For this mini assignment, my task was to remix anything of my choosing. After some thought, the idea of combining two of my favorite shows together, Friends and Gossip Girl, came to mind and it seemed perfect! I thought I would maybe try and somehow recreate a scene/picture with my two favorite (and most stylish!) characters from each show, Serena van der Woodsen and Rachel Green, but I had no idea how to go about my idea. I don’t have much experience with photoshop, so I turned to DALL-E to see if it would be able to help me generate anything remotely close to the image I was picturing in my head. Here are the results that I got…

Prompt: gossip girl tv show character Serena van Der wooden sitting with Friends tv show character Rachel Green at the central perk coffee shop, digital art, painting

I decided to add “painting” into my prompt because often the more realistic digital art of humans on DALL-E appears quite distorted and freaky! After I altered and changed the prompt a few times I still wasn’t able to get exactly what I had in mind, so I tried to integrate characters from both shows into the well known Central Perk coffee house set from friends…

Prompt: gossip girl tv show characters sitting on the orange coach in the friends central perk coffee shop set, with the friends tv show characters, abstract oil painting, digital art 

Some of the results were pretty cool, but still not exactly what I wanted to create as you can’t really tell the characters apart from each other . After a few more tries, I figured that I wasn’t going to be able to get the result I was looking for using DALL-E, so instead I thought, “I wonder what a conversation between Serena and Rachel would look like?” So I headed over to chatGPT and put in this prompt, “show a conversation between gossip girl character Serena van der Woodsen and Friends TV show character Rachel Green talking about fashion”, and got a pretty cool response! 

Serena van der Woodsen: Hey, Rachel! I love your outfit today. You look amazing as always.

Rachel Green: Thank you so much, Serena! Coming from you, that means a lot. You always look so stylish.

Serena van der Woodsen: Aw, thank you. I’m just really into fashion, you know?

Rachel Green: I can definitely tell. You always seem to be on top of the latest trends.

Serena van der Woodsen: Yeah, I like to keep up with what’s happening in the fashion world. It’s always changing and evolving, so it’s important to stay on top of it.

Rachel Green: I totally agree. I used to work in fashion, you know.

Serena van der Woodsen: Really? That’s amazing! What kind of work did you do?

Rachel Green: I was a buyer for Bloomingdale’s.

Serena van der Woodsen: No way! That’s such a cool job.

Rachel Green: Yeah, it was definitely exciting. I got to see all the latest collections and work with some amazing designers.

Serena van der Woodsen: That’s so cool. I would love to do something like that one day.

Rachel Green: You definitely have the eye for it, Serena. Your outfits are always so put together.

Serena van der Woodsen: Thank you, Rachel. I really appreciate that. You know, I’ve been thinking about starting my own fashion line.

Rachel Green: That’s a great idea! I think you would do really well. Your style is unique and fresh.

Serena van der Woodsen: Thanks, Rachel. It’s still just an idea right now, but maybe someday.

Rachel Green: Well, if you ever need any help, let me know. I have a lot of experience in the fashion industry.

Serena van der Woodsen: Thanks, Rachel! I definitely will. It’s always great to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

After I was finished exploring chatGPT, I wasn’t sure if this was enough to exactly fulfill the assignment as I had sort of taken the “remix something” in the direction of creating a crossover between the two shows as sort of a “what if” scenario, instead of altering an already existing image/piece. With that being said, I came across a new AI app called Viola that animates images and turns them into different cartoon avatars. This gave me the idea to see what Gossip Girl characters would look like in a cartoon series, so here’s the result from a  picture that I used of Serena and Blair… 

I thought the results turned out pretty good, and if anything the AI recognized their sense of fashion! If you’re interested to see what your favourite characters would look like as a cartoon, or how they might interact with a character from another show, check out these AI applications and have fun with them!