I am losing track of the number of AI-based image-creation tools I have access to now. It’s not that huge a number, but it’s complicated! :) There’s at least:
good old ArtBreeder, which I haven’t used in ages, and which seems to have a potentially interesting new mode where you sketch a thing with a few shapes, and then type text telling the AI what to make it into,
MidJourney with the old V3 engine and the newer and lyrically named ‘test’ and ‘testp’ engines and mixmashes of those,
NightCafe, which was my main goto image tool quite some weeks, with the old Artistic and Coherent engines, but now also the new Stable Diffusion (SD) based “Stable” engine, and various workflows among those,
NovelAI which now does images as well as text; the images are also in a Discord bot, and it’s really fast; it uses some heuristic smut-blurrer (maybe just the standard SD one?) but the devs sort of promise they will eventually move it off of discord and then have few or no restrictions (similarly to their text generator),
and now I discover that I have access to Dall-E also, from OpenAI, which I have just barely begun to use (detailed surrealism).
The “you can’t copyright art made with AIs” meme seems to have withered (which is good since it’s not true, although nothing is certain), but my experiment to gather additional evidence against it has finally borne fruit (months before I expected it to, really): I have now registered my copyright in this masterpiece of mine:
A blonde porcelain doll and a worn teddy bear sit on a trunk, in a musty attic in light from the window
with the real actual US Copyright Office, who have sent me a real actual certificate testifying to it. The registration can also be found on the web (you have to go to that page and then search on Registration Number for “VA0002317843”; I have yet to find a permalink that persists, bizarrely).
I did it through LegalZoom rather than myself; it cost more (I think), but I was more confident that I was Doing It Right during the process. There were no questions about whether AI was involved, or about what software I used to create it, or anything like that. I did have to say that I’m the creator, of course, but since I am :) I don’t see a problem there.
Registering the copyright doesn’t mean it’s 100% correct, it just creates a legal presumption. Someone could still challenge it, arguing that I wasn’t really the creator at all. I think that would be very unlikely to succeed.
And in any case, here is a nice concrete counterexample to any remaining “you can’t copyright art produced with an AI” claims that might be floating around.
Extremely generous friend Karima also continues updating the virtual world region “AI Dreams in Art” with things she likes from my Twitter feed, etc, so drop by! It is getting blushingly positive reviews on the Social Medias; apparently there are significant numbers of people who have heard a lot about this AI Art stuff, but never really seen any. They seem to like mine! :)
Updates: there have been significant developments, legal and otherwise, in this area since this was initially posted; see the copyright tag on the weblog here for more.
I was thinking of a post extending the legal thoughts from last time to talk about this widespread claim (based on the Thaler decisions that I mentioned briefly there) that “Artwork made with an AI can’t be copyrighted”. It’s all over the clickbait-website press, and it’s wrong. The rulings in question said that an AI can’t be the creator-in-fact of a work (in the U.S.) so someone can’t get copyright to a work based on being the “employer” of the creator-in-fact AI. But they say nothing about the obvious alternative that a human can be the creator (simpliciter) of a work make with an AI, just as a human can be the creator of a work made with Photoshop, or a paintbrush.
Heh heh, I guess I’ve already written a bit about that here now, haven’t I? But there are various arguments and counterarguments that one could talk about that I’m not going to.
Then there’s the fact that I’ve been generating So Many Images in Midjourney, which for a while there had pretty much entirely drawn me away from NightCafe. As well as those So Many Images, I’ve started to put a bunch of them together in the GIMP in the form of a sort of amateur manga or graphic story that attempts to have an actual plot and stuff; here’s a pdf of the story (the first 10 pages of it, which is all that currently exists), at considerably reduced resolution so it isn’t like over 30MB. Feedback welcome. :)
But then! By which I mean just today I think! NightCafe has become very interesting again, due to adding the Stable Diffusion engine. Which I have been using extensively, and have noted that:
It is kind of boring compared to the other engines I’ve used, in that it seems to usually take the simplest and most quotidian interpretation of a prompt, and create the most unremarkable (and, admittedly, sometimes impressively realistic!) image possible from it.
