Pirates and AI Art

 Lately I have been creating quite a lot of pirate images with AI Art Generators. Obviously I am fascinated by them. Why? Well, one of the reasons is that I am highly fascinated by the way you can create images with submitting text prompts, so I have been playing around with various themes and subjects. But there is more to the subject of "pirates".

• History in general has been and still is one of my favorite subjects - which means that I love to read books about history, and I love to read historical fiction. I also love to read history novels playing aboard ships - for example the Hornblower series written by C.S. Forester. They play in the 18th century, and naval history from that time cannot be told without saying something about pirates.
• In addition to the historical aspect of Pirates there is a social one which I find extremely important. Nowadays pirates seem to be described as heroes who took from the rich and gave to the poor; in the 18th century they were described as brutes, as a danger to society who had to be killed. In my opinion they were not much different from the people who went after them: they often left their homes in order to escape the bad conditions there; they also escaped the ships of the Royal Navy where the ordinary sailor was often mistreated. Becoming a pirate was one way of making one's living or even get rich, but alway risking getting killed in battle or being caught and hanged.

So I tried to create images like this:

An old pirate who looks like a pirate because of his hat, the long hair and the fancy clothing. 

The prompt for that image is very simple:

"Generate the portrait of an old pirate with a tricorne"

When I saw the image I was quite impressed with the quality - I think that this image on the left could be used in a historical novel or even in a fiction book about pirates without any problems.

Of course there were a lot of pirates who were young.

With this pirate boy on the right I used the same prompt, just replacing "old" with "young".

I must say I am quite touched by the image. The boy looks like he is not older than 15 years. Mind you, in the British Navy there were ensigns who were younger than that. In the 17th and 18th century you were considered a man at that age.