A GUEST GALLERY: BAD-ASS BIKER ME - WHEN AI-GENERATED VIDEOS CAN BE TOO GOOD FOR THEIR OWN GOOD!

 

Bad-Ass Biker me, Karl, as a confident, assertive, swagger-Jagger motorbike dispatch rider with attitude in his mid-20s straight after uni but some months before commencing my full-time writing career - whatever happened to him, I wonder?? (This is a screenshot from my real-life genuine Bad-Ass Biker video (as dubbed by my good friend Randi Macdonald), which like all of the other real-life genuine biker vids of me included in this gallery are (c) Dr Karl Shuker)

[Intro by RebelBikerDude: My biker/writer mate Karl has done sterling work in helping me create & keep going this blog of mine ever since I launched it back in January, so today & tomorrow I'm handing it over to him to contribute a couple of linked guest galleries, entirely of his own making; here below is the first one, and click here to access the second one.]

Sometimes, as proclaimed by the title of this present gallery, AI-generated images can be too good for their own good, as I'll explain a little later here! But first, here is some necessary background info regarding this gallery and its contents:

Working on this blog with RebelBikerDude during the past 8 months no doubt helped revive far-distant memories in my mind of a small stash of VHS home video tapes that had been mostly filmed about 35-40 years ago by various family members and at least two different girlfriends, showing me alongside or astride my several motorbikes that I'd already owned down through the years up till then (I've owned a fair few others since too!), using a very basic, early video camera, whose tape recordings' picture quality was adequate more than admirable. Nevertheless, I greatly treasured the resulting videos, because they were the only record that I had of me from my rebellious Wild Youth days back in my late 20s when, as I freely admit, I was not lacking in attitude, (over-)confident swagger, or assertiveness - in short, and as my American friends have said, I was definitely a bad-ass biker, lol. (More about that a little later here.)

 

RebelBikerDude (RBD) and me joking around as usual! ((c) RebelBikerDude)

Sadly, however, this stash of video tapes had somehow been misplaced during our house move in the early 2000s, and after undertaking several unsuccssful searches for them I'd reluctantly conceded that they must have been lost or even mistakenly discarded in transit and that I'd therefore never be able to watch what was taped on them again. Imagine my surprise but delight, therefore, when, following yet another search for them earlier this month after their memories had newly resurfaced, I found them, wrapped inside a very large paper carrier bag concealed amidst several other such bags that contained some items of glassware and ornaments from our old house that I'd never got around to unpacking here in our new house.

Most anxious to discover their condition after such a very long time in unplanned storage, as I was well aware that video tapes are not known for their viewing longevity, I binge-watched all of them. As a result, I was both happy & relieved to find that although there were sizeable segments on each tape that were unwatchable and unsalvageable due to a grim combination of tape crinkling and mould - the twin terrors always faced by video tapes & their collectors - in among these predominantly wrecked portions were some small yet perfectly watcheable, well-preserved video clips showing me as I still so well remembered, standing alongside, sitting astride, or riding my mean machines!

So what I've been doing since rediscovering my tapes is subjecting those precious few still-watcheable vid clips of me with my bikes preserved on them to a lengthy, laborious, but very fulfilling programme of restoration - firstly creating digital copies in mp4 format that could be played and edited on my laptop, then utilising resolution enhancement software to improve their viewing quality as much as possible. I've currently achieved excellent results with nearly a dozen vid clips - so much so, ironically, that at least two Facebook friends mistook one of these restored real-life clips (but not the same one) for an AI-generated vid (more about that later here)! However, there are many more clips still awaiting attention, so this could be a very long drawn-out process, but to see a younger, fitter, and so much more vibrant me, resurrected like a veritable leather-jacketed biker phoenix from the ashes of the past, makes it all well worth while.

My Bad-Ass Biker vid clip, in which I'm wearing one of my self-customised leather biker jackets, transferred from its original VHS video tape on which it was filmed back in the 1980s, converted into MP4 digital format, and then given some resolution-enhancement treatment ((c)  Dr Karl Shuker)

Plus, here is my second, shorter, but different Bad-Ass Biker vid clip:

Moreover, by including them in their very own gallery here, despite the fact that they are definitely not AI-generated videos, means that these real-life vids now have a permanent online home, where they can be watched & enjoyed by so many viewers, after having spent the previous three to four decades concealed from the world inside a paper carrier bag!

