Finally trying my hand at AI quicksand images

[JSample]

I haven't commented here for a while, very remis of me. You've come up with some really nice and interesting stuff recently, very impressive.

Thank you very much, cerberus; I really appreciate your compliments and encouragement.

[JSample]

 
"VISUALIZING THE UNVIEWABLE"

When I posted my "Purgatory" story excerpt from "The Girl" last week, the very first image of Angela (re-posted below)...

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... was one that in effect should be impossible: "seeing" someone completely submerged in the pitch-blackness of quicksand. There is necessarily no light beneath the surface, and so there should be no way to physically "see" anything or anyone down there, whether from the perspective of an observer or of the person who has sunk. The most realistic image would have been a thoroughly black void, but that would been completely uninteresting and beside the point of such an image, which is to somehow visualize the plight and peril of someone who has sunk completely into the enveloping darkness of quicksand. What I posted was the best result of a few hours of experimentation and several reworded prompts to try to get the AI to depict something that logically shouldn't be depictable.

Without going into the boring details of my efforts, I did want to share here some of my "honorable mentions" and sometimes outright failures to get the AI to depict what I had in mind.

The biggest difficulty in getting the AI to make sense of what I was trying to accomplish is that in order for someone to be "visible" beneath the surface of quicksand, the quicksand itself would need to be at least somewhat transparent. The AI's usual answer to this matter was to depict the quicksand as being essentially water:

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These two images, while dramatic in their own right, imply that Angela has sunk into quicksand whose surface is itself several feet below the surface of overlying water, which wasn't my intent.

Sometimes the AI simply gave up didn't and even try to make the quicksand look like anything other than water...

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... while other times it made Angela look like she was sinking into a literal miry grave.

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Given the "contradictory" nature of what I was trying to depict, a few times the AI decided that a somewhat stylized approach was best (both of these images could have been "the chosen one")...

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... while once it just went full-blown dramatic. (I'm guessing that here Angela is a quicksand ballerina starring in Black (Muck) Swan.)

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On one occasion I tried to emphasize that Angela was both completely submerged beneath the surface of the quicksand and completely encased within the quicksand, which caused the AI to go off in a two-different-women-who-are-somehow-also-one-body-horror direction:

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Finally, if the AI had not rendered the image at the top of this post that I actually chose for the story excerpt, this one would have been my best choice:

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Angela is submerged beneath the surface, her arms are extended, she's encased and sinking in deep, dark muck that's enveloping her arms and body... but the quicksand is again obviously beneath a few feet of water. Also, as with certain other images here, she's clothed because the online AI won't do nudity.

So after asking for and receiving dozens of images to try to depict Angela completely submerged within quicksand, I ended up going with the first image in this post, which was ultimately the AI's best compromise between what I wanted to see and what it could conceive of as being "seeable" beneath the surface of the quicksand (and the "encasing" nature of the image allowed the AI to imply Angela's nudity without stumbling over her actual nudity).

Don't ask me about the times when the AI decided that Angela should be wearing scuba gear and a regulator...
 
 

[Boggy Man]

Actually, an image of someone submerged in quicksand can be possible if it is in infrared (heat)!

[JSample]

Actually, an image of someone submerged in quicksand can be possible if it is in infrared (heat)!

That would make for quite a haunting image...

[JSample]

Actually, an image of someone submerged in quicksand can be possible if it is in infrared (heat)!

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Here's the best that the AI would give me on short notice. Her upper body is still warm above the surface, but the blue mist around her and the cold blue of the quicksand indicates that hypothermia is a real danger.

[JSample]

 
                                         "SOMEBODY...!"

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“Okay! What can I do?” Sarah groaned breathlessly, her eyes wide with fear, her thoughts racing in different directions faster than she could follow as she tried to remember anything that she had ever learned about surviving in quicksand, “Ohh-ohhhh!” She felt as if every neuron inside her skull were firing at once, obliterating reason and logic and inundating her consciousness with random impulses and emotions beyond her control as she grasped manically from side to side at the sodden surface, while the persistent ooze patiently solidified its own grasp on her body even more firmly.

