#DALL-E image generator

[shamnadt]

5 things about AI you may have missed today: OpenAI's CLIP is biased, AI reunites family after 25 years, more

Study finds OpenAI’s CLIP is biased in favour of wealth and underrepresents poor nations; Retail giants harness AI to cut online clothing returns and enhance the customer experience; Northwell Health implements AI-driven device for rapid seizure detection; White House concerns grow over UAE’s rising influence in global AI race- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look. 1. Study…

[therobotmonster]

On the subject of comic books and emphasis.

Getting some use out of my Tyrannomax extras.

[dalle2]

“An ear of corn with translucent colourless liquid dripping down it, in a field, at sunset, golden hour, award winning photography”

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Substack: dalle.substack.com

Twitter: @Dalle2AI

The heading of this post was used to generate the image, src

[snailspng]

DALL·E costume PNGs, part 1

[geekysteven]

damn boy are you an AI image generator cause I'm having fun with you but if I try to imagine a future with you I get sick

[tangibletechnomancy]

The (Personal) Is (Political)

~7 hours, Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, generated under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

Or, Dear Microsoft and OpenAI: Your Filters Can't Stop Me From Saying Things: An interactive exercise in why all art is political and game of Spot The Symbols

A rare piece I consider Fully Finished simply as a jpeg, though I may do something physical with it regardless. "Director commentary" below, but I strongly encourage you to go over this and analyze it yourself before clicking through, then see how much your reading aligns with my intent.

Elements I told the model to add and a brief (...or at least inexhaustive) overview of why:

Anime style and character figures - Frequently associated with commercial "low" art and consumer culture, in East Asia and the English-speaking world alike, albeit in different ways - justly or otherwise. There is frequently an element of racism to the denigration of anime styles in the west; nearly any American artist who has taken formal illustration classes can tell you a story of being told that anime style will only hinder them, that no one will hire them if they see anime, or even being graded more harshly and scrutinized for potential anime-esque elements if they like anime or imply that they may like anime - including just by being Asian and young. On the other hand, it is true that there is a commercial strategy of "slap an anime girl on it and it will sell". The passion fans feel for these characters is genuine - and it is very, very exploitable. In fact, this commercialization puts anime styles in particular in a very contentious position when it comes to AI discussions!

Dark-skinned boy with platinum and pink [and blue] hair - Racism and colorism! They're a thing, no matter how much the worst people in the world want you to think they're long over and "critical race theory" is the work of evil anti-American terrorists! I chose his appearance because I knew that unless I was incredibly lucky, I would have to fight with this model for multiple hours to get satisfactory results on this point in particular - and indeed I did. It was an interesting experience - what didn't surprise me was how much work it took me to get a skin color darker than medium-dark tan; what did surprise me was that the hair color was very difficult to get right. In anime art, for dark skin to be matched with light hair and eyes is common enough to be...pretty problematic. Bing Image Creator/Dall-E, on the other hand, swings completely in the opposite direction and struggles with the concept of giving dark-skinned characters any hair color OTHER than black, demanding pretty specific phrasing to get it right even 70% of the time. (I might cynically call this yet another illustration against the pervasive copy-paste myth...) There is also much to say about the hair texture and facial features - while I was pleased to see that more results than I expected gave me textured hair and/or box braids without me asking for it, those were still very much in the minority, and I never saw any deviation from the typical anime facial structures meant to illustrate Asian and white characters. Not even once!

Pink and blue color palette - Our subject is transgender. Bias self-check time: did you make that association as quickly as you would with a light-skinned character, or even Sylveon?

Long hair, cute clothes, lots of accessories - Styling while transmasc is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, doubly so if you're not white. In many locations, the medical establishment and mainstream attitude demands total conformity to the dominant culture's standard conventional masculinity, or else "revoking your man card" isn't just a joke meant to uphold the idea that men are "better" than women, but a very real threat. In many queer communities, especially online, transmascs are expected to always be cute femboys who love pink (while transfems are frequently degraded and seen as threats for being butch), and being Just Some Guy is viewed as inherently a sign of assimilationism at best and abusiveness at worst. It is an eternal tug-of-war where "cuteness" and ornamentation are both demanded and banned at the same time. Black and brown people are often hypermasculinized and denied the opportunity to even be "cute" in the first place, regardless of gender. Long hair and how gender is read into it is extremely culture-dependent; no matter what it means to you, if anything, the dominant culture wherever you are will read it as it likes.