But what has any of this to do with AI images, which are after all the subject to which this AI biker art blog is devoted? All will now be revealed.

You'll notice that directly following the short series of real genuine vid clips of me in biker mode whose origins I've now described above, I've added a single but notable AI vid of biker me that I purposefully created earlier today in direct response to one of my FB friends' inventive but incorrect claim concerning my real Bad-Ass Biker vid (inserted two paragraphs above here), which she'd seemingly but wrongly assumed was an AI-generated vid. To quote her full response to my Bad-Ass Biker vid after I'd posted it on FB yesterday: "Very fortean, the way your leg moved through the bike! " So I replied: "It doesn't actually do that, I slide it across the front of the saddle, look closely." That was the way I always dismounted from this particuilar bike, a Honda CX500, because it was too tall for me to throw my leg over the saddle like I do with most other, lower-slung bikes such as my Harleys (had I tried it with the Honda, I'd have probably overbalanced!). Anyway, what I decided to do in addition to posting my reply was to create with RebelBikerDude's help & via the AI image-generation program Adobe Firefly a bona fide AI vid that hopefully would show this friend what moving my leg through the bike would have really looked like.

How I set out to achieve this aim was to utilise her exact comment as quoted in full above together with my real Bad-Ass Biker vid as a combined verbal & visual prompt supplied by me to Adobe Firefly in order to engender an AI vid of me that looks a lot like my real genuine Bad-Ass Biker vid but in which my leg really does move through the bike in best fortean fashion, lol. And, happily, that is exactly what Adobe Firefly did generate, so be sure to check it out, and see for yourselves!

Meanwhile, here's some more info about my Wild Youth phase, lol. In my late 20s, during those last still-youthful times between graduating from postgrad uni and embarking upon what would become my future full-time writing career, I entered what was for me a somewhat belated, uncharacteristically rebellious phase, as in loud motorbikes, louder punk/Heavy Metal music, an assortment of tattoos, a couple of piercings, and a half-hearted attempt at smoking (happily, the smoking didn't last long). And now, courtesy of another of this gallery's real, recently-rediscovered, resolution-enhanced VHS videotape clips of me that I've now converted to an MP4 file and which is perhaps the best visual representation, of my Wild Youth phase (hence I've duly dubbed it my Wild Youth vid), here's how I was back then. (Incidentally, the muir cap that I'm wearing in my Wild Youth vid was kindly gifted to me by the American biker brother, Joe, of my then-current Stateside girlfriend Carol whom I'd met at uni). Forty-odd years later and having now entered a very different phase of my life - my Far Too Old To Care phase! - I figured why not celebrate my long-gone but still fondly-remembered rebel days by including my Wild Youth vid clip here, but those of a nervous disposition may be well advised to look away now!

 

My Wild Youth video clip ((c) Dr Karl Shuker)

And here are some of my other restored real vids of me in biker mode during the 1980s-2000s:

Finally, here as promised is the AI-generated vid created by me that envisages how I'd look if I could move my leg directly through my Honda motorbike, lol:

 

Be sure to click here to acess my second, sequel guest gallery to this first, present one.

 

But before I hand this blog back to RebelBikerDude, I couldn't resist presenting a few nostalgic visual treasures of mine. So here is a quartet of pix kindly created for me by RBD with the AI image-generation program Cici/Dola (from a single original photo of me snapped during my late 20s) in which I'm sharing a smoke and a joke - with me! Plus, I've added a video clip created in turn by him from one of those latter four pix (again with Cici/Dola) in which I demonstrate that I have burn-proof lips! (Don't try this at home!); together with a Cici/Dola-generated video clip in which he has magically combined and brought to life three pix of me wearing the three different one-piece motorbike racing leather suits I've owned down through the years - not sure what language I'm speaking, though! AI is fun, no doubt about that!

 

More of my AI-created biker images next time!

Plus: please click here to access a chronological listing of fully clickable links to all galleries uploaded by RBD on this blog. NB - all of the images included in this page's gallery were created by RBD, using the AI image-generation program Adobe Firefly, for non-commercial, entertainment purposes only, and do not feature any real-life persons (other than me!) or copyrighted characters.