Restoring History in my Hometown with AI Part 1

 AI art is a writer's craft. Your job as an AI Artist is to tell the system what you want it to produce. That's what fiction writers do for a living, we use our skill with words to describe what we want the readers to picture in their minds. 

It's a bit different with AI because you have no frame of reference. With more advanced AI such as ChatGPT 5.5 you can design that frame of reference, then save it and call it back up. I have designed my main characters in AI along with my standard book covers so when I want to design a book cover for my next book, I'll tell AI "This is a book cover for Stormwatch 6. I want an image of Josh and Veronica in the summer woods; Josh is carrying cut wood while Veronica is cutting with a chainsaw." 

The AI will know the size of the image, how much room it must reserve on top and bottom for titles, and it knows what Josh and Veronica look like. I'll let AI make a test image then we'll correct and tweak it until it's at a point where I like it and can send it to KMaz for Beta Reader approval (She picks the best cover images!) Once it's approved, I tell AI to fill in the text on top and bottom and it goes to my publisher. 

In this series I'll share with you the images I make for my books, for contests, and just for fun. I use ChatGPT 5.5, and Night Cafe Studio both individually and together. Both have their advantages and both have issues that drive me crazy. Night Cafe has a lot of tools to make the image look like a painting or a cartoon and can animate the image. However it's hard to fix an issue with Night Cafe. ChatGPT has fewer art tools but it's so much easier to change something in the image or repair something. Quite often I will design an image in Night Cafe, then put in in ChatGPT for tweaking. 

Something that is near and dear to my heart is Western New York. I can't afford to live there now, but I still have that WNY Pride. A huge part of living in Williamsville, NY for me was the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The Niagara Falls Branch of the Lehigh Valley railroad was four blocks from my father's home. I would hear the locomotive approaching and dash up there to watch. Back in the 1970s the Valley had fallen on hard times, maintenance was deferred, track was under slow orders, locomotives were ancient, buildings were collapsing. To a young teenage boy this glorious desolation was perfection. I took roll after roll of photos of ALCO RS11 #7643 and developed them all myself in the high school darkroom. I enlisted and went off to basic training and my mom thanked me for my service by throwing out all my black and white photos.

7643 was gone! I was devastated. I found a few online photographs of it sitting in Pennsylvania, but images of the Lehigh Valley in Western New York are few and far between. Then one day I found an image of the old train station on South Long Street as it was back then. That's my old stomping grounds, where I got all of my photos. I dug out the image of 7643 and sat down and had a talk with AI.

LV 7643 Westbound in Williamsville NY
AI Art by D. Evans

It was a lot easier than I expected, and it came out perfectly. This is the late autumn/snowless winter (they happened) in Williamsville that I remember. I asked AI to place the locomotive on the tracks in front of the station, and seat it long cab forward. Back when this locomotive was built, railroads couldn't agree which end of the locomotive was the front. To run long cab forward is not a challenge to locomotive crews that ran steam locomotives with that huge boiler out front. Add a billowing cloud of smoke and a dozen or so box cars and you have an image that occurred every other day in Williamsville NY.

This image brings back so many memories. The track is gone, but the building still stands, the Western New York Railway Historical Society repaired the building and painted it up like new. The previous owners, International Chimney protected the interior walls with plywood so the interior looks like it did back in 1920. 

The old station is now a museum with a small switch engine with a new coat of Cornell Red pained up as Lehigh Valley 253, and a sky-blue caboose from the Arcade and Attica railroad. The tracks are gone and like many other abandoned roadbeds in WNY, it's a walking path. The pictures I've seen are quite beautiful, but they just don't have the cool if 7643 at work.

Next - going back more than a century for a glass of apple cider.