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Her vision seemed to be narrowing, blurring the periphery of sight and mind as one intent alone –– escape –– quashed all other conscious thought beneath its instinctive impetus. Amid the mental chaos enveloping her she seemed to recall something about lying flat to spread her weight across the surface to allow her to free her legs and crawl to safety, but the extreme depth to which she had sunk and the heavy suction of the clutching muck around her body made that impossible. Wordless moans gave way to gravelly, disjointed cries as she continued to thrash her arms about. “Nooo!... oh, fuck!... okay… there’s somebody––”

That one word born of both fearful hope and hopeless fear snapped Sarah’s scattered mind back into focus. Neither fight nor flight was going to save her; at this rate, they would end her. If she were ever going to find release from the cold, muddy bonds constricting and constraining her, salvation, if it ever came, would arrive in only one form.

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“SOMEBODYY-Y-Y!” Sarah cried out hoarsely to the surrounding woods, clenching fistfuls of muck as her voice trailed off piteously and her arms fell back into the mud. Her wild exertions had been constantly sapping her strength, and now, sunk to her shoulders in the mire, she found herself battling for every breath against the weight of its rising pressure around her torso.

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For several seconds her lungs labored deeply as she sought to steady herself, her form rising and falling in the thick morass with each heaving gasp as her heart pounded within her chest in a mad race against the adrenalized demands of her body, while dire recollections of her earlier difficulties extracting her legs and feet after every jump haunted her as portents of peril heedlessly ignored till it was far too late. Regardless of the casual way in which her friends had spoken of it and treated it during their group ventures to this place, this entire “dare spot” was in fact a muculent menace that she had briefly studied years before in a college geology class, she abruptly remembered, a type of quicksand more dangerous than most, from the subtle safety of its deceitful shallows to the lurid lethality of the seemingly bottomless abyss into which she was slowly yet steadily sinking.

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Shit… she grimly realized as she anxiously glanced around herself at the thick layer of dark, decaying plant matter now clearly visible on the rippling surface beneath her face, this is a peat bog… it’s a fucking peat bog! She had read about such bogs in that long-ago class, she shakily recalled, how deceptively deep they could be –– dozens of feet… or more! –– how fatally frigid they could be –– bitterly cold… even in summer! –– and how woeful the plight of any poor soul who became trapped in one.

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Horror filled her eyes at the thought of what was happening to her and what would very soon happen to her if she could not break free from what she now understood was a doubly deadly trap that could claim her life in minutes even if she never sank beneath the surface, and with deepening dread she began raking her hands again over the miry expanse, twisting her body left and then right, her voice reduced to groaning whimpers of desperation as she felt herself slipping further into the ooze.

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“No!... okay… ohh-oh… hunh-uuuhh-unh!... fucking quicksand!” she grumbled bitterly at the cold, wet, sticky substance holding her captive within its clutches. Without outside assistance, she knew in her heart, there would be no surviving this.

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“SOMEBODY, HELP ME! I’M IN QUICKSAAANNND!” Sarah threw her head back and screamed at the top of her lungs to anyone who might be within earshot before collapsing again in convulsive sobs as her hands once more fell to the surface, the bleak prospect of her increasingly likely fate driving her sinking heart ever deeper into despair. Despite the warmth of the mid-summer afternoon, she shivered tremulously under a dank chill that swept over and through her as encroaching clouds darkened the sun above, plunging the bog and its timbered environs into gloom and shadow as the fading light abandoned her to her lonely struggle against the pitiless pit, and she began crying miserably as her muddy adversary overran her shoulders and quickly encircled the base of her neck.

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She was only fooling herself, she recognized through her tears as she forlornly grasped handfuls of ooze; she knew that no one would hear her cries no matter how loudly she called. She was deep in the middle of the woods on a weekday and had deliberately not told anyone where she was going or what she had been planning when she struck off around noon in search of the “dare spot,” and of course –– of course! –– she had forgotten her cell phone. It’ll be fun, she ruefully remembered thinking earlier that morning while she was mapping out her day’s adventure; no one will be around, and I’ll have the mud all to myself. Now, hopelessly snared in the grip of the enveloping muck, she could only wish that someone, anyone, might somehow chance upon her and rescue her from this cold, miry deathtrap that had her all to itself.

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(From my story "Homecoming - A Narrative Adaptation of the MPV Video 'Just a Little Further,' Starring Sarah Michelle." No photos or images from any source, whether from MPV or of Sarah Michelle herself, were used to generate these images; they all originated solely from written descriptions of her character's general appearance in the video and from text prompts.)

