![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mosquito Hawks, part 2: AI
Mar. 20th, 2026 10:00 amLast night I posted about how I finally learned what a Crane Fly, aka Mosquito Hawk, is. (TDLR: it looks like a giant mosquito but isn't, and doesn't bite.) As I was looking up images of actual crane flies to include in that post I also wondered, Hmm, what would a mosquito-hawk hybrid look like? So I asked AI to generate one for me.
This (above) was Google's nano banana first iteration of a mosquito/hawk hybrid. It's pretty nightmare inducing already, especially when you consider this thing would have a wingspan up to 5' wide. 😧 Yeah, you're gonna need a bigger flyswatter!
Then I prompted it to refine the idea .
AI said there are three models in this render: left, center, and right. Per the descriptive notes it provided it seems that whatever was on the left got cut out. Or was just an AI hallucination. Though the two that made the cut are plenty of nightmare fuel.
The AI's notes referred to the imaginary mosquito-hawk as a chimera. That's a scientific term to describe an organism with cells that come from different species. Scientific chimeras are very rare but do exist. For example, scientists found a bird that's a mix of two similar species. Its wings are two different sizes and colors. (Each one resembles a different parent.) Occasionally a sheep and goat mate and produce a living chimera offspring, a geep. It's got patches of wool and fur in different places.
But chimera is also a term from Greek mythology. In Greek mythology it's a fire-breathing monster with features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. People born a lot fewer than 2,500 years ago might also recognize chimera as a monster from Dungeons & Dragons and other FRPGs. In D&D it's a three-headed monster, with a dragon's head added to the lion and goat heads of ancient Greek stories. Though in D&D terms, when I looked at these monstrosities my immediate thought was "Stirges!" I could've used this picture last month in my D&D game. These look way more like stirges than ibises (aka bin chickens) do.
This (above) was Google's nano banana first iteration of a mosquito/hawk hybrid. It's pretty nightmare inducing already, especially when you consider this thing would have a wingspan up to 5' wide. 😧 Yeah, you're gonna need a bigger flyswatter!
Then I prompted it to refine the idea .
AI said there are three models in this render: left, center, and right. Per the descriptive notes it provided it seems that whatever was on the left got cut out. Or was just an AI hallucination. Though the two that made the cut are plenty of nightmare fuel.
The AI's notes referred to the imaginary mosquito-hawk as a chimera. That's a scientific term to describe an organism with cells that come from different species. Scientific chimeras are very rare but do exist. For example, scientists found a bird that's a mix of two similar species. Its wings are two different sizes and colors. (Each one resembles a different parent.) Occasionally a sheep and goat mate and produce a living chimera offspring, a geep. It's got patches of wool and fur in different places.
But chimera is also a term from Greek mythology. In Greek mythology it's a fire-breathing monster with features of a lion, a goat, and a snake. People born a lot fewer than 2,500 years ago might also recognize chimera as a monster from Dungeons & Dragons and other FRPGs. In D&D it's a three-headed monster, with a dragon's head added to the lion and goat heads of ancient Greek stories. Though in D&D terms, when I looked at these monstrosities my immediate thought was "Stirges!" I could've used this picture last month in my D&D game. These look way more like stirges than ibises (aka bin chickens) do.
