Elsewhere in this issue, I've written about using artificial intelligence to create art. To educate myself on the topic, I spent a couple of weeks (and a couple of hundred dollars) trying out some of the big-name tools.
That article includes quite a few images I created during that time period, and we decided to pick one for our cover.
I created this image using Midjourney.
During my experimentation, I discovered that some of the best results came from instructing the system to use a particular style of art. Since science fiction and fantasy styles are very popular among many of the people playing with these tools, I chose such a style -- steampunk -- for this image. The result needed a bit of cleanup in a photo editor, but the original was pretty close to what I was imagining.
I've written more about this whole topic in the Spring 2023 issue of LNF Weekly.
Check out Jim's web design company, Loft 2203.