Depending on what you read, Artificial Intelligence will either be the greatest advancement in the history of humanity or it will be the end of civilization as we know it. I’m not sure if it will be either of those, but I do know I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I’ve been using chatGPT, a popular form of AI for a little over a year. I first used it to help me research blog ideas and, for the first time, I used it to edit my most recent post. The text feature is what we most often think about when considering chatGPT, and I’ll talk about that in a future post, but today I want to tell you about DALL-E, a feature available on the enhanced version.
DALL-E is an AI powered image generator that creates original images based on user input. I have always thought the banner illustration for this blog was boring and wanted to create a new one. I tried using stock images but you always run into copyright and fee problems. When I discovered DALL-E, I realized it was the answer to my problem. I just didn’t know how much fun it would be.
My first attempt was to simply enter the command: “Generate images for the home page of a blog titled The Grumpy Doc”. These were the responses I got.
I thought they looked pretty good, but obviously I don’t have a beard so I tried a few more. I entered for him to have gray hair and glasses and be clean shaven. I got what looked like a gray haired 14 year-old with a lab coat and a stethoscope. When I said make him look older, it gave him a gray beard. When I said make the beard go away, it turned it brown. I went through a variety of commands for images in a realistic style and a cartoon style with many various other instructions. The more detailed the instructions you give it, the better images you will get. One caveat, it will not generate images of actual people or of copyrighted material. I probably generated almost 100 images for this project. Here are few of those images.
DALL-E has some trouble depicting human emotion. It doesn’t seem to distinguish between grumpy, angry and just plain mean.
When I asked DALL-E for a whimsical or sly smile, I got this down right goofy look.
Being a hefty guy myself, I asked for The Grumpy Doc to be a little heavier:
Please, no wisecracks about how that looks just like me or you may be in my next blog.
Sometimes the images just don’t make sense. In the image below you will see a stethoscope tube that doesn’t connect to any thing, book titles in no known language and a dial with unrecognizable symbols. Look at some of the above images and you will find many of the same types of mistakes. It is almost like a built-in game.
When asking for text or a title you have to check closely. Sometimes it is fine; other times there are subtle mistakes. One of the pictures above has one of those. See if you can find it. Other times you get something like this:
The one human emotion that DALL-E seems to be fine with is confusion or indecision.
Now what’s that all about?