The Weird World of AI Text-to-Image Art Generation

[Unwary Traveller]

The ability to generate AI art by entering a text prompt (e.g. "a mouse driving a tractor") has been developing rapidly into something fairly astonishing, and I suspect anyone browsing the internet this year has been recommended a video or seen an article about it (there was some digital AI-assisted art posted in this thread - https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=13545). These are some interesting videos I've seen recently:

In case you missed all this hype in a haze of ennui, the first video is a general introduction focusing on DALL-E 2

How This A.I. Draws Anything You Describe [DALL-E 2] | Coldfusion

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Since the end of September, DALL-E 2 has become available for general use with no wait list. It's a very simple interface accessed through their website. When you sign up you get 50 free credits, meaning you can enter 50 text prompts, each of which will generate four images, which you can download and use how you want. After that you get 15 free credits per month, and you can buy more at a cost of 115 credits for $15. To sign up you need an email and phone number (verification codes will be sent to each; presumably the addition of a phone number is to discourage multiple accounts to get more free credits). It's very easy to get started and have some fun playing about using the free credits - try searching for "DALL E-2 prompts" to find videos or articles explaining how to get better results from your text inputs. Some words are restricted to avoid the generation of violent or sexual imagery. For other AI art generators see this article - How-To Geek: The Best AI Image Generators You Can Use Right Now.

The next video is on more of a weird theme, showing the potential for strangely disturbing AI imagery:

The Disturbing Art of A.I. | Nexpo

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Midjourney is another popular AI text-to-image generator. It runs within Discord, making it slightly more complicated to access if you are unfamiliar with that, but there are plenty of videos explaining the basics of how to set it up and use it. I've not tried it yet, I think you get 25 free credits, after which a very limited subscription (in terms of the number of images you can generate) is $10 per month and an unlimited subscription is $30. Not cheap, but you can see why people are fascinated by it. The next video shows a variety of Cthulhu images generated with the text prompt "horror artwork of H P Lovecraft."

100 AI generated images THE CALL OF CTHULHU tribute to H.P. Lovecraft | Midjourney AI

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This video showcases a more varied selection of fantastical art, showing the detailed prompts used to generate them:

Ai Generated Art | MidJourney Top 100

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Another AI project which has become available recently is OpenAI's ChatGPT, where you can chat with an AI on their website through text inputs and responses, in the way you've probably seen reported in the past. It's surprisingly sophisticated and the possibilities of this are wider than you might expect:

ChatGPT is Frighteningly Good | Enrico Tartarotti

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This video is slightly mindblowing - using ChatGPT to generate descriptions which you can use as the prompts for the art:

ChatGPT + Midjourney V4 Showcase: Insane Combo! | All About AI

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Inspired by this, I asked ChatGPT to "think of some creative ways of using prompts to generate strange, weird, alien AI art pictures." This was its response:

Quote

Here are a few ideas for using prompts to generate strange and weird AI art pictures: Use prompts that describe bizarre, otherworldly landscapes, such as "a planet covered in endless fields of glowing purple fungus" or "an ocean of acid where the sky is a boiling, stormy red". Use prompts that describe strange, alien creatures, such as "a six-legged, tentacled beast with a bulbous, glowing head" or "a pack of predatory, humanoid insects with razor-sharp mandibles". Use prompts that describe surreal, dream-like scenarios, such as "a city where the buildings are alive and constantly shifting" or "a forest filled with ghostly, translucent figures". Use prompts that describe abstract, nonsensical concepts, such as "a color that cannot be seen by human eyes" or "a sound that causes the listener to hallucinate". Use prompts that combine multiple strange and weird elements, such as "a cityscape where the buildings are made of living, pulsating meat" or "a landscape of floating, interconnected brain-like structures".

It's starting to feel like I'm living in the future...

I'd be interested to hear peoples' experiences of this technology, either initial impressions (I tried DALL-E 2 yesterday and this is all very new to me) or from more experienced users. My ability to paint or draw is extremely limited, so I find this ability to generate pictures from text very inspiring. Try it!