The right set of adjectives and so on can get more interesting results from it sometimes. The prompt prefix for Yeni Cavan, for instance, produces recognizably Yeni Cavan images, but somewhat less smoky and mysterious ones than Midjourney or the NightCafe Artistic engine do.
It has some kind of risible post-censorship blurring algorithm, and if a picture looks too naughty to that algorithm, it comes out with a very heavy blur applied. I have (accidentally) gotten one NFSW image that its filter didn’t detect, and on the other hand just including “in the style of Gauguin” in a prompt seems to pretty reliably produce just a blur. (“Well, yeah, he’s in the training set, but his stuff is really too naughty to output.”) I mean, /facepalm and all.
Update: when I reported a couple of very obvious porn-filter false positives, NightCafe support replied that the filter should be gone / optional in “a few days”. Very gratifyin’!
I wish NightCafe had an “effectively free, but might be slow” generation mode like Midjourney does. I’m running out of NightCafe credits after playing with Stable Diffusion for hours, and I’m near out of credits, and given the overall experience I will probably just to back to Midjourney now and make more images for the comic. :)
So that’s those things! But mostly it’s been lots of cool pictures. We will close with a recent one from Midjourney:
“Atomic surrealism detailed render“
and something that Stable Diffusion did (rather interestingly) with the same prompt:
One of the AI “image from text” systems that’s gotten a lot of coverage, and shown some pretty amazing images, is Midjourney. There’s been a waiting list for it for some time (I vaguely recall), and lucky people who had access have been posting the occasional wild image to social medias (with, I expect, a relatively large cherrypick effect).
I ran across a mention today that, while still in beta, it was thrown open to anyone and everyone (a week or three ago?), with some number of free images to generate, and then some reasonable prices for stuff thereafter. This sounded interesting!
Bizarrely, the interface to it appears to be via Discord, which I suppose is perfectly natural to The Kids These Days, but strikes me as chaotic and strange and hard to use. You accept an invitation to some Discord channel, you go to one of many “newbie” channels, you enter a /imagine command with your text prompt, and then you watch your mentions (after looking up on the web how to find them) to see what comes out.
The /imagine command causes the bot to produce four thumbnails based on your prompt. There are rather enigmatic little buttons under the thumbnails, that let you ask for four (or, I guess, three) more thumbnail-sized variants based on one of the four, or to upscale one of the four.
I’ve been having some fun with it, but I don’t feel like I’ve really mastered it (or figured out when I run out of free stuff and have to decide whether to pay), because the Discord interface is just bizarre.
Anyway though :) here’s some of what I’ve done so far. I think it’s pretty comparable to the Nightcafe output, really, although some of the things I’ve seen other people post seem extra-amazing.
Art Deco Print of an Elegant Woman Dressed in SkullsSteampunk plans for a complex mechanism; blueprintsFour thumbnails from earlier in the history of the aboveThe Library of Time; EntranceA page from a forbidden bookDetailed steampunk cyberpunk noir; street scene (i.e. #YeniCavan !)
I’m not sure if this will turn out to be an advance over Nightcafe to the extent that I’ll start using it more, or get all excited about AI generated art again (note that Nightcafe has been hinting at a new algorithm coming also, so there’s that). Especially if the interface stays on Discord!
But we’ll see! And in general the progress here seems pretty astounding; as I said to a couple of people in the last week, if I was a professional illustrator, I might be getting worried. (Whereas I don’t feel that way about professional writers or coders yet; this may just indicate that I don’t have as good an understanding of what illustrators actually do.)
I did another little run of NightCafe images, this time all with “The Library of Time” and some details in the first prompt, and then another prompt like “Fantasy, wide shot, detailed art, expert” which just sort of popped into my head. The full published Collection should be here, but I’ll post some favorites herein. The smaller ones are generally from the “Artistic” engine in NightCafe, and the larger ones are from running the “Coherent” engine over output from “Artistic”. And I would definitely like to go to this Library, thank you!
The Library of TimeOuter OfficesThe Library of TimeMain Reading RoomDown in the CatacombsSecret HallwayDreams of EternitySunset (woo!)
