I’ve watched from the sidelines for about a year now. The photography YouTubers I follow one-by-one fell in love with it, I started seeing a lot of criticism from artists YouTubers, and a few months ago my old brother became enamored with it, reinventing himself as an AI Artist and posting 100’s of images to Facebook. So when a buddy of mine showed me Bing’s Image Creator early last week I was quite interested.

Suffice to say, I’ve fallen hard for this tech. A lot of the AI art I was seeing months ago wasn’t very impressive, but today it seems amazing. I was in awe of this creepy pumpkin it created for me:

If this was on a t-shirt, I’d consider buying it. It’s just so mind boggling good.

After toying around a bit I wound up becoming entranced with creating this stuff. Early last week they were giving 100 credits per day (now it looks like its only 25). So I had plenty of room to experiment with prompt ideas. And a good prompt is key. I found out early on that if a prompt isn’t yielding good images, just ditch it and move on to something else. However, once you create a good prompt, you seem to get an endless supply of cool images. For example, the above image was created with the prompt “A scary carved jack-o-lantern smoke around it, modern H.R. Giger stylized oil on canvas”. Making subtle tweaks to that prompt you can get all sorts of good stuff.

And almost any kind of image you can think of it can generate. For example, you can create medical cut-away diagrams with this prompt: “Detailed anatomical cut-away diagram of ___” (I didn’t come up with this one myself, someone told me about it). It can yield all sorts of wild images.

And If you don’t like blood and guts, you can describe what you think should be inside and it’ll do that instead.

The cut-away effect can also be used in descriptions to create interesting looking stuff:

For some of these images if you look closely you’ll see mistakes. And in the skull one above I actually used Photoshop’s AI generator to fix some of the parts I didn’t like (basically I used the lasso tool to select what I didn’t like, then I had Photoshop’s AI generate something new). However, Photoshop’s AI is waaaaay behind Dalle3.

This thing is also great for memes and in-jokes. At work we have this in-joke about Alf (too complex and long of a story to go into here). I’m able to generate an endless supply of goofy Alf images.

I also have had this weird obsession with Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk album. I actually really like the album, it’s not his best, but it’s so bizarre and off brand, yet I still like the music. I can make all sorts of weird art for the album:

Are AI Artists Artists?

That’s a good question. I feel like even Bing considers Dalle3 the artist and not the user, otherwise it wouldn’t be blocking so many prompts. After all, you don’t see Photoshop implementing such draconian censorship for what its users can create. But the refining of prompts and editing images after the fact isn’t nothing. Even though my brother considers himself an artist and the AI creations his art, I’m still on the fence about it. I feel more like a slot machine junkie than an artist when creating this stuff. It’s fun and cool to look at – and even functionally useful in some cases too (even if just for a laugh at work). At what point does someone become an artist in anything? And even though this stuff is cool – is it actually art? Is the user’s prompt (the idea for creation) what makes it art? Questions for a longer think piece I suppose, for now I’ll just enjoy the stuff.

What to do with all of this stuff?

At the moment I don’t know. I was putting it on my Flickr, but then quickly deleted it all because that seemed like the wrong place. I started posting some to Twitter, that seems like the most logical place (especially since I’ve never really used my Twitter account). If you’re doing AI art feel free to hit me up over there. For now I’ll leave you all with a random assortment of AI art images I generated in the last few days (a lot of these prompts have suggestions from others – I’m including them so you see how I got the images).