Artificial Intelligence has been used to create images of everything and anything you can imagine - so we wanted to know what it would create when asked to visualise people from Southampton.

This was inspired by the recent experiment done by film editor Duncan Thomsen on the Midjourney software where he generated images of what the 'average' person looked like from 13 different UK counties.

AI has notoriously found people quite hard to create convincingly, with many cases of people having far more fingers than usual or faces looking a bit 'off'.

So we thought it would be interesting to see what it came up with for visualising people from Southampton.

Daily Echo: What people from Oxfordshire look like according to Duncan Thomsen's AI promptWhat people from Oxfordshire look like according to Duncan Thomsen's AI prompt (Image: Duncan Thomsen/SWNS)

Here's what the results were when we put the prompt 'People from Southampton' into some AI programmes.

AI creations of Southampton people prove to be terrifying

The 'Text to Image' AI service on Canva was used to produce some of the images of what 'Southampton people' looked like.

Judging by what was produced it seemed to point to people from Southampton mainly being middle-aged or slightly older and meeting on the High Street.

Daily Echo: An image of three people walking together produced by the Canva AIAn image of three people walking together produced by the Canva AI (Image: Canva 'Text to Image' AI)

However, whilst some images like the one above produced almost proper human faces, others were horrendously distorted.

Another image of people walking down a street and a large group sitting down in a public space struggled to produce human faces.

Daily Echo: The AI service couldn't quite get the faces rightThe AI service couldn't quite get the faces right (Image: Canva 'Text to Image' AI)

Despite the struggle with this aspect what was gleaned from the images was that there was not a huge amount of variety in what 'Southampton people' seemed to look like.

Daily Echo: Another fairly disturbing AI-produced image of 'Southampton people'Another fairly disturbing AI-produced image of 'Southampton people' (Image: Canva 'Text to Image' AI)

Additionally, the service DeepAI.org produced an image of a group of people on a hill which was also quite disturbing.

Many were wearing what looked like red and white sports jerseys, perhaps trying to indicate they were Saints fans.

Daily Echo: A group of people from 'Southampton' on a small hillA group of people from 'Southampton' on a small hill (Image: DeepAI.org)

Whilst that aspect was not too bad, once again the task of creating faces that even resembled humans proved to be quite tricky.

Conclusion?

It would not be unfair to say that the altered faces could be described as nightmare fuel.