The advent and advances in AI has been all over the news in recent months, with everything from Chat GPT being heralded as the rise of Skynet to creators (particularly artists but not exclusively) voicing concerns about being out of a job soon.

Over the weekend, my Edge browser updated and included a new Microsoft Image Creator that’s AI powered and can offer up creations prompted by keywords (all family friendly so no rude suggestions allowed) so I thought I’d have a play, and started with something basic: “Batman and Superman” which gave me this:

Both characters are recognisable but not sure why it decided to give Batman a distorted S shield and, more confusingly, but a bat-cowl on Superman.

So then I thought “Crisis on Earth Prime” which delivered:

And while I like the globe cracking in the background, I’m not sure why I got a faux Iron Man character who’s clearly not having a good day!

My third attempt was a bit more specific: “superheroes in the style of dave gibbons in black and white with the words crisis on earth prime” and got this:

Sure, the text is a complete load of gibberish, but I think there’s a bit of a WATCHMEN vibe there, even if it’s not exactly Dave Gibbons-like.

And after playing about for a bit, I thought – maybe I can actually use this for some backdrops for the UNTOLD TALES covers I do? Finding good, licence free backgrounds has often been tricky, so maybe this would help every now and then? So I tried “alien world backdrop” and got this:

Which I think is pretty good. It certainly gives me some hope that with some practice I can get it to generate something that I can use on occasion.

Anyone else used this or any of the other generators out there?