The last day or so I’ve been using Midjourney to create AI art. The reason is not that I’m artistic, I’m not really at all. Rather, I want to create illustrations for my Substack, and I figure it will be cheaper/easier than commissioning an artist. In fact, I already used something I generated with Midjourney for a Substack post.

But over the last hour, I aimed to produce a Western hunter-gatherer woman, and a Neolithic farmer man, and a Yamnaya pastoralist man.

Click for the larger image. It was really difficult to create the woman because the training inputs are such that when you stipulate that a woman has very dark skin, it just assumes you want to depict an African woman. So then I started adding “thin lips” to the prompt, and it turned the women into Europeans. My friend Askhar pointed out that you probably need to tell the program to start with an Indian woman, so that the dark-skinned feature doesn’t have strongly African features. Nevertheless, it was difficult to get the blue eyes to stand out on her face, so she ended up looking like she had Waardenburg syndrome. But I didn’t want to spend more than 30 minutes on it.

Here’s the prompt for her:

large blue eyes, cheek tattoos, face tattoos, long hair, black skin, beautiful woman, meadow background, shoulders visible, simple brown clothes, tribal Tamil woman, deep-set eyes, wide face, strong jaw, wide jaw, European characteristics, Hunter, primitive, face tattoos, cinematic, photorealistic, portrait –test –creative

The men were trivial to generate, so I’ll leave that to you.