Artists remain divided on whether AI is a boon or a curse. Some are panicking about AI generators copying their style while others are using them to power their creative process.
For the past six months, filmmaker Filip "Philatz" Filkovic has been experimenting with Midjourney, an AI image generator that has drawn acclaim and notoriety for generating billboards, sci-fi books, and viral images of Pope Francis and Donald Trump.
Filkovic confirmed to Insider that he's generated more than 24,000 images using Midjourney to date — largely, he said, to expand the bounds of his own creativity. He also uses these images to storyboard scenes for his films, deploying them as a guide for which camera lens to use, or how to position the actors on set.
In a recent Midjourney project, Filkovic played upon the bomb shelters from World War II that now remain empty across his home base of Croatia. He prompted the tool to create images of bomb shelter furnishings and the results look like they're straight out of an Ikea catalog.
Ikea itself was of course not involved. It didn't respond to Insider's request for comment.
Filkovic has been on the "Ikea beat" for a few months now and regularly posts his creations to Facebook and Instagram. Through Midjourney, he's a simulated renderings of a catalog where the rooms are "messy, filthy, and destroyed." He's also created a series of "weird Ikea concepts" that include a coffee table that doubles as a greenhouse and a rug that can also be used as a musical instrument. And last month, he unveiled a Barbiecore version of Ikea-like offerings where the walls, appliances, and furnishings were awash in bright pink.
The bomb shelter series took Filkovic two whole days to complete because his prompt was more advanced than usual: Nuclear bomb shelter; a catalog inspired in the style of Wes Anderson; Symmetry; and Scandinavian design mixed with 50s kind of interior design.
Filkovic later told Insider via email that including "Wes Anderson" in the prompt imparted the images with a sense of symmetry and the American filmmaker's whimsical color palette. And the '50s kind of interior design helped to generate what he called an "eerie space-age look." Filkovic said he didn't edit the images aside from the text.
For creatives like Filkovic, AI tools could ultimately serve as a breakthrough for bringing abstract concepts to fruition.
"You know, like, you can have this perfect dream in your sleep, and then you awake, and it's real," he said, in reference to how Midjourney has helped him translate his mental images into real ones. "Stuff like this is something that you have, like imagined, it's now here in front of you."
Take a closer look at the images that AI-powered Midjourney generated for Filkovic's bomb shelter series: