Finally trying my hand at AI quicksand images

[JSample]

 
                                           "BETRAYAL"

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You’re… sorry… Angela silently repeated to Jason as the ooze encircled her lower jaw. You promised me you would save me… and you’re… sorry…? I… I trusted you… and you’re… sorry? I’m gonna fucking die in this shit… and you’re… SORRY?!

She had indeed trusted this Jason, her would-be savior who had convinced her to place her life and hope in his hands… and he had failed her in every way. His arrival on the scene and the faith that he had engendered in her heart had merely served to delay the inevitable. He was just like all the others, she dolefully realized as she closed her eyes in sorrowful acquiescence to her impending fate; promises made and promises broken; trust evoked and trust betrayed. There truly had been only one man who had ever kept his promises to her, she now understood and sadly accepted as her tears mingled with the mire, only one man who had ever deserved her trust… and very soon she would join him forever.

The ooze flowed thickly around the sides of her upturned face as Angela tilted her head back as far as she could, straining to take in one final, futile lungful of air against the crushing pressure of the heavy mud encompassing her chest before the quicksand claimed her as its own… and to deliver a final, scathing rebuke to her worthless “hero.”

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              “You… promised!––” she choked bitterly at Jason…


… and then all became stillness…

                                     … utter blackness…

                                                                  … and complete silence…

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    … save for the muted echo of her stinging words of accusation…

               … the panicked beating of her heart in her ears…

                             … and the thick, heavy voice…

                                        … of a creature.

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(From my story "'The Girl' (Part Four): Angela's Plight.")
 

[JSample]

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No story excerpt today or repeated attempts to get an image just right;
just me enjoying myself in the quicksand...

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... enjoying how it's suctioned around my body...

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... wishing you were here with me... suctioned around my body...
 
 

[Viridian]

I like the model you are using to make these.

[JSample]

I like the model you are using to make these.

Thank you. A lot of it is actually the AI's doing; for today's images I specified an attractive, athletic woman in her early thirties with long brunette hair and bangs, deep brown eyes, high cheek bones, and rosy pink lipstick, though sometimes the AI will go "Crystal Gayle" on me and make the damsel's brown eyes blue. I haven't used any photos or images to seed the output, nor have I told the AI to make the results "look like" anyone in particular; it's using its own resources to create a model of such a woman matching my description. There seem to be three or four different "faces" that the AI will cycle through, but it's sufficiently consistent that with enough renderings I can create a sequence of images where the damsel (usually) looks like the same woman from image to image.

[JSample]

 
"BEAUTY BEYOND SKIN-DEEP"

When I began writing my quicksand stories "The Kid" and "The Girl" years ago, I envisioned the character of Angela as a beautiful, athletic twenty-year-old young woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and a light complexion who in her first appearance in "The Girl" was wearing a red bikini while sunbathing on a riverbank near an expansive mudflat. While such a general description is admittedly vague, for years my default image of her in my head amounted more or less to this:

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However, in submitting the same prompt without variation over and over to Microsoft Designer's image generator, I've come to discover that in the eyes of AI, beauty goes beyond skin-deep, so much so that I can say with confidence that all of these women are Angela...

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... and Angela is all of them.
 
 

[JSample]

 
                                  "ANGELA'S PURGATORY"

                               Jason… you… you promised…

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Angela’s naked form hung motionless within her miry tomb, her face held forlornly upward, her arms suspended weakly by her sides, her legs extended limply toward the unfathomed depths of the mudflat, her strength finally exhausted by her futile struggles against the grasping ooze and its sensual assault on her body. Once again she had sunk beneath the surface, only this time she knew that there would be no reprieve, no additional breath of air, her fight for survival having at last reached its end, her remaining moments of life and lucidity numbered by the slowly diminishing levels of oxygen in her blood. She had been taken by the quicksand as she had vowed that she would not, struggling and screaming as it drew her into its suffocating depths, her body and mind submerged within its inexorable grasp, submitted to its unrelenting intent, consumed by its insatiable hunger. Somewhere beyond this dungeon of darkness, she brooded emptily, her would-be hero likely still stood before the place where she had vanished into oblivion, still straining stupidly against the grip of the rope on his belt, still reaching uselessly forward to effect a rescue that would never occur. Yes, he was probably still standing there in the cool breeze and the bright sunlight near her favorite sunbathing spot by the river, she supposed… but it no longer mattered. Enveloped within the muck and ooze of the merciless, implacable quagmire, cut off from all the living, Angela would now meet her end in the cold and dark of the quicksand, completely and utterly alone…

… except that she wasn’t alone.

