AI – The New Blather

Last year I posted about creating AI art. The website I mentioned, NightCafe, is still around and has added interesting new features, but the images it generates still primarily lean to the abstract side. It doesn’t generate much I would consider of very practical use beyond having fun.

But just a few weeks ago, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, and the images it generates are much more mind-blowing and exciting. Here’s a brief overview of the tech from Two Minute Papers:

What a time to be alive!

Granted, the examples shown in the video and on OpenAI’s website are cherrypicked. There are some other examples out there that look a bit more wonky. It still doesn’t seem to be great with human faces, for example, or things requiring a lot of finer details, and it’s awful with generating text in images.

Here’s another video describing the tech:

Despite its weaknesses, it still looks enormously more useful, fun, and exciting than the AI image generators I looked at in that post from last year. I of course added my name to the waitlist. I’d love to experiment with it, but I probably won’t get access anytime soon. But DALL-E 2 definitely looks like something I’d be more than willing to pay for (assuming the price isn’t overly expensive). I can at least imagine creating useful images to accompany blog posts, short stories, book or album covers, or something.

Amazing stuff!

ETA: Also check out this mind-blowing art book of 1,000 robot paintings by DALL-E 2 in various styles: 1111101000 Robots

Over the past week I’ve been having some fun generating bizarre digital art with AI via a couple of websites. You generate the art by simply giving the AI a text prompt, such as “castles in the sky” and, after a couple of minutes, out pops the AI’s somewhat abstract but interesting interpretation:

Castles in the Sky

Since the results are rather abstract, it helps to use words that lack specific forms, such as clouds and landscapes. If you ask for an animal or human, you’re probably not going to get anything that actually resembles their shape, but rather only some abstract colors and textures that resemble them. For instance, here is “dolphins eating sandwiches”:

Dolphins Eating Sandwiches

It also helps to give the AI some hints as to what the result should look like. For instance, the exact prompt for “castles in the sky” above was actually: “An enormous castle floats in the sky beautiful artwork”. Adding the tags “beautiful artwork” help give it a more painterly look.

The art is also limited in resolution; the AI just takes too much memory for larger pics, so the smaller resolutions are the norm.

I’ve been using two websites to create such art:

NightCafe Studio’s AI Art Generator. The site features a very nice user interface, lets you set some optional settings, and allows you to save and share your work while exploring the works of others. It does make you create an account and limits how much you can create with it using a credit system. You can buy credits or earn some. You can check out my profile here: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/Seanthebest
NeuralBlender has no user interface or options, but does not seem to limit use. You do have to wait for the AI to finish its current image before starting a new one if you want to see it in your browser.

I have not yet tried it, but if you do a bit of Googling, you can find resources on how to set up your own AI art generator without having to use one of the websites above; the tech is called VQGAN+CLIP and is available to all. A “GAN” is a generative adversial network … and I have no idea what the other acronyms stand for (obviously you can Google that too). So I’m not sure how long the above websites will stay in service considering the tech is not proprietary, nor do I think the AI produces artwork of enough controllable quality to be of widespread use beyond offering an amusing spectacle.

Still, it’s fun to play with. Here are some of my favorites that I’ve generated so far:

Colorful Clouds