I’m pleased by what the AI did with these (see the full Collection for some that I left out for length, including the Room of Secrets). The last one is rather Hudson River School, which I love.
Soothing, eh? I had to ask it specifically for grey and green for that last one; otherwise it really liked the blue-orange colorway (“colorway” is such a great word).
And finally, a completely different prompt, and even a different AI:
Two different and completely unrelated topics (OR ARE THEY?) today, just because they’re both small, and hearkening back to the days when I would just post utterly random unconnected things in a weblog entry those title was just the date (and noting again that I could easily do that now, but for whatever reason I don’t).
First, whatsisname Wolfram and his Ruliad. Reading over some of his statements about it again, it seems like, at least often, he’s not saying that The Ruliad is a good model of our world, such that we can understand and make predictions about the world by finding properties of the model; he’s saying that The Ruliad just is the world. Or, in some sense vice-versa, that the world that we can observe and experience is a tiny subset of The Ruliad, the actual thing itself, the one and only instantiation of it (which incidentally makes his remarks about how it’s unique less obviously true).
I’m not exactly sure what this would mean, or (as usual) whether it’s falsifiable, or meaningful, or useful, or true, in any way. My initial thought is that (at the very least) every point in the Ruliad (to the extent it makes sense to talk about points) has every possible value of every possible property at once, since there is some computation that computes any given bundle of properties and values from any given inputs. So it’s hard to see how “beings like us” would experience just one particular, comparatively immensely narrow, subset of those properties at any given time.
It might be arguable, Kant-like, that beings like us will (sort of by definition) perceive three dimensions and time and matter when exposed to (when instantiated in) the infinite variety of The Ruliad, but how could it be that we perceive this particular specific detailed instance, this particular afternoon, with this particular weather and this particular number of pages in the first Seed Center edition of The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment?
The alternative theory is that we are in a specific universe, and more importantly not in many other possible universes, and that we experience what we experience, and not all of the other things that we could experience, as a result of being in the particular universe that we are in. This seems much more plausible than the theory that we are in the utterly maximal “Ruliad of everything everywhere all at once”, and that we experience the very specific things that we experience due to basically mathematical properties of formal systems that we just haven’t discovered yet.
We’ll see whether Wolfram’s Physical Project actually turns out to have “vast predictive power about how our universe must work, or at least how observers like us must perceive it to work”. :) Still waiting for that first prediction, so far…
In other news, The End of the Road is Haunted:
These are in the cheapest one-credit mode, because I was in that mood. Also I kind of love how the AI takes “haunted” to mean “creepy dolls”.
We made this World Tree series in NightCafe by appending things to “Concept art, pencil sketch, sepia tone”, starting with “Surprised by Joy”:
Surprised by Joy
Kind of adorable, eh? Might be a tardigrade.
Then for some reason we took it to The World Tree:
at the base of the World TreeClimbing the World TreeSo high in the World Tree
And then some old friends suddenly appeared! It’s Hugo and the Lamb!
Hugo and the Lamb arrive at the World TreeHugo and the Lamb ascend the World Tree
(I don’t think the AI has the idea that to really look like you’re up in the World Tree, there shouldn’t be anything that looks too much like the ground right there. Unsurprisingly perhaps.)
Wind in the Limbs of the World TreeResting High Up In The World TreeEyes High Up in the World Tree
And on that somewhat eerie note, the World Tree series ends (for the moment). We don’t see Hugo and the Lamb sleeping in one of the eye-shaped little nooks, or making their way back down the Tree (perhaps via parachutes or aircraft).
Back on the ground:
Those two are amusingly similar, due to having the same starting image with different seeds. I imagine that the little character on the right there comes in and says something witty or ominous.
On the RoadHugo and the Lamb reach the river, and cross the bridge
And across the river (surprise crossover!) they enter Hyrule:
Is Link taking care of the Lamb? Is Hugo wearing a Link costume? Was Hugo Link (or Link Hugo) all along?
