My latest serial, The Diary of a Victorian Disciplinarian, explores the affairs of Emily Havercock with Arabella Horsham, whom she is employed to be the companion of and Arabella’s husband, Alexander Horsham, who is a devotee of the birch.

The events that took place have been recorded in Emily’s diary. Although photography was invented in the 1800s, Emily, unfortunately, did not possess a camera and I needed title illustrations for each of her diary entries.

I have had some success creating composite images featuring real life models superimposed on a background in Photoshop to use as the title images.

Having worked in the photographic industry from as far back as when film was the main medium and Photoshop was a mere glint in the Knoll brothers’ eyes, I have always been happy to make use of new technology, embracing digital photography, but only when it became capable of doing the job and economical.

I have already started using AI generated backgrounds and elements in some of my composited title images for my other stories but these were subjected to a lot of Photoshop tweaks, which also uses a lot of AI driven editing and selection tools. This was my first step to illustrate, The Diary of a Victorian Disciplinarian

There came a point where none of my stock of images fitted Emily’s diary entries. The idea of hiring two models who could pass as Victorian ladies, and were willing to wade into a woodland pool in early spring in the UK was impractical, so I turned to AI.

The first images produced were surprisingly good. Skin often looks plastic in AI generated pictures and people are often not looking where a human would look. I was also surprised that it produced the NSFW images. Since I am trying to keep the title photos on my Substack a nipple and genital free zone, I had to rewrite the prompt to put Emily and Arabella in slightly deeper water.

Another entry in Emily’s diary describes a scene where Arabella is whipped with a riding crop in the stables. The first result was again rather explicit, which is OK for this site, but not what I was after as Substack title images.

Some of the intervening creations were either too explicit or a little weird. I should add that both Emily and Arabella are buxom women, so I have added this to the prompt at this point to try and get away from stick-thin renditions of women that AI seems to favour.

In the next scene, Emily and Arabella lead Mr Horsham into a room where he is positioned on a spanking bench. In the background there is an A frame to which Arabella will be tied to receive her birching. The AI had a pretty good idea of what an A frame should look like in the first image, but then it lost the plot, so I abandoned it.

In the diary entry, Arabella is tied to an A frame ready for her birching so I decided to try adding that. Unfortunately, Emily’s boobs kept popping out and Mr Horsham kept rolling over onto his back, so it was back to Photoshop, where I lifted the best image of Emily out of one picture, dropped her into the best image of Mr and Mrs Horsham and rebuilt the A frame.

Just for fun, I wondered what would happen if I turned Arabella around to face the front, as she is in the story. Emily’s breasts popped out again, Mr Horsham kept turning over, presumably to get a look at them, and Arabella lost her buxom figure as she reverted to AI type.

AI image creation is improving all the time, skin looks more natural, body shapes are becoming more varied, but there is still an artificial quality to its rendition of humans: look at the twinkle in the real model’s eyes in the title photo for Part 3 compared to the blank, android like look of the AI images. Even where the two seated girls are looking at each other, there is no connection.

I read recently (sorry I have forgotten where) that AI cannot write about what it feels like to eat a hot curry: it has never had that feeling, it can only copy what human writers have written about it.
It is a useful tool for editing and, in some cases, creating images, but it still cannot beat picking up a camera and photographing a real person.

Just in case you are wondering – no, I do not use AI in any part of my writing.

The AI images on this page were produced using Stable Diffusion 3