I’ll dedicate this post to the exploding trend of AI-based visual engines, namely, Midjourney, and offer my first, early, humble takes on taking Alice through this AI looking glass.
What’s Midjourney? What are AI-based visual engines? Well, If you’ve been tripping balls off mushrooms in the last few months, or meditating on a rock in Dharamsala, and have just logged on, and got to this post, and it’s all very new, read on, the rest can skip ahead. Google’s Dall-e and Midjourney, as well as others, are text-to-images wonder engines. You type a textual description, and get an output in a visual. You whisper a few words to a machine, and it paints you a pretty picture. It’s like something from the Wizard of Oz, only with a real Wizard behind the curtain.
Midjourney is free and easy to use. You get 25 images for free, and than you have to pay. I ran a few experiments on the free model, and will soon try out the premium one. Below are a few of my recent experiments.
I set out to play with Alice in Wonderland related prompts. Asking the AI God to illustrate Alice in Wonderland scenes.
Naturally, it all depends on my textual input, the description I lay down, the style I ask for, the design I set in words, all that, within the engines abilities, and restrictions.
The fantastic Midjourney engine works so it gives out 4 versions of an image, you can then multiply a specific variation, or upscale one to a better rendering and resolution.
This mind boggling technology is still in development, and with every frequent, periodical release, the end result looks better and better. Dear me, here I go rambling on. Let’s just dive into the few samples that I played around with. This is part one, as I’ll revisit it at a later time. These are just my early experiments.
First were these attempts of Alice sitting with her sister, her sister reads a book, and Alice is bored. 
Alice and her sister reading a book, by the river, by Rackham. The 3rd and 4th variations are brilliant. The 4th can pass as a Rackham, can’t it?
2nd attempt at same description of ‘Alice and her sister reading a book, by the river’, this time by Michelangelo. Well, while all variations are great, none looks like his work, right?
Same description, with Caravaggio this time. While it doesn’t resonate Wonderland related, it does have artistic merits. I do like them all.
I had quite a few attempts of asking midjourney for the image of Alice running after the White rabbit. It didn’t start off very well:
In the following attempt MJ mashed Alice and the Rabbit into one creature
This one started looking more like a girl running after a rabbit, especially the bottom two. So I created multiplies of those. 
Both of the upper two came out pretty good. In each I found variations I liked and proceeded to upscale.
I love this one particularly. One element in MJ is how dream-like the images are. This is a great example of it. Elusive, brilliant Wonderland.
Take a breath here.
Now we continue. Down the Rabbit’s hole, through the well. This was a difficult one. Haven’t really managed to pull it off. 
The description was this – Alice falling down the well, around are cupboards and book-shelves, maps and pictures, jar labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE”. It was just not something the engine could translate to a visual properly.
This was a slightly better attempt. Still not there. 
This was the best one I achieved. Instead of ‘Alice falling…”
I tried ‘Alice hung in mid-air’.
Next were a few experiments with the scene of Alice going to the Hall of Doors, with the White Rabbit, seen in the distance.
I did like the 3rd one there. I upscaled it. take a look:
I went ahead and tried a few more takes on this scene. 
I finally reached a few visuals I liked from this scene, and upscaled a couple:
Beautiful, isnt it?
Next I tried out Alice after drinking the ‘Drink Me’ Bottle, when she shrinks. It did not come out too well –
While it’s hardly recognizable as the scene, can you guess what artistic style I went for here? Salvador Dali. Nice, ha?
Next I tried Alice and the Dodo. Here’s where things got a bit off the rails
Yeah. No need to say anything.
The next was this one, also Alice and the Dodo
Yes. What can I say? Let’s never discuss this again.
This gets weirder though. Brace yourselves. Here’s the mouse, telling his long story, with the birds around:
Is this not what Carroll had in mind? You see how midjourney mashed up the mouse and the birds into one creature.
Oh, you thought that asking Midjourney to illustrate a talking Caterpillar smoking a hookah, would be a ride in the park? Here’s what I got:
Finally, I just asked for a Mad Tea Party. This is what I got:
This was part one. I’ll create more of those in the near future and share. Any comments and questions, please leave below.