Trophies and medals - For one, the trans sports Disk Horse has set feminism back by nearly 50 years; I'm barely a Real History-Remembering Adult and yet I clearly remember a time when the feminist claim about gender in sports was predominantly "hey, it's pretty fucked up that sports are segregated by sex rather than weight class or similar measures, especially when women's sports are usually paid much less and given weirdly oversexualized uniforms," but then a few loud living embodiments of turds in the punch bowl realized that might mean treating trans people fairly and now it's super common for self-proclaimed feminists - mostly white ones - to claim that the strongest woman will still never measure up to the weakest man and this is totally a feminist statement because they totally want to PROTECT women (with invasive medical screenings on girls as young as 12 to prove they're Really Women if they perform too well, of course). For two, Black and brown people are stereotyped as being innately more sporty, physically strong, and, again, Masculine(TM) than others, which frequently intersects with item 1...and if you think it only affects trans women, I am sorry my friend but it is so much worse and more extensive than you think.

Hearts - They mean many things. Love. Happiness. Cuteness. Social media engagement?

TikTok - A platform widely known and hated around these parts for its arcane and deeply regressive algorithm; I felt it deserved to be name/layout/logodropped for reasons that, if they're not clear already, should become so in the final paragraph.

Computers, cameras and cell phones - My initial specification was that one of the phones should be on Instagram and another on TikTok, which the model instead chose to interpret as putting a TikTok sticker on the laptop, but sure, okay. They're ubiquitous in the modern day, for better and for worse. For all the debate over whether phones and social media are Good For Us or Bad For Us, the fact of the matter is, they seem to be a net positive-to-neutral, whose impacts depend on the person - but they do still have major drawbacks. The internet is a platform for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and dangerous hoaxes to spread farther than ever before. Social media culture leaves many people feeling like we're always being watched and every waking moment of our lives must be Perfect - and in some senses, we are always being watched these days. Digital privacy is eroding by the day, already being used to enforce all the most unjust laws on the books, which leads to-

Pigs - I wrote the prompt with the intention that it would just be a sticker on the laptop, but instead it chose to put them everywhere, and given that I wanted to make a somewhat stealthy statement about surveillance, especially of the marginalized...thanks for that, Dall-E! ;)

Alligators - A counter to the pigs; a short-lived antifascist symbol after...this.

Details I did not intend but love anyway:

The blue in the hair - I only prompted for platinum and pink in the hair, but the overall color palette description "bled" over here anyway, completing the trans flag, making it even more blatant, and thus even more effective as a bias self-check.

The Macbook - I only specified a laptop. Hilariously ironic, to me, that a service provided through Bing interpreted "laptop" as "Macbook" nearly every time. In my recent history, 22 out of 24 attempts show, specifically, a Macbook. Microsoft v. OpenAI divorce arc when? ;) But also, let us not forget Apple's role in the ever-worsening sanitization of the internet. A Macbook with a TikTok sticker (or, well, a Tiikok sticker - recognizable enough) - I can think of little more emblematic of one of the main things I was complaining about, and it was a happy accident. Or perhaps an unhappy one, considering what it may imply about Apple's grip on culture and communications.

Which brings me to my process:

Generated over ~7 hours with Dall-E 3 through Bing Image Creator - The most powerful free tool out there for txt2img these days, as well as a nightmare of filters and what may be the most disgustingly, cloyingly impersonal toxic positivity I've ever witnessed from a tool. It wants to be Art(TM), yet it wants to ban Politics(TM); two things which are very much incompatible - and so, I wanted to make A Controversial Statement using only the most unflaggable, innocuous elements imaginable, no matter how long it took.

All art is political. All life is political. All our "defaults" are cultural, and therefore political. Anything whatsoever can be a symbol.

If you want all art to be a substance-free "look at the pretty picture :)" - it doesn't matter how much you filter, buddy, you've got a big storm coming.