[JSample]

 
"DESCENDING IN DARKNESS"

Oftentimes a quicksand scene, whether as an image or in a story, will emphasize a trapped person facing their impending submersion/demise on a bright sunny day (or at least during daylight) as the difference between night and day as they sink from the realm of light and life into the quicksand's domain of darkness and death, with the surface of the mire acting as a literal, clearly demarcated boundary between the two. But what if the "light of life" of the trapped person is just as dark and featureless as the quicksand into which they're sinking? What is it like, emotionally and psychologically, to be sinking in darkness (or near-darkness) with few visual cues if any as to what is happening to you and when you're finally going to go under?

To consider this prospect, here is a doleful display of desperate damsels descending in (near-)darkness to their direful doom:

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(It just occurred to me that the in the image of the very last damsel above, either her right shoulder and elbow are extremely limber or she's sinking on top of someone who's already gone under.)
 
 

[JSample]

 
"DESCENDING IN DARKNESS 2"

Following up on yesterday's theme, here's another collection of mud-bound damsels descending in darkness, only this time there's enough light for them to see and know just what's happening to them.

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I especially like this last image because the combination of texture, lighting, and shadow makes it look like she's sinking into the mud, into the sky, and into the universe.
 
 

[JSample]

 
"AMOROUS OUTTAKES"

Several weeks ago I posted an excerpt from my story "The Girl" taken from the very end of Part Five where Jason rescues and revives Angela after her near-death experience in the depths of the quicksand. It was such an emotional moment for both of them that between the end of Part Five and the beginning of Part Six they took a short break from the narrative just to enjoy a little personal time together in the mudflat.

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Then after the entire story was completed they decided to hop back into the mudflat for some playful, after-story fun...

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... which fun then started getting somewhat serious...

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Now, before anyone says, "Jason, you lucky dog, you" (or, for that matter, "Jason, the 'Jason' in the first three images looks a lot younger than the 'Jason' in the 'after-story' images"), the unfortunate fact of the matter is that while I am indeed Jason, I'm neither of the 'Jasons' in these images. As the author of the story, I'm stuck behind a computer monitor tapping words on my keyboard, miles away from the mudflat where Angela's story plays out, with not a spot of mud on me. So who are these Jasons in the images? They're my stunt doubles. That's right; I as the creator of Angela's story and of her entire world am necessarily stuck here at my desk, typing away, while my stunt doubles get to enjoy tender, intimate time with her in the quicksand.

I gotta get a better agent for the sequel... and a better contract... with better benefits...
 
 

[JSample]

 
                 "THE QUICKENING CALL"

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Angela sighed and smiled musingly under the summer sun, her thoughts returning to her grassy spot on the bank of the river as she rose up on her elbows and again cast her eyes over the mudflat that lay before her. All these memories –– her childhood fascination with being stuck in mud, her unlikely “first time” in the bog at her grandparents’ farm so many summers ago, her several years’ journey to awareness and acceptance of her sexual fetish for mud and quicksand, and her unexpected discovery of an online community of like-minded enthusiasts for the viscous ooze –– now swept through the twenty-one-year-old’s mind like an ocean wave as she continued gazing wistfully at the miry area in front of her. Many of the member submissions on the quicksand site, she recalled, were people’s first-hand accounts of their own experiences in deep mud or quicksand, an experience that, aside from her accidental moment in the mud years before, she had heretofore only imagined in her most private fantasies; perhaps, she wondered pensively, the time had finally arrived for her fantasy to become a reality.

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She lay staring at the mud for several more seconds until, haltingly at first but then more deliberately, she rolled onto her left hip and elbow and then, after another moment’s hesitation, brought her right leg up beside herself. Planting her right hand in the soft grass, she placed her weight on her right knee as she brought her other leg forward before slowly straightening up and rising to her full five-foot-five height before the expanse of mud that stretched before her.

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Not since that long-ago day on her grandparents’ farm had she stood this close to a bog of any size, much less one that extended tens of feet across as did this one. Its unfathomed depths somehow beckoned her, she recognized, her breath momentarily catching in her throat as an overwhelming sense of anticipation coursed through her body. By the same intuition with which she had only begun to perceive it all those years ago while stuck waist-deep in a mudhole in the middle of a fallow field, she now understood that this was indeed her deepest truth, her deepest desire, and after years of cultivating and in turn being cultivated by this her deepest passion, she realized that she was at last ready to answer its quickening call.

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“I’m gonna do this,” she whispered to herself, quietly and resolutely, as she looked out intently over the bed of mud that lay invitingly, beguilingly, before her.


(From my story "'The Girl' Part One: Angela's Passion.")