"My dive into the intersection of photography and AI, started with early generators like VQGAN+CLIP and NightCafe’s 'artistic' mode. As a painter, I appreciated the results that skillfully balanced the figurative and the abstract— an aesthetic I pursue in my art. Though initially put off by DALL-E's seemingly flawless output, I discovered ways to leverage its potential for creating absurdist film stills, leading to my project, 'Sentient Muppet Factory.'

Inspired by Laurie Anderson's talk, where puppets served as an analogy for new technologies, I imagined my AI-generated images in a late 1970s variety show and worked on the concept of 'Sentient Muppet Factory.' While humorously referencing AI discourse, as these puppets are not truly sentient, the term 'factory' nods to mechanized production facilitated by AI, for I'm generating new characters in an apparently automated manner.

All pieces in this series were generated using a bank of images on my computer, primarily the early NightCafe pieces and a few studio photos of myself. Purposely utilizing disparate source imagery, I aimed to provoke an unsettling result by intentionally confusing the AI into responding unconventionally". - Beth Frey