AI and Me

If you have been following along during the past year or so, you know that I have been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create images for this blog. I am having a lot of fun in the process and plan to continue using AI ’til the cows come home.

Saturday was a rainy day and I cancelled my plans to do desperately-needed yard work (darn!). Instead, I sat in front of the television watching TCM with my MacBook Pro in my lap. 

As luck would have it, TCM was showing Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge, a 1930’s mystery that I vaguely recall seeing before. And even more vaguely, I seemed to recall that there was some crossdressing in the film. Next thing I knew, one of the bad guys is in full and convincing femulation mode and remained so for the next 10 minutes of the film.

After the film, I began playing with AI on my laptop wondering how well AI would work generating an image of me en homme and en femme. 

I tried en homme first and hit a home run on my first attempt. I was shocked how closely the AI image resembled the real me. My AI image could use a little more hair, but now I was ready to try an image of me en femme.

Not so fast, Big Girl! 

I spent about an hour generating en femme images, but none of them were me. There were two problems: the hairdo and the eyebrows. 

No matter what I tried, I could not get AI to generate the short blonde hairstyles I normally wear. What AI generated were styles that were either too long or too big. I tried a workaround by commanding AI to generate a “very short blonde men’s haircut” and that finally did the trick.

The eyebrows problem had me stumped for a long time. If AI’s output was a female or a male en femme, it insisted on thin, plucked and arched eyebrows. And I don't have thin, plucked and arched eyebrows! Asking for “thick eyebrows” did not work.

I was close to throwing in the towel when I thought that if AI would not give me the eyebrows I wanted, I would hide the eyebrows it wanted. Eyeglasses should do the trick and when I added eyeglasses to my AI command, voila! that solved the problem. (Although most of my photos don’t show it, I do wear eyeglasses much of the time that I am en femme.)

The images below are the results. 

In my opinion, the en homme image is so good that it is scary, while the en femme image is close and maybe a cigar.

Wearing Tory Burch

Frank Puglia femulating in the 1937 film Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge.