Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the avalanche of AI generation programs from elevenlabs to lazy high school students’ dreams come true, ChatGBT. But perhaps the most popular of this new genre would be the image generation tool, Midjourney.
For those of you still somehow unaware about what I’m talking about, Midjourney is a program which allows the user to type in a descriptive prompt about the kind of image you’d like the tool to create. It then uses a vast library of images in its database to collect and reorganize aspects of photos it has to do its best to generate the prompt you’ve given it.
Now I’m not here to join in on the debate of whether AI tools like this should even be legal given the alleged thievery that takes place when training the program to perform. What I’m here to discuss—no, what I’m here to warn you about, is why you should never use it.
My first experience with Midjourney was pretty much like everyone else’s. I’d seen the results on Twitter and Reddit and had been curious about how these bizarre images of Yoda standing trial for war crimes or Trump and Obama playing Xbox together in the Oval Office had been created. When I found out the name of the program and how it worked, I got into the Discord chat and just tested the waters to have a little fun.
So I spent the early days of my experiences like the other thousands of people in the general chat rooms, generating ridiculous pieces of art that had been primarily used to just create funny and outlandish scenes and depictions to send to a messenger group with a couple of friends.
It wasn’t until a few months ago that I had started using Midjourney on a regular basis. You see, as a DM, I’m always trying to get the party I run in DnD to see the world I’m sending the party through by apt descriptions and so on and so forth. But I figured Midjourney would be the perfect way for me to create some landscape scenes and character art as a way for them to see first hand some of the things and places they’d be encountering. Pretty harmless right? I mean it’s just for my party and that’s about it. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Well to give a little context, it was the night after the most recent session when I had logged back into the Discord server. My party had just finished burning down a tavern after a one-sided battle with a lich, and I thought it would be fun to have an image of a fantasy tavern burning down for them to start up the session next week. So as always, I opened up the General Image Generation channel and typed up:
/imagine prompt: fantasy tavern, burning down, patrons running outside on cobblestone streets, night
As always, it placed me in the queue as it started to slowly generate the four different variations of the prompt for me to choose from. But it wasn’t until it had finished rendering and notified me of the prompt’s completion that I realized that something was off.
Now when dealing with any type of AI generated content, you’re bound to get your fair share of glitches and goofs as it sometimes doesn’t give you exactly what you were looking for. But what I was looking at wasn’t that, it was something… Well, different.
It was a burning building alright, but not the kind within the fantasy genre as I had requested. It was a modern one, that stood on a street corner that upon closer inspection was all too familiar. It was the street that I had grown up on, and that was the house I’d been raised in, the very place where my mother still lived. Rather than patrons running out onto cobblestone streets after some ridiculous battle with fireballs, was the silhouette of a single woman who looked to be trapped behind one of the windows.
Each of the four sample images showed what was unmistakably my mother’s home in incremental phases of destruction due to the flames, the fourth and final variant showed the smoldering ruins, with a blackened skeleton standing by the ruins of the front entrance. Now at the time I was a tad bit unsettled at the generated images on my screen.
I then just chalked it up to the fact that the area I grew up in was just the stereotypical 90’s suburban neighborhood that could have come from any number of stock images the program had been trained on. Yet I had to admit that the resemblance was a little uncanny, especially the small yellow and green mailbox that seemed to be identical to my mother’s.
Around two weeks later, I woke up to a call from my brother at around 5:00am.
“David… There’s been an accident..” He said, his voice shaking and clearly trying to hold back tears.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, anxiety quickly starting to build in my chest. “Are you okay?”
“No, it’s not me. It’s… It’s mom. There was a fire, and-“ his voice trailed off as he finally started to cry.
“What? What happened?” I asked, my blood pressure growing higher with each second.
There had been a fire. According to the report from the chief of the local fire department, it seemed to have started in the kitchen around midnight. It looked to be the result of the stove being left on by accident. They tried to console us by saying that she wouldn’t have felt any pain, given the smoke inhalation—she would have passed in her sleep.
At the time I never even once thought about those images, I’d had too much on my mind given the obvious circumstances. I had to work with my brother in planning a funeral while mourning our own mother. While we all know it’s something we’ll eventually have to deal with, it’s an issue we all think we won’t have to deal with until we’re well in our 50s or so on. It’s not the kinda thing a couple of 24 year olds are really equipped to deal with at the time.
It was about another five weeks before things started to return to a state at which I could classify as normality. And by that I mean that was how long it took for me to go a few days without thinking about how I’d never be able to talk to my mother again and start crying because of it.
At that time I’d started writing and planning out more campaigns to run my group through, as I found that writing stories, lore, and planning encounters was a good way to get my mind off everything and back to the world of dungeons and dragons, where the world and rules that governed it were all under my control, as opposed to the real world—where the world moved on and where consequences were final and unchanging.
That was when I then returned once again to Midjourney, to help visualize some of the concepts I’d been creating at the time.
One of my players, a man by the name of Tyler Griffin, had made a new character of a Tiefling Druid. He’d given me a description of the character and I’d told him I’d create some character art for him to have in his binder where he kept his character sheet, notes, and spell cards.
So I repeated the same process I’d done countless times now and prepared the generation channel:
/imagine prompt: DnD Character, Tiefling, druid, blue skin, green eyes, black cloak with gold trim, hyper-detailed
As always, I sat back in the queue while the program did its thing. When I got the notification that it had finished, I must say that I was rather disturbed by what it had shown me. In all four variations were the DnD character I had asked it to create, but they were all eerily similar to Tyler himself. They all had his same slicked back hair, the same two ear gauges, even the same damn scar he had across his upper lip. But that wasn’t even the worst part. That terrible honor would fall to the fact that each and every one of them depicted his character being hung by a noose within a small room cramped with scrolls and bowls that looked unsettlingly close to his bedroom in his apartment.
At this, I immediately clicked the redo button, and upon its completion I was met by the exact same series of images, except this time they depicted the body now in a rotting state of decay, with ravens eating at the blackening flesh that drooped from bones and hanging tendons.
It was only then that my mind went back to the images of the fire and the burning house, and then to the sight of the smoldering remains when I had arrived all those weeks ago.
Now I’d like to sit here and say that I’m a rather rational guy—at least I try to be. And the whole time I was sitting there and looking at those images and thinking back at the ones of my mother’s house, I couldn’t help but feel sick to my stomach. It had to be a coincidence, I mean AI tools like this fuck up all the time and generate weird shit that goes beyond the depicted boundaries, but this was one weird damn deviation if I’d ever seen one.
So just to be double sure, as well as for my own sanity, I called him up just to make sure he was okay.
“Hey Tyler, how is everything?”
“David?” He asked, probably more surprised at the fact that I’d called him rather than texted. “Yeah, I’m good. Something up, man?”
“Oh yeah, no, everything’s good. I uh, I just wanted to call and let ya know that the AI thing is acting up. It’s uh, not doing the best with getting your character right.”
“Oh that? Man, don’t worry about it. I just thought it’d be cool to have but it ain’t like it’s the end of the world.” He said with a laugh.
“Well I’ll try again later, might wait until they update it again.”
“Yeah that’s no worry, Dave. Hey, I’ll see you and the guys tomorrow for game night.”
“I’ll see you then bud. Bye.”
If I’d have known those were the last words I would have ever said to him, I like to think I’d have tried to warn him somehow, but warn him about what? Some kind of voodoo bullshit about seeing his character dead in a fantasy version of his bedroom? I mean he was usually the pothead of the group, but he’d have only asked me where he could get what I had been smoking when I called to tell him that. What could I have said?
It was only when I had ended that call that I started to think to myself how stupid I was being. Everything’s alright, I’d said. I’ll get the group back tomorrow, we’ll have fun like always, and it’ll all be fine.
The very fact that I’m here recounting these events is probably all you need to know that things were indeed not fine.
I’d come to that realization myself when I received a visit by the local sheriff’s department at noon the following day. At the time when I’d first opened the door to them I’d been worried over something stupid like they’d come because someone found out that I’d been driving around with my inspection sticker 6 months out of date or some shit like that.
“Is something wrong, officers?” I asked at the door.
“Mr. Edwards, we’re here because you’re the last known contact that was made with Tyler Griffin. According to his phone records, you called him at 8:47pm last night. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, what’s all this about?” I asked, stepping outside to join them. “Is he alright?”
“What was the nature of the call you had with Mr. Griffin?” The other officer asked, ignoring my question.
“I had called to make sure that he’d be at tonight’s game.”
“Tonight’s game?” The first officer asked.
“Yeah, tonight’s game. A group of us play DnD.”
“Dnd?” The first officer asked. I could forgive the question given that he was an older gentleman, one whom despite several obvious decades of protecting and serving the good people of this community, would likely have never heard of any game that wasn’t Sunday night football.
“You know, DnD? Dungeons and Dragons?”
“Like the thing from Stranger Things?” The second younger officer asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Like the thing from Stranger Things. Listen, can you all please tell me what this is about? Is Tyler alright?”
The older officer took a deep breath. “Your friend, Tyler, was found in his apartment by his sister this morning. He’s believed to have died by an apparent suicide attempt.”
I had backed up and now found myself half-way falling backwards against my front door.