First I had this conversation with NovelAI; its contributions are in bold:
“So I want to have one AI produce a paragraph, and then feed that to another AI to produce an image from.” “That sounds interesting,” the AI console typed back, “would you like me to generate a paragraph of interesting text, to get you started?” “Sure,” I said, “can you do that” “Easily,” the AI replied, and then it emitted this paragraph: A man walked down a road. He was very old, but he had been walking for many years now, so his age did not matter much any more. The sun rose in front of him as he walked along, its light warming his face and making the wrinkles on his skin seem less harsh than they might otherwise be. His eyes were still clear and bright with intelligence, even though those around him often looked at them without seeing what lay behind them. He saw things other people missed; he knew how the world worked and why it worked that way. “Wow, thank you!” I thanked the AI, “I’ll have to break that up into multiple prompts, but I can’t wait to see what VQGAN+CLIP comes up with from it!” The next day, I fed the generated text to my CLIP-based AI, which produced these images:
I thought that last line was amusingly appropriate, although of course there was no reason to wait until “the next day”. I fed the generated text immediately to Nightcafe, and it produced these images (same prompt text for each, just different random seeds):
I kind of love it! See the face in the clouds in that last one?
First of all, I’m sick. Three COVID tests over three days are all negative, so probably not COVID, but still. I’d rather not be sick. It started over the weekendish, and is gradually getting better.
Other than being sick, and therefore sleeping a lot, I’ve been doing not much more than generating more and more and more and more images on ol’ NightCafe. They have cleverly rate-limited the three-credit bonus for twittering (or, as it turns out, Instagramming) creations to one per hour, so I no longer have an infinite number of credits, but they are well worth a dime or two each.
Otherwise I have been generating lots and lots and lots and lots more images, and wondering at them. I feel like I want a huge coffee-table book of them to page through, or a vast gallery of them arranged by a thoughtful curator. And on the other hand I also feel that I’m plateauing slightly in my fascination, in a way, and that they haven’t been … surprising me as much lately. We’ll see how that goes!
There are lots of gorgeous complex maximalist images from it in the Twitter (and my own Yeni Cavan is quite maximalist for all of that), but what I’ve been most struck by lately are the small and simpler things, in the spirit of Pencil on White the other day. So here are some of them, pretty much randomly. Some of them result from prompts that are only about style, not content, so the AI is free to use whatever content it thinks is likely. Some are from vaguely suggestive prompts, some abstract, some in French. :) I’ll see if I can get WordPress to lay them out more interestingly than one per row…
Illustration, pencil on paperSepia tone illustrationIllustration, pencil on paperIllustration, pencil on paper
I observe that (1) this WordPress “gallery” control is kind of awkward and non-optimal, and (2) this particular “Illustration, pencil on paper” prompt tends to produce odd African faces sometimes; I wonder what that tells us about the AI and the training set.
Illustration, ink on cardboardIllustration, ink on cardboardblueprint illustrationblueprint illustrationblueprint illustrationblueprint illustrationblueprint illustrationblueprint illustration: xenobot
Part of the reason, I think, that I want to wander among these gazing for many hours, is the feeling that there must be a whole story, probably an interesting one, or several interesting ones, behind each of the images. If that turns out not to be true, or one comes not to believe that it’s true, it might significantly reduce the fascination. Or can one just gaze and make up one’s own back stories for each and every image?
Those four are “Monochrome print of…” but you’ll have to click through to see the individual titles; the captions on the WordPress gallery control were overlaying too much of the images.
Illustration, ink on canvasIllustration, ink on canvasColored pencil on paperColored pencil on paper , happy snakes
See that rather creepy result from “Colored pencil on paper” up there? Well, that’s the least creepy result I’ve gotten from that prompt all by itself. I don’t know what that means at all. Is there a whole bunch of creepy colored pencil on paper body-horror stuff in the training set? Or is it some strange local maximum that happened to form in the neural net? Mysteries!
abstract charcoal drawingminimalist abstract charcoal drawingminimalist circular abstract charcoal drawingminimalist abstract charcoal drawing, The Stairs of Creteminimalist abstract charcoal drawing, The Things We Leave Behindminimalist abstract charcoal drawing, The Things We Leave Behindminimalist abstract charcoal drawing, Leaving the Seaminimalist abstract charcoal drawing, Cat Ears
The captions interfere with the images there a bit, at least in this view, but YOLO, eh? I feel really torn by these pictures, between being fascinated by the thought of the artist looking out over the valley from their shack on a cloudy afternoon, and then feeling betrayed because there was no artist, and then feeling that they come from an amalgamation of all the artists who created the AI’s training set in all their separate times and places, and finally that they are as fascinating as the accidental (or not!) patterns in the water threading between the rocks and barnacles as the tide comes and goes.
