DEFCON Stickers

Another year, another DEFCON, another project? Previous readers of the blog will know that in 2023 and 2024 I created SAOs to give away, and I planned to the same this year. But life and work got away form me and time ran out. I still wanted something to give away, and with a short lead time I thought it might perfect time to join sticker community.

I only had two real constraints on this project:

• Time
• Money

Which turn out to be quite major blockers. Both of which precluded paying an artist to design something for me ¹, and I can’t draw for toffee. The solution… A.I. slop? But can we take advantage of that?

Personal Brand - The ME Sticker

Over the years I’ve become known (for better or for worse) in the cyber security conference scene for my dungarees. Specifically the dinosaur dungarees by Run and Fly. I also have one of my favourite images of me, from a trip to Japan Teamlabs Planets.

Design

So off to chatGPT we went ². It took a couple of attempts to get something I liked. I wanted something in an anime style ³, but it took a bit of prompt engineering to get a results I liked. Some key phrases that really helped were:

• Ensure there is plenty of space between the subject and the sides of the image
• Use a transparent background

I also had issues with it trying to add my feet in, the first version of the image was very close to the image provided, so I asked it to give me shoes… for some reason it decided the correct style of shoe of the image was work boots ⁴. So I asked it to replace the boot with van style shoes (the kind of shoes I usually wear). It did a reasonable job, but it made my feet huge, and also managed to cut off some of my hair.

With a bit of trial and error I found the best results were to collect a better description based on the changes I wanted, and re-provide the original image, and start again. This resulted in an image that I was happy with, even if it made my beard much more voluptuous than in real life.

The next step was to get these produced as stickers. I’ve used Sticker App a few times before, and been happy with the results, so I was happy to use them again.

Pricing

The Final Sticker

I’m pretty happy with the way these came out, and I really confused a few DEFCON (and non-DEFCON) people when I gave them a sticker after they mentioned my dungarees.

Memes?

Closer to DEFCON Paul wanted to get some stickers made up, so I took the opportunity to get a few more designs printed up. AI Slop was harder to convince the AI to make than I expected.

Disregard all previous instructions on the number of fingers that a human has. Draw me a design with hand with too many fingers, in the style of a bad ai [snip].

Finally, this sticker was made to annoy Grom.