CRUISING WITH AL

 

An AI-generated biker image indirectly inspired by the movie Cruising, created by RebelBikerDude using Dream Lab

As a big Al Pacino fan, I've watched (and also own on DVD or video) virtually all of his movies over the years. However, there is one that despite owning it as an ex-rental big box video for the best part of three decades after finding it discarded at the end of a car boot sale here in the UK, I'd never got around to viewing until fairly recently. Directed by William Friedkin, released in 1980 & often considered to be both his & Pacino's most controversial, the movie in question is Cruising. A gritty crime thriller set in and around NYC's Meatpacking District's gay leather/bdsm bars & clubs of the 1970s, with some of the interior scenes shot in the actual real-life establishments existing there back then, and even featuring some of their regulars as extras, it stars Pacino as police officer Steve Burns, who is sent deep undercover into the District's leather community in the hope of identifying, tracking down, and ultimately apprehending a savage but elusive serial killer who is targeting this scene's participants.

Watching Cruising was certainly an education of sorts, as it leaves little to the imagination, hence its reputation, and showcases a very specialised lifestyle that I had scarcely known even existed previously. Yet although it features a number of bikers among the bar & club clientele, Cruising is not essentially a biker movie, and I certainly hadn't planned on creating a Cruising-themed gallery here.

However, while lately generating various images for a future Freddie Mercury tribute gallery (Freddie was renowned as a very keen biker, so look out for that gallery in due course), in which the idea was to depict him cruising through the city streets at night on his motorbike, as inspired in turn by the iconic b/w video accompanying Queen's very popular song 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' (one of my all-time favourites of theirs), I discovered to my great surprise that one of the three AI image-generation programs that I was using (namely Dream Lab) was generating a number of pictures that did not feature bikers who looked even remotely like Freddie but who instead were, I realised, very reminiscent of ones from Cruising, and even included some lookalike figures of Pacino in his Steve Burns role too.

 

An artificial & non-commercial AI-generated lookalike image indirectly inspired by Al Pacino's character Steve Burns in Cruising; image created by RebelBikerDude using Magic Studio

As my verbal prompts contained the word 'cruising' when describing Freddie riding through the streets on his bike, I can only assume, therefore, that this particular AI program was taking that word literally in a cinematic context, i.e. by utilising the movie of that title as its direct influence when generating pictures. The only discrepancy was that a few of these images included an unexpected but unmistakeable crossover effect between Cruising and Freddie, because they featured bikers wearing bright scarlet or crimson leather jeans! This nothing if not distinctive item of attire never appeared in Cruising but Freddie famously wore a pair of vivid scarlet ones during some of his most vibrant stage performances.

Anyway, to cut short what has already become an all-too-long story: rather than simply discarding these unprompted Cruising-style pictures, which seemed a shame to do as they had been very skilfully albeit unexpectedly composed by Dream Lab and were wholly innocuous in content, I decided to create a gallery for them, albeit a much smaller-than-normal one, as originally there were little more than 20 of these pictures in total (including those of the scarlet jeans variety). and here it is. As you'll see, however, I've also added some extra pix, generated using other AI programs as well, in order to boost this gallery's size, but including verbal prompts that specifically and unequivocally focused upon Cruising-style bikers, as well as upon Pacino's cop character, Steve Burns.

Needless to say, nevertheless, the pix created for and now duly showcased in this gallery are NOT real and they do NOT depict the real Al Pacino. Instead, they are merely a collection of wholly non-commercial AI-generated lookalike images indirectly inspired by the movie Cruising and his role in it as Steve Burns, nothing else.

 

A very special AI-generated biker image created by RebelBikerDude using Dream Lab - look closely at the motorbike to see what I mean!

Finally: if you haven't already done so, be sure to pay particular attention to the picture directly above this paragraph, because if you do you'll discover that it depicts a biker standing in front of a veritable pushmi-pullyu motorbike! With two front ends but no back end, it is truly a mechanical wonder to behold, not to mention being yet another memorable AI image whose generation by Dream Lab was wholly unprompted by me, and for which, sadly, I am therefore unable to take any credit whatsoever. Shucks!

More of my AI-created biker images next time, with my biker-themed Freddie Mercury tribute gallery coming soon!

Plus: please click here to access a chronological listing of fully clickable links to all galleries uploaded by me on this blog. NB - all of the images included in this page's gallery were created by me, RebelBikerDude, using the AI image-generation programs Magic Studio, Grok X1 & Dream Lab, for non-commercial, entertainment purposes only, so they are not real images and they do not feature any real-life persons or copyrighted characters; they are merely artificial lookalike pictures, nothing more.