“Dead?” I asked, my voice shaky. Images of his character’s body swaying from a noose. “You… You said he’s dead?”
“I’m sorry, son.” The older officer said as he knelt down in front of me. “We’ve just been checking around to see if he might have said anything when you were on the phone with him last night.”
“Did he sound depressed?” The other officer asked. “Did he seem different in any way you can think of?”
There wasn’t anything I could think of, because there hadn’t been anything wrong. Tyler wasn’t someone who’d do something like that. He was the jokester of the group, the one who was able to just sit back, smoke some reefer, and see the bright side to every situation.
I didn’t ask them how he had died, mainly because deep down I already knew. But I couldn’t tell them that. If anything it could somehow maybe end up making me a suspect, but was there a chance I actually could be? I mean was something as stupid as typing in a prompt in Discord of all places actually lead to a death? And if that was the case, did that mean it was my fault?
You try to put yourself in my situation and ask yourself those same questions. What kind of state of mind would you be? What kind of ridiculous scenarios and possibilities would be going through your head? Because I can tell ya right now that I was really going through the motions—pretty much all of them suggesting that I was just going insane and imagining all of it.
By the time the officers had left my apartment I had just stood there in the living room for about an hour just slowly losing my mind. It wasn’t until I went into my own bedroom to call the rest of the group to tell them what happened, that I noticed what was on my computer monitor.
When I had left earlier to first answer the door, I’d been catching up and listening to the critical role podcast on YouTube, but now Midjourney had been opened up over the screen. As I slowly made my way towards it, I saw that I had already entered into one of the image generation channels, with a prompt already typed up in the chat box, waiting to be entered:
/imagine prompt: lonely man, all by himself in an empty room, the darkness closes in, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no one to help, no god to save him
I’d had enough of this bullshit. I wasn’t playing any more games. I was done. So I went to my keyboard, and held down the backspace key to delete it. Yet the moment I pressed the key, it instead entered directly into the queue.
I’d never felt so out of control in my life up to that point. I tried everything from attempting to cancel out the prompts, even closing out the Discord program all together, but at that point my entire damn computer was unresponsive. So there I stood hunched over my desk, helplessly watching as that dreadful image was slowly constructed in hazes of pixelated blurs moment by moment.
The ball of stress that had been building up in my stomach ever since I’d heard about Tyler earlier that day had now grown into what seemed to be an endless pit of fear of impending anxious doom.
When that prompt was finally rendered, I almost threw up right there and then.
In the first of the four variable renders, I was hunched over my desk in the exact position I now was, even wearing the same damn clothes. Behind me was a shape composed of black disorganized geometry that could only be created by an AI art tool. Stitched over this alien shape were screaming and agonized faces. There were dozens of spider-like appendages breaking through the form in uneven angles that kept the thing suspended in the air.
In the second image, there were black tendrils with jagged rib cages and other shredded bones breaking through them—reaching out towards me, my back still turned towards the computer desk.
The third image had those tendrils and spider legs entrapment me, slithering around my body and lifting me up in the air, blackened bones coming out from the mass and stabbing into my back and through my arms—while a black snake-like form coming out from the computer screen. At the end of the tentacle was an opened hand with elongated fingers that looked to be made of sharpened metal covered in blood, with a mouth of jagged teeth in the palm.
The fourth image had each of the jagged fingers breaching into my skull, while the mouth within the palm of its hand was eating some kind of light or glowing essence that was coming out of the holes that were being ripped out of my body.
I could feel my heart racing a million miles a minute as I watched this twisted and demented prompt on my screen. It wasn’t until I almost doubled over from my weakening arms holding me up on my desk that I quickly turned around—and was met with nothing. Yet every instinct in my body was telling me that I wasn’t safe, that I was still in danger. It was then that I reached under my desk and ripped my computer’s power cord right out of the outlet, leaving my monitor with nothing but a lifeless black screen.
I haven’t been back to that apartment in about three months now. I moved in with my brother that very day, he hadn’t even asked why. I think that after losing mom he was just happy to have some more family much closer to him, and I have to admit I am as well.
The group fell apart quickly after that, everyone felt that it just wasn’t the same to continue without Tyler, I was just relieved I wouldn’t have to cancel the whole thing on my own accord. Because I’m not the same man I was back then. I’m at the point now where I’m always looking behind my back, always worried that what I’d seen is coming for me. For my mother, it came weeks after those images were created. For Tyler, it was the very next day.
I don’t know how much longer I have left until my card is punched. But there are nights where I see things in the shadows at night, there are times I swear I can hear something beyond the windows—something coming closer. And every time that instinct of fear kicks in during those dark times, my mind always curses me with those damned words…
The darkness closes in, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no one to help, no god to save him…