To illuminate how generative AI models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion derive their worldview from its 5.8 billion image and text pairs, German data journalist Christo Buschek and Canadian software artist Jer Thorp deconstruct the (only) open-source foundation dataset LAION-5B in an incisive, visual essay. Digging deep into its troubled contents, algorithmic—not human—curation, and entanglements with other systems, the two warn about stacking “models on top of models, and trainings sets on top of training sets.”

How does generative AI’s carbon footprint fare against human creators? Pretty well, according to a recent paper shared by American software artist Kyle McDonald. Comparing text and image creation energy use, University of California researcher Bill Tomlinson and team found that BLOOM, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 beat human writers and illustrators (and their computers) by wide margins: “An AI creating an image emits 310 to 2900 times less CO2,” states the paper. McDonald’s dark take: “New eugenics just dropped.”

German media scholar Roland Meyer reveals AI image synthesis tools to be “redundancy processing machines,” as he pushes Midjourney’s new zoom-out feature to the extreme. Prompting a “family enjoying a barbecue” that yields a painterly “all-white, middle-class, suburban American dream world,” the AI keeps adding more of the same—more white people, more barbecue grills—as Meyer zooms out. “Redundancies collapse in on themselves,” muses Meyer, until, eventually, “clichés turn into nightmares.”

Never shy to insert his eccentric alter ego into art history as a form of playful provocation, Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey tasked the generative AI system Midjourney to put his ‘Famous New Media Artist’ persona into a David Hockney pool painting (“it keeps twisting my legs up!”) and to combine it with one of Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs (image). Credit where credit is due: Balloon Bailey is the blue, bespectacled kitsch we didn’t know we needed.

Eliot Higgins, Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.