Finally trying my hand at AI quicksand images

[JSample]

 
 
                                      "DIRE REALIZATION"

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Her voice broke off as she looked around herself at the quivering expanse of the unstable ooze encompassing her. A short breath escaped her lips along with an uncertain “um” as she sought to find her footing in the marshy quag. A troubled frown crossed her face. Something wasn’t right, it seemed, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “What...?” she murmured uneasily, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion as her feet tentatively probed the sloughy depths beneath her. She had been so preoccupied with freeing her arms that she had given little thought to her lower body below the surface, but now that the muck had finally relinquished its hold on her hands she belatedly realized that her legs had become deeply mired and nearly immobilized in the thick, muddy morass, while the supposedly solid earth under her feet had melted into a strange, mushy consistency that she hadn’t noticed earlier when standing in the shallows of the pit, a dense, shifting softness that clung stubbornly to the soles of her shoes yet yielded readily under pressure. Another shaky breath accompanied her next unsettled attempt to push herself up from the bottom – from what should have been the bottom – only to be followed by a bewildered gasp as the hair on her neck stood on end and the gravity of her peril became appallingly and undeniably clear.

“Oh–!”
 
 

[JSample]

 
 
                                        "DESPERATION"

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Sunk so very deeply in the clutching quag, with so much of her body engulfed in its relentless grip, there was no way that she would be able to free herself from her miry imperilment, and she knew it. She could find no leverage, no hand- or foothold, nothing whatsoever, and soon her strength would give out completely. Already her feet and legs were growing numb as the cold, soggy depths of the bog stole warmth incessantly from her body. “I can’t... do this...” her weeping voice rasped wearily as she felt herself settling further into the liquefied earth, gravely aware that she was running out of time. She would be able to keep her head above the surface for only a little while longer, especially as the thick suction of the quicksand around her shoes and legs caused her every movement to drag her slowly and inexorably downward. As difficult as it had now become for her to breathe, she knew that soon she would no longer be able to breathe at all. This was her nightmare. The horror of this prospect, of being entombed alive within the smothering depths of the asphyxiating ooze, of suffocating in choking, helpless agony as the merciless mud flooded her throat and lungs, drove her tortured mind to the only defense remaining within its reach.

“It’s not happening! It's not happening! It's not happening!...”
 
 

[JSample]

 
 
                                   "A TENDER EMBRACE"

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Angela’s eyes fell closed and her head collapsed upon Jason’s chest as she continued gulping air into her lungs to satisfy her body’s overdue demands for oxygen, her naked form heaving against his body with her every breath, her mind a jumble of emotions and impressions, some stark and vivid, some blurry and uncertain, all of them culminating in an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward her rescuer. Oh, god, she murmured weakly between gasping inhalations, thank you, Jason… thank you… As the twenty-year-old slowly recovered from her fearful ordeal beneath the surface of the quicksand, she heard him whispering to her, “It’s okay… you’re okay…” as she lay against him in the mud, his arms clasping her tightly to himself. This was the most intimate embrace that she had ever shared with a man, the thought occurred to her, her bare breasts squeezed against his chest beneath the surface, her lower body pressed against his, and their legs somewhat intertwined with each other’s in the miry depths, but she sensed no prurient intent on his part. For the next minute or so she did little other than to breathe, her various bodily systems reviving as her bloodstream delivered fresh oxygen to the boundaries of her being, the sensation of feeling gradually returning to her extremities, while her hero did nothing more than to hold her close. In her relief and exhaustion she would have gladly remained this way indefinitely, comfortable and safe in her protector’s arms…


I can't begin to count how many prompts, re-prompts, and dozens of renderings it took me to get the above image as close as I could to what I wanted it to look like. As you can tell from the title of this vignette, adapted from my 2019 quicksand story "The Girl," I wanted to come up with a tender image that captured Angela's relief, exhaustion, and gratitude after Jason had pulled her up from the depths of the quicksand and had revived her with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and she had taken the first breath of the rest of her life.

There were some honorable mentions for this scene:

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I really, really liked this image and came close to using it as "the" image because I felt it captured a sweet moment between Angela and Jason after he rescued her; unfortunately, my prompt wasn't specific enough to make it clear that Angela had indeed been submerged beneath the surface; her hair and face here are mostly mud-free.


Another option was this one:

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I liked the way that the AI depicted Jason's and Angela's emotions as they held one another at the surface, and her darker hair could indeed suggest that she had been submerged before being rescued, but the image makes it look like they're in the middle of a roiling, raging river of quicksand swirling around them instead of in a quiet mudfalt, which wasn't quite what I wanted.


Some renderings from the same basic prompts I used above made Angela and Jason look so young that they appeared to be barely of legal age, and so for obvious reasons I won't be posting any of those.


Of course, I had to deal with the AI telling me over and over that the phrasing of some of my prompts "may violate Microsoft Designer's code of conduct," forcing me to adjust them bit by bit, so you can imagine my startlement when the AI spit out this image in response to the same basic prompts that I had used to get the above images and other similar ones:

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Regardless of what my story excerpt and prompts called for, this image makes Angela and Jason appear to be doing something "deeper" beneath the surface than just hugging each other, which especially took me aback since I specifically wrote that Angela "sensed no prurient intent" on Jason's part as he held her. True, I had written that Angela felt "gratitude" toward Jason for his having saved her, but this wasn't quite what I had in mind for this scene. Maybe the AI read ahead to the next chapter in my story where Angela makes it very clear to Jason what she wishes he would do with her in the quicksand!

