the closest I could get to long claws on the wings. Usually if anything Stable Diffusion just gave me a clawed foot where a wing would normally be. Unfortunately, because it has no beak it’s missing a lot of the “creepy bird” vibe Bob ought to have.

All in all, it was a pretty interesting experiment, and my first brush with AI image generation. In the future I may spend more time tinkering with such things, and see if I can’t come up with something that better represents all it means to be “Bob.”