To finish up for tonight, we just show off that it knows some French, as generative AIs trained on as much as possible of what was lying around tend to be casually multi-lingual by accident.
Encre sur papierEncre sur papierencre sur papier, les nuagesEncre sur papier
(I don’t know why it’s made that last image so gigantic; apologies if it does that for you also and is disturbing.)
For some other time, I’ve also generated some sets like images from Leonard Cohen lyrics (there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in), from the World Tree (all sepia), book covers (did I already post some of those?), the wonders of Xyrlmn, cute Xenobots, and some other things. I feel like I should post all of them! And also that they can as easily be allowed to slip away relatively unrecorded.
In the meantime, we wander between the pictures, turn the pages, stroll the galleries, and let the patterns touch our minds.
I chose the title “The Colors of Chaos” randomly for an experiment with Gustave Doré, and that went so well (and so amusingly) that I tried a bunch of other artists as well. My impression is that the AI knows all of these artists, and can at least gesture in the direction of their styles. This is more difficult, and the results perhaps less interesting, for artists who would not generally deal with the colors of chaos! But overall I’m pleased with this tiny collection.
In the style of Gustave DoréIn the style of M. C. EscherIn the style of R. CrumbIn the style of Thomas ColeIn the style of Pablo PicassoIn the style of Hieronymus BoschIn the style of Salvador DaliIn the style of Pieter Brueghel the ElderIn the style of Lisa FrankIn the style of Grandma Moses
Sometimes I try a random prompt that springs into my head, and fun unexpected things happen. Why this particular style of illustration results from things like “Detailed colored ink on paper, illustration of … island”, I dunno! Maybe there is a subgenre, or a few prolific flickr posters?
(Harder to search the web for similar images than it is to search for texts similar to GPT-3 outputs, but nothing obvious came out when I tried.)
But anyway, I kinda love these isles, from the dreams of a neural network… :)
Sunrise. Suns scattered around like big egg yolks.The TownsCarnival!Sunset; good night!
And a few bonus images, with slightly smaller / sketchier settings. I wanna go!
Back in the day (and especially back in the day), I used to just, y’know, chat a lot more than I do now. Rather than posting a particular thing about a particular thing, or a bunch of AI-generated images or whatever.
Speaking of which:
Ink on Rice Paper: Cozy
Why that is associated with “cozy”, I don’t know. Which is part of the fascination of this; exploring the odd mind of the AI. (See also of course GPT-3 and additionally Semantle for that matter, in the textual sort of area.)
I don’t think I’ve linked to semantle before, so there you go! I’ve become very much in the Wordle habit (even in the New York Times period here) (haven’t lost one yet!), and Semantle is also fun. It’s much harder, but on the other hand you get an infinite number of guesses. I realize in writing this that I got distracted and didn’t get yesterday’s, although I was within like two or three words of it.
(Long pause here while I do today’s Semantle in a mere 442 guesses, hahahaha. Toward the end there I was just typing random words that sprang to mind. In retrospect, though, it makes sense and I should have gotten it quicker.)
I also I used to use other fonts and stuff more often, because that is fun, and I used to write in raw html rather than in this WordPress environment here, which gets easily confused if you try to do anything too fancy, and often just deletes random markup that one might add in raw mode, oh well. Also it often looks radically different on my phone than on the computer here, in ways that I don’t have the patience or energy to look into to understand.
(Like, will this be in a different color everywhere? I dunno!)
I am reminiscing about Back In The Day, because for some reason that I can’t recall at the moment I was digging around in the ancient weblog on the personal site (whose front page still says “COMING SOON” and I really ought to fix that) looking for a particular funny story, and I read all various old entries while looking for it.