[gingerbredman1989]

By ANY means necessary!

DALL-E

[deepdreamnights]

The Secret Origin of Wally ManMoth

Scans from TyrannoMax #26

Cocytus was one of the better-performing comic companies outside the big 2 in the 1970s before the whole company was bought out by Buzby-Spurlock Animation in the early 80s.

TyrannoMax was its biggest title, so almost everyone in the character stable teamed up with the Dinoids eventually.

Process under the fold.

TyrannMax is created via use of Dall-E 3 and Midjourney as pencilers, and me doing essentially everything else (writing, editing, inking, lettering, layout, etc.) DE is on most of the character art, MJ on backgrounds and select characters.

Each panel utilizes anywhere from one gen/prompt (for a handful of very simple head-shots) to around 20 for stuff like the DinoHydra action shot or the hero/villain showcase panels.

Once I know what I want for a page I lay out the rough dialog and panels, then start generating pics. Basic prompt format and a few examples:

, , , , comic panel by 1968, in the style of 1968

A portly 50 year old man, resembles Alan Hale Jr, jolly smile, wearing a tweed jacket, slacks, sandals, a fedora, sweatervest and a loosened ascot, full body character design, comic panel by Jack Kirby and Alex Toth 1968, in the style of 1968 Marvel comics

a mad scientist mid-transformation into a green anthro-tyrannosaurus, asymmetrical transformation, boils and growths, screaming/roaring, bald, portly, with round glasses. wearing a tattered lab coat, vest, slacks, tie. Comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth, 1968, in the style of vintage horror comics

Then I take the pics into PS, arrange and composite them, and then remove all the color. I don't tend to prompt for my final colors on characters and instead choose light tones I can easily extract. Why not just do B&W prompts? Style impact.

Then I start to re-ink over errors and details that don't match the mood I want, match line thicknesses over various elements, etc. Through this process I adjust dialog placement and panel arrangements, and do generally the things and editor and letterer would be up to.

Once I have the inks, flat colors, and the text on various layers, I do the weathering and compositing to simulate scans of a 1970s comic book. This is also where the deliberate flaws in coloring and print alignment are added for authenticity.

[gender-trash]

at work rn we're working on a feature where users can scan barcodes/QR codes on their employee badges to log into a robot, and this is all well and good except that *we* don't have employee badges at my work because it's a dinky startup. so we've just been like scanning barcodes stuck onto stuff that say TEST, or, like, random cans of soup from the test warehouse, or whatever's to hand that has a barcode on it (i use my notebook a lot bc i usually have it with me).

my boss decided this was boring & lame (and also we now want to do cloud integration so we need a better-defined set of barcodes), so he took the list of weird names from that dr seuss story about a woman who had 19 kids and named them all "dave" and fed it into chatgpt to have dall-e generate employee badge photos for them, and then printed them out, with barcodes, and made surprisingly legit employee badges out of them. with the clip-on retractor thing and all!

so now i have a Legit Employee Badge to use for testing this feature:

[cottagecore4life]

[somerandomaiart]

A new home. 💙💚

[silmarillion-ways-to-die]

My attempt to get Dall-E to show the Fëanorians somehow making it up to Vingilot to get the Silmaril from Eärendil has FAILED MISERABLY.

[therobotmonster]

I've seen people say that the new AI art has lost the charm that its early first-gen incarnations had...

That the "seeing the pure madness of the machine" had gone. But to that I say:

"a shark buying a Mello-Yello at the 7-11, snapshot photograph, 1977"

Generated with Bing Image Generator, 10/9/23

The longer I look at it the more things I notice.

[dalle2]

Seinfeld episode where Kramer installs a toilet in Jerry's doorway as a shared building amenity, "The Convenience", season 2, 1991

Generated by OpenAI's DALL·E 2

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Substack: dalle.substack.com

Twitter: @Dalle2AI

The heading of this post was used to generate the image, src

[snailspng]

DALL·E costume PNGs, part 2

[irradiatedsnakes]

i miss ai image generators that suck. i want old artbreeder back so i can make flesh computers again. i want to tell the computer to make something that is 50% website and 50% swimming cap to get the Meat World back