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You… did this… to me… Angela replied mutely, faintly, to her fetish-creature, which seemed to be growing stronger even as she continued to weaken within the smothering morass, as if the thing in her head were stealing life from her as she sank further into its element.

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Tears again began to well in Angela’s eyes behind their tightly closed lids at the thought of the imminent horror awaiting her within the depths of her miry prison. Why…? she grieved in silent sorrow.

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At least… Angela answered feebly, they get… to live out… their lives…

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Merely existing… Angela responded sadly, seems preferable… to this…

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I wish… I could… Angela’s mind muttered weakly.

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Fuck… reality…

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Lucky… me…

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I’d rather… grow old… and bored… Angela silently whimpered.

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I am… dying… for it…



(From my story "'The Girl' (Part 5): Angela's Purgatory.")
 
 

[JSample]

 

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"Wouldn't you know it... the one day I finally decide to enjoy a private mud bath in my favorite sinking spot and BOOM! Attachments go live again and everyone on the forum can see me..."
 
 

[JSample]

 
"THE SCREAM"

In homage to Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" (which image, even though it's in the public domain, I won't be posting here because (1) I figure that everyone has already seen it and (2) if you haven't, it's easy enough to find online), I present a collection of "scream queens" competing to give their own impressions of this late-nineteenth-century Expressionist work (you'll pardon them for not holding their hands to the sides of their heads as does the figure in the painting, given that their arms are rather deeply mired in quicksand):

First, there's Angela's plaintive take on "The Scream"...

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... followed by Joyce's terror-stricken rendition...

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... accompanied by Sarah's existential angst...

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... attended by Anna's pleading appeal...

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... rounded out by Jennifer's hopeless cry to the heavens.

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But for all the emotive energy expressed by these bog-bound beauties, in my opinion their efforts pale before Connie's full-throated portrayal of the painting:

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You'll note that here, to most accurately emulate the composition of Munch's work, the quicksand itself is holding the sides of her head (along with every other part of her body as well). So Connie wins today's "Scream Queen" competition... at least until the quicksand finishes doing what it's giving her a reason to scream about in the first place...
 
 

[JSample]

 
                                         "OH MY GOD!"

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Sarah’s voice broke off as she again 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 after her last jump 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 dense, 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–!”

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The “something” that hadn’t seemed right ––

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“Omigod... umm…!” Sarah extracted her right hand from the mud and began slapping her palm at various places on the bog’s surface as she worriedly glanced around herself…

–– the “something” that she couldn't quite put her finger on ––

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“Oh, my god...!” A wave of urgency swept over her as she anxiously pressed her hands back into the muck in another apprehensive attempt to free herself from its grip…

–– was that there was nothing but sucking ooze beneath her feet.

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“OHHH, MY GOD!” Sarah cried in rising panic as she pushed her hands even further into the mire and began hyperventilating uncontrollably, her face a mask of both shock and dismay. “I can’t... feel the bottom!” she panted fearfully, her lips trembling as her eyes grew wide, unable to catch her breath, “What’s going on?!” She gulped heavily against the insistent demands of her runaway lungs as dark possibilities, none of them reassuring, flooded her mind amid the ominous recognition that she was sinking into the bog.

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“Is this...? No!” she gasped in dread denial of what her subconscious already suspected as she began pawing madly at the surface, her hair flying from side to side as she hastily looked around to find something, anything, to which she might take hold. She instinctively tried to push herself up with her feet, but the muddy depths offered no purchase. Even worse, she found her frightened efforts to free herself stymied by a massive suction grasping her shoes and legs that countered her alternating attempts to heave either foot upward by forcing the other progressively deeper into the cold, clutching muck, pulling her downward with them.

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“No!” she cried again with increasing alarm as she abruptly dropped lower into the ooze. Whereas moments before she had seemed to be floating buoyantly at her waist, within a matter of seconds her frenzied struggles had caused her to descend to a level just below her breasts. She still felt no bottom beneath her feet.

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In deepening distress Sarah continued smacking her arms and hands against the surface of the mire as she cast her eyes about for a means of escape, but there were no branches overhead, and the nearest vegetation stood at the perimeter of the clearing, well beyond her flailing reach. Her throat began to tighten as she felt the clammy mud soaking through her top against her skin in a wet, heavy embrace, and a sob of anguish surged from her chest as a dawning terror sparked within her mind and quickly expanded to fill her consciousness.

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“Fucking quicksand…!” she whimpered incredulously, hesitantly, as if naming the unspoken horror would somehow bring it to life. But there was no longer any doubt.

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“FUCKING QUICKSAND?!” she shouted in stunned disbelief as she sank further into the muck, “NO!”



(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.)
 
 

[cerberus]

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.