And also, I found it! Here is a copy of it, as well as that link there. The context (also interesting in itself) is a journal that I needed to get to someone in Indiana.
Then after lunch I took it down to the “Post Office”, where a lady agreed to take it to Indiana for me. I also had to buy her a little paper package to carry it there in. (That seemed sort of odd; why didn’t she just factor the package into the price of the service, the way she presumably does with gas fare and stuff?)
I’m not sure she’s really got a viable business model going here; the price was so cheap! I mean, she agreed to take the journal to Indiana (a particular place in Indiana, even) for like six bucks (including the price of the little paper package). I gather that there’s an economy-of-scale thing here, that she waits until she’s got a bunch of things all going to Indiana, and takes them all at once, to save on travel costs. But she also promised to get it there in just two days, so if no one else comes in and wants her to take something to Indiana by Wednesday, she’ll have to go there on just my six bucks, and there’s no way that that’ll even cover her costs.
(She’s probably got to pay someone to keep the place open while she’s going to Indiana and back, also; and then there’s rent, and utilities, and all sorts of other stuff.)
Probably she’s selling at a loss right now to get people used to being able to send things cheap, and she’ll raise prices later, once she’s got mind share. Sorta like pets.com did so well! *8)
Still, it was nice that she was still in business today, so I didn’t have to, like, drive to Indiana myself…
Apparently this lady or her successors are still in business, which is nice!
That journal was part of a project which is probably (although not certainly) the same as this 1000 Journals Project, about which there is apparently a book and a documentary and stuff, which is pretty cool. I had (briefly) number 278, about which the old weblog talks a bit. Do go take a look! I wonder if it still survives, somewhere out there. Or even in the book or documentary!
There is some extra space for eyes
So that was all fun to discover and reminisce about. (Ha, I’d forgotten that I scanned the whole thing and burned it onto CD (remember “CDs”?) and included a copy of it in a little paper slipcase inside the journal itself. How clever of me!!
Hi-Tech Comix!
One thing that’s rather different from Back In The Day (in addition to having less control over the HTML, and not being in the habit of doing one catch-all entry per day, with the date as the title), is that I no longer feel guilty about putting more-or-less-huge images in the weblog here. On the assumption, I guess, that hardly anyone is reading this on like a 4096 bps modem or something. (But if anyone is, or is otherwise bothered by all of the huge images, do let me know! You can even leave a comment right here in the weblog and I might notice it.)
I am still very enamored of NightCafe and the inexpressibly vast universe of images that it’s willing to create. It feels (still) like I’m a tiny kid wandering through a vast library of lavishly illustrated books, dashing joyfully from shelf to shelf, delighted and overwhelmed.
I felt roughly that way about GPT-3 for quite a while, too, only with words instead of pictures; and, as the structure of these words hints, I don’t really feel that way anymore, at least not at the moment. I’m not certain how or why, but one theory that I have is that I gradually came to realize that there is no “there” there; that is, as far as I can tell, when interacting with a GPT-3 or NovelAI model, it’s easy to feel like the funny and crazy and suggestive things make sense in light of some thoughts or model of the world or way of thinking, and that by continuing to interact with it, one will come to know more about that way of thinking, and that’s cool. But after interacting with it for awhile, that seems less likely, or at least it’s more like “this writes stuff superficially like random fanfiction but without even that much sense to it” than it is like “wow, this crazy alien being I’m talking to sure has some interesting ideas!”.
I can easily imagine the same kind of thing happening with NightCafe; looking at the panel from “Hi-Tech Comix!” up there, my first fascinated reaction is that those enigmatic machines and blurred speech bubbles must be About Something, must be Saying Something in some enigmatic language and universe into which the image offers us a preliminary glimpse. But perhaps one ultimately realizes that it isn’t; it’s just a mindless imitation of stuff on Flickr or whatever.
