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Melbourne's Mascot

A friend of mine was recently on a business trip in South Korea, and they visited Busan. The city is lobbying for a World Expo due to be held in 2030, and they have come up with a wonderful mascot for the bid.

'Boogi' is a seagull designed to represent modern Busan: in an article I read, described as 'friendly, speaking the local dialect, and hot-tempered'. 

I love everything about this. The design is cute and arresting, you feel great complexity behind that inscrutable look.

And so I was curious: what would our A.I. friends think would make a suitable mascot for Melbourne, in a similar style. My prompt was:

Can you make a mascot for the city of Melbourne, Australia. Make reference to the city's history and culture when picking the mascot, and design it in the style that would be used for an Olympics Games or World Expo.

ChatGPT


ChatGPT has delivered an engagingly old fashioned mascot, replete with fedora. The old timey vibe of this did make me wonder: was it leaning on the 1956 Olympics as a reference point?

Sans the spelling mistake, you could have used this then.

It did not furnish its mascot with a name - only Gemini did this -  so I asked it to come up with one. It gave me 10, all of them bad:


Scarfy! I will have to remember this next winter, when there are plenty of Scarfy's roaming this city.

Gemini


These exercises are - in my mind anyway - a little like head-to-head contests, and after a slow start, Gemini has lifted its game. This is easily the best of the four, and is actually so good, I think the city should adopt this, forthwith. 

Gemini was the only tool to pick an animal that is actually associated with Melbourne - there is  fairy penguin colony in St Kilda, where I live - and it also added in the fun, city-centric details of the footy and the coffee cup. As mentioned, it also gave it a name: 'Mel, the Little Penguin'.

I would happily buy this on merch, and send to people as a gift (should I get on etsy, get this going?). I love Mel, and Mel now is this city, for me.

Melbourne's official city logo currently, is this horror. I can see why graphic designers are terrified. 

Grok


Elon's platform was clearly still feeling its AFL Grand Final hangover, as to reperesent Melbourne it has chosen... a lion? Perhaps predicting this would get some blow back - Grok has obviously been in a few pitch meetings - it also gave an explanation:

This design evokes Melbourne's "Marvellous Melbourne" era of prosperity and grandeur during the Victorian gold rush, with the lion symbolizing strength, royalty (British heritage), and the city's bold, roaring spirit.

Now this is a comedown from the first two, but it has to be said: this would clearly play very well on the Conservative side of politics. They'd just get those indigenous colours off the jumper (surely they are there by mistake anyway), and sub in good old Australian blue, red and white.

Co-Pilot


I have realised as I have done a few of these that the tests so far may be unfair to both Grok and COP; generating images is clearly what they are worst at. 

I am not a fan of Elon, but his tool is impressive, both in the complexity and variety of things it can do. And Co-Pilot is reliable, as long as you are asking it to compose an email or summarise a presentation.

Neither does images well (I guess you always have to add the caveat: not yet, anyway).

Here, Co-Pilot has come up with another truly bizarre digital aneurysm. It is only Melbourne oriented in the tiniest way, and then only if you squint: Flinders St station, sortof, is on the right, and one of the buildings on the other side looks like a big one we have downtown, that I bet no one here knows the name of. 

As for our mascot, I really have no idea what this is. An almond nut? 

And so I paste this image back in the chat, and ask COP what it is, and can it supply a fun, mascot-y name.


I understand this means, it hasn't really understood what I have asked it. But I choose to take it as, it doesn't know what this thing is either.

Nutty the Almond! At least the kids love it.

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