Hey, Microsoft, with your AI putting out suggestive images like this, I don't want to hear anything more about how my prompts "may violate" Designer's code of conduct!

[JSample]

 
 
                                           "UH-OH..."

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Nicole discovers that her double-D's don't double as flotation devices...

[JSample]

 
 
                                     "IMPENDING DOOM"

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Her weakening, unanswered pleas for help tapered off as the remainder of her strength at last gave way and her depleted body fell limp, her disheveled bangs matted with mud and sweat upon her brow as her head lay wearily in the muck. I’m so fucked, she wept in silent sorrow, faint streaks of muddy rivulets tracing the paths of her tears down her face as she felt the soppy soil saturating her hair and scalp. She could barely summon the wherewithal to breathe, her spent form rising and falling in the thick morass to the ebbing rhythm of her diaphragm, her sunken body encased within a miry grip that afforded her little leeway to move, much less to try to escape. Her mud-soaked clothing clung leadenly to her immobile figure in the dense quag, while the tips of her shoes pointed downward listlessly toward the frigid, fathomless depths of the bog in the empty wish for a solid bottom that was nowhere to be found. She could envision no possibility of rescue, no hope for salvation, no future but the grimy, acrid taste of the sodden earth that was slowly swallowing her. Just a short time before, blissfully ignorant of the danger, she had fantasized indulging herself in a sensual moment of “dirty” delight in the clasp of the encompassing ooze; now she foresaw only the endless oblivion of her eternal interment in the cold and dark of the quicksand.

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[JSample]

 
 
                                   "OMINOUS INTUITION"

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“Please! Somebody!” Angela cried out as loudly as she could from what amounted to a miry hole in the ground, a tight, form-fitting depression that seemed intent upon drawing her ever more deeply and completely into its grasp. As she forcefully expelled the lungful of air that had powered her call for help, the dense mud enclosing her chest seemed to settle even more firmly around her as she sank lower into the quag, and she realized that she might never be able to take as deep a breath again so long as she remained trapped at this depth in the ooze. A disquieting image flashed through her mind, that of the heavy muck relentlessly squeezing her chest ever more thickly after her every exhalation like the constricting coils of a python until finally she would be unable to breathe at all. Was it possible, she wondered fearfully, to suffocate in quicksand -- or quick-mud, or quick-clay, or whatever the hell this stuff was -- without ever actually sinking beneath the surface?

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[JSample]

 
 
                              "LA PETITE MORT, INDEED..."

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                                               "Oh..."

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                                           "Oh, yes..."

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                                       "Ohhh, yesss..."

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                          "OHHHHHHHHH, YESSSSSSSSS...!"

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                                               "Oh..."

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                                            "Oh, no..."

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                                       "Ohhh, noooo..."

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                       "OHHHHHHHHH, NOOOOOOOOOO...!"
 
 

[JSample]

 
 
                                        "LAST BREATH"

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“Ohhh-ohh,” the entrapped young woman moaned despondently amid her doleful descent into the muculent morass, her fearful whimpers returning as her leaden arms slowly disappeared into the mire before her.

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Bitter tears fell from her eyes and mournful cries from her lips as she settled deeper into the consuming muck, the grasping ooze claiming first her mouth and then her nose, cutting her off from life-saving air as it steadily climbed her cheeks toward her tightly shut eyes, her flowing hair offering scant resistance to the flowing mud as it entered and then inundated her ears, silencing the soft sounds of the forest around her.

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Far above, oblivious to her suffering, the summer sun had finally emerged from behind obscuring clouds, once more casting its bright, warming rays through the trees onto the surface of the bog around her, but she took no solace in the celestial orb’s belated return, its shining presence overhead now but a cruel mockery of the black fate awaiting her. The naive, playful curiosity that had drawn her like a child to the mud pit had long since perished deep within her broken heart, sucked into a swamp of sinking emotion, her shattered psyche submerged in a boundless abyss of sadness.

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Before this hour, before this moment, she would never have imagined that this would be the way that her story would end, that the joyful, uplifting melody of her hopes and dreams, the buoyant, vibrant song of her very self, would be senselessly stifled and stilled forevermore in the cold finality of the choking depths of a loathsome, miserable pit of… fucking quicksand.

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“Fuck...” she conceded wearily in tearful resignation to her inexorable end, relinquishing her last breath into the smothering mass of the enveloping ooze. She could no longer resist the inevitable.

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Oh, please... she at last yielded in a spent voice of silent surrender, I can’t fight it anymore…
 
 

[JSample]

 
 
                                          "TAKE ME..."

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                                      "... not you, silly..."

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                                    "... the quicksand..."

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                                        "... take me..."
 
 

[JSample]

 
 
"A 'MIDSOMMAR' DAY'S DREAM"

After going through several takes and re-takes at getting a dramatic, evocative image of Angela from my story "The Girl" struggling desperately in the quicksand with only her hands visible above the surface as she goes under for the last time...

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... the AI apparently decided that the poor girl had had enough for one day and gave her a break... by going all "Midsommar" on her.

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I'm not sure what the AI was thinking/dreaming/hallucinating here, but Angela seems happy with it, and considering the physical, emotional, psychological, and physiological hell that she'll go through in the story before finally being rescued from the muddy, gooey, grimy, yucky, mucky depths of the mudflat, I'm not going to begrudge her a headdress of pretty flowers and butterflies.