As a welcome distraction from… all…. this…
A potential use for AI image generation finally occurred to me the other day that finally got me interested enough to try it. I shared the results on social media and people seemed to enjoy it, so I wanted to share them here as well with a little more commentary.
Fans of By Light of Hidden Candles, please enjoy these AI renderings of photos and scenes from the book! I used Bing’s Copilot image creator tool, which is based on DALL-E.
“Que bonita pareja”
This one is my favorite 😍 and that’s why I’m putting it first, despite the fact that the scene it depicts is towards the end of the book (pages 258-259), when Alma asks a stranger to take a photo of her and Manuel in front of his childhood home in Granada.
It nails everything about this scene, from the looks of the characters to their moods and dynamic. 10/10, would accept as canon!
Okay, actually it’s a 9/10 on the original output: I had to crop out the bottom of the image because the AI gave Alma an extra hand around Manuel’s waist!
“This way, señor”
My Facebook caption for this read: “When you’re watching your neighbor’s toddler and the Christian nobleman looking for your dad is terrible with directions but also kinda cute”
This is a depiction of the scene where Míriam helps León find the synagogue on pages 43-44. My actual prompt for this one included León, but this result jumped out at me, even though it left him out. I love the soft, kind of amused, almost teasing expression on Míriam’s face. The red circle patch is supposed to be on her chest, but it stands to reason that some Jews wore them on their arms.
Reluctant Shabbos goy
Alma drags Manuel to synagogue with her on her first Shabbat in Madrid (pages 118-120). They both look way too movie-star-ish here, and Copilot apparently has no concept of what a high neckline looks like on a dress, but the “HELP ME” look on Manuel’s face juxtaposed with Alma’s self-satisfied expression is priceless.
Escape from the judería
My FB caption for this one: “León finds his true calling in life as an emergency stepstool”
You would not BELIEVE how hard it was to get this image anywhere close to right!!! Oh man. It kept showing Míriam on top of León instead of the horse, which… would have been a different genre entirely. And yet, Copilot raised several proverbial eyebrows (a.k.a. blocked my prompts) when I told it to put a 15th century Spanish nobleman on all fours in front of a horse. 😑
ANYWAY. This scene takes place on pages 135-136.
Archive basement blues
My FB caption: “Catalogue the loose records from Murcia, they said. It’ll be an exciting academic opportunity, they said.”
This isn’t meant to depict a specific moment, just the general drudgery of the painstaking work Alma and Manuel undertook in the middle of the book while on the hunt for records mentioning their ancestors.
A special find
This one is my second favorite. It’s a sweet moment in the book (page 205) and something about the lighting and the poses and expressions really captures that tenderness. Not sure why the AI decided to give León 1990s teenage heartthrob hair and that’s likely far from the only thing that’s historically inaccurate here but the spirit of the scene really gets across.
Alma’s Facebook profile photo
As described by Manuel in the book (page 306): “It was a selfie of us from the restored synagogue in Lorca, her lips pulled into a radiant smile, strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail falling wildly around her face, her head touching mine as I obliged her with a tired smile.”
Alma’s face looks too cartoonish here, but the pose and Manuel’s expression are just right.
So much fun!
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