Susanne Hæsta’s photos of old ladies in nightclubs are a finger to everyone who thinks older ladies should be invisible. It’s just too bad the ladies don’t exist in real life. They are created via an artificial intelligence program. Hæstad is a trained designer from the fashion school Esmod and has a certificate as a shoemaker, likes to work with textiles, wallpaper and has worked with digital production of prints. The head is always full of ideas.
Avatar at bar. Susanne Hæstad’s avatars at the bar – rock up in notions of old ladies. (AI Midjourney)
– I like learning new things, technical hacks and programs and exploring how different things work. And I have a typical bubble head, full of ideas, she says.
I like to learn new things, technical tricks and programs
— Susanne Hæstad, designer
It was almost by chance that she came across AI Midjourney – a program where you can create “fake art” via an artificial intelligence program that creates images from text descriptions. After studying some You Tube tutorials, she got the idea.
– Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night at three or four o’clock and can’t sleep. What do I do then? Yes, surfing the net, she laughs.
Avatars at bar made with AI Midjourney Cool and old, the dream of old age need not be sad (AI Midjourney)
– For a while I spent the nights sitting on online sales in Japan and bought a bunch of kimonos, but I couldn’t keep up with that for long. So then I thought ok, all this AI stuff that people talk about so much, maybe I should try something like that?
That’s when she found the program AI Midjourney. And then the imagination caught fire.
[ Raserer behandlingstilbud for folk med spiseforstyrrelser ]
The inner circle of friends
– We have a club called the “Get together and get it out on a trip and theatre” club. And then I sat there alone and fantasized at night, and thought: what will we look like when we get old?
She typed in a few selected keywords: AbFab, 80-year-old, tough, tattooed ladies at a New York nightclub. Based on that, the program produced a series of images that can make most people face old age optimistically.
avatars created with AI software A little wrestling match before the next round? Susanne Hæstad’s eighty-year-olds are ladies who refuse to be invisible. (AI Midjourney)
– Yes, I have to say I think it was very funny, and a wonderful picture of what we might think we will look like in a few years, when so many people like to get tattoos, she smiles.
A bit scary
Susanne Hæstad sees the program as fun pastime, which is not entirely unproblematic.
– In these days when there is so much talk about fake news, such a program is scary, because you can produce images of people and events that never happened. As an avid newspaper reader who swears by paper and old school stuff, I see clear challenges for the digital media of the future when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence. Because – in the end, who can decide what is true and false? she says.
The eighty-year-olds of the future will not sit in nursing homes and be put to bed at nine o’clock: this is how Susanne portrays them in AI Midjourney. (AI Midjourney)
A funny detail is that the program has the same challenge as real people:
– You may remember the debate that took place in artist circles a few years ago about being able to draw a hand? says Susanne Hæstad.
One of the most difficult things to draw when it comes to anatomy is precisely the human hands and feet. It has often been a measure of how skilled a draftsman is.
– Well, the AI program has exactly the same challenge as us humans, it certainly cannot produce a natural human hand. And maybe that’s also a bit reassuring, she smiles.
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