Learning Automated Art

 kw: experiments, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, art, generated art, images, prompts

Much of my early exploration of DALL-E2 was learning to use prompts. Longer, more descriptive prompts are usually considered better. An early experiment with single-word prompts (some real words and some nonsense words) can be seen here.

The third image I considered worth extending (DALL-E2 also calls it Outpainting) is a city on an alien planet with a purple sky. Over time I did three more on the Alien Planet. The four prompts refer to the images from top left in clockwise order:

1. Futuristic city on hilly alien planet with violet sky and two moons
2. an alien forest with orange trees, blue and yellow flowers, a placid stream and a small moon in the bluish-white sky in the style of chesley bonestell
3. A futuristic city on a wide plain surrounded by mountains on an alien planet with a greenish-blue sky and two small moons
4. A city of spindly buildings on a low gravity planet with a deep blue sky having thin, scattered high clouds, and very high mountains in the distance

The first is cropped from a longer, panoramic image. In the second, although I specified orange trees, I got orange dirt also. This one was intended as a landscape rather than a city. Although the first and third prompts are very similar, one can see how differently DALL-E2 can interpret a prompt, and how I may choose something quite diverse from the earlier look. Even where I didn't ask for a moon, DALL-E2 supplied one. I guess that's part of what makes a scene look "alien" in the training set. I can't say I prefer any of these images more than the other; I like each differently.

In my formative years I usually had access to desert landscapes, and I like the desert. I produced two desert scenes so far, and I may yet do more of them. The prompts, followed by the montage:

1. Desert landscape with mesas and saguaro cactus
2. A desert scene with exaggerated mesas and steep mountains around an alluvial valley, digital art

The first was intended to evoke Arizona; the second was to be more fanciful. Of course, one can produce vertically exaggerated landscapes by stretching the image later, but asking for it at the outset produced a landscape I find very pleasing.

As another example of post-processing, I tried inverting the colors of the blue-orange alien planet scene:

Comparing this with the one above, I see that DALL-E2 chose totally complementary hues to base its blue and orange palettes upon. Neither this nor the original is much like what I was originally looking for, but I find them both interesting.

I used IrfanView to invert the colors. It can also do color channel swapping. There are five possible transforms; some are 1-2→2-1 reversible, and the others rotate 1→2→3→1. For this variation I used a rotation: RGB→BRG:

That's starting to look really alien!

Later I'll also explore making composite images.