If indeed that’s all it is. :)
What else what else? The family still exists and prospers. The little daughter is working remotely from Queens for an IT company (“IT company”) and going to tango events again now that there are vaccines and things are opening up somewhat. M and the little boy and I still live here in the ‘burbs, but I went in to work in Chelsea a couple of days last week (yay!), and I intend to do the same this coming week.
It’s wild how, after living up here and barely visiting the City at all for decades, once I started working down there I fell in love with the place, and have been going somewhat crazy not being able to get in for months and months.
Ah, Chelsea, how I missed ya!
I skipped my usual bowl of cold cereal at home, and got a Bacon Egg an’ Cheese on a Roll, Salt, Pepper, Ketchup from the vendor on the way to work the other day. It was glorious.
So that is a nice completely random weblog entry, as in Back in the Day. Now I will probably generate many more images (Twitter link assuming it works, and NightCafe link similarly), and perhaps play some Computer Games (although I’m kind of plateaued on everything I play, including WoW and Satisfactory and No Man’s Sky, but that doesn’t always stop me), and perhaps read some books (Oh, I was thinking I should do a weblog entry on a couple of rather meta books that I finished lately, maybe I will some time), fight some entropy, and/or go for a walk in the sunny chilly day.
A comic strip from NightCafe. In a variety of styles.
Episode 1: We meet Hugo, and the LambEpisode 2: At the BridgeEpisode 3: A twist!Episode 4: The SignEpisode 5: Return to the SourceEpisode 6: The Lamb ConsidersEpisode 7: The PuzzleEpisode 8: A Dark TurnEpisode 9: The NightmareEpisode 10: The Baker You Meet In HeavenEpisode 11: ResolutionEpisode 12: Returning Home
Special bonus content: Coming This Summer, Hugo and the Lamb, the Motion Picture!
I thought it would be fun to see what the Nightcafe “Artistic” engine would do with a slightly ambiguous product name (and basically nothing else). So we present: the development of the Stormracer VII!
(The caption on each image is the entire prompt passed to the AI engine.)
The big wheel in the concept art was apparently dropped during development.
One thing (of many) that strikes me here, is that the logos on the three documents that have logos, seems to almost spell out the product name. That seems to say something about the level of understanding that the AI has; other aspects say similar things, more subtly.
So, obviously, I gave AI Dungeon a prompt with a few prompts that I’ve given to Nightcafe Studio:
Here are some good prompts for an AI program that generates images from text: - vray rendering of my feelings for you - vray rendering of diamond tentacles in space - At the Cabaret; oil on canvas - Illustrated plans for an interstellar cyberpunk yacht - Victorian colored sketch, lush comfortable; Sunlight through the window - dark neon alien city; The Cost of Memory - Modern realism retrofuture gernsback vivid vintage street scene - Detailed steampunk cyberpunk noir library interior
And it continued:
- Detailed art deco fantasy architecture - Detailed sketch of magic artifact - Fantasy gargoyle, black and white - vray rendering of SciFi city - Medieval cathedral interior - Sketchy cyberpunk bar interior; The Bartender - Digital concept painting, renaissance era - Colorful fantasy city scene - Sketchy cyberpunk bar interior; The Bar - Fantasy medieval castle exterior - High fantasy city at night, watercolor painting - Detailed concept art of alien city
And it would have continued except that I seem to have a thing about dozens lately.
So here we go! Images generated by an AI, from prompts generated by an AI. :)
Detailed Art Deco Fantasy ArchitectureDetailed sketch of magic artifactFantasy gargoyle, black and whitevray rendering of SciFi cityMedieval cathedral interiorSketchy cyberpunk bar interior; The BartenderDigital concept painting, renaissance eraColorful fantasy city sceneSketchy cyberpunk bar interior; The BarFantasy medieval castle exteriorHigh fantasy city at night, watercolor paintingDetailed concept art of alien city
Not extremely notable: the images are more or less what we’d expect from the prompts, which are more or less what we might expect from the meta-prompts.
Welcome to █████Public SquareThe Squalid BazaarWarriors of the ████x██The Cost of MemoryThe Lake of IndustryThe Palace of the ThreeLibrary InteriorThe House of FiresThe King’s Pro██████████ HotelSuns-set
ceoln 