One of the best things about art is the willingness of artists to take risks, and to depict things, events and phenomena they have never seen before using materials at hand, the skills they have developed, and a dash of imagination. That, and also not admitting they just don’t have the knack for animals, or still life, or humans, but trying their best anyway.

It is ever thus, particularly with the artistic rendering of cats. There are so many opportunities for artists to get cats wrong and they all exist. Admittedly cats are fairly difficult to represent, but some artists don’t even seem to know where to start. Yet love all these bad cat pictures so much. All this brings me to trying out artificial intelligence art apps and asking them to depict cats. My theory is that if human artists can fail cats, so can AI…maybe?

Thus, I present to you a selection of AI renderings of galactic astronaut tabbies, because I had to input something and I wanted the cat to stand out on the background. Some images are more successful than others but mostly I believe they look more like cats than not-cats. At least they are not cats with human faces, however, I was expecting a touch more uncanny valley. I suppose some images are a little odd, but not quite as successfully disturbing as the human created cat paintings, especially those ones which are basically sad human faces with cat ears and fur. I don’t know if any of this is a win for cats, for cats in art, or AI art cats, but time may tell.

After playing with cat images, the other thing I am starting to experiment with is using my poems as input in AI art generator apps. I completed one round, and it came out surprisingly accurate to what I imagined while writing the poem. Yet the series lacked life or oomph. Or something. We’ll see how it goes with different poems or prose works and if anything interesting pops out it might end up here.

Generally, the writing was slow in September, but I submitted some pieces recently and at least one publication is due out in October. Here’s where it’s at right now.

Steady as she goes, the 2022 writing update:

• Rejections: 151
• Pending: 19
• Acceptances by publisher: 26
• Acceptances by work: 37
• Published: 34