Dall-E Created Article Covers: Part 2 of Coauthoring With ChatGPT

Part 2 in my adventures Coauthoring with ChatGPT

If I will coauthor with an AI that can spit out ready-to-go paragraphs, I need to use AI-created article covers.

So I went to Dall-e, the older sister project of ChatGPT, and prompted it to generate some images I could use.

When it comes to article covers, Unsplash has been my best friend for a while. You can go to its prompt, type a couple of keywords that would describe the kind of picture you are looking for, et voilà, a bunch of pics with random but related subjects appears.

So, it felt familiar to ask the command prompt of Dall-e for:

“A futuristic sci-fi portrait of a lost bitcoin wallet”

The images that came back were interesting but not really what I needed. So, I made the second prompt a bit more specific:

“A futuristic sci-fi portrait of a lost bitcoin wallet with background similar to matrix the movie”

Still not what I was looking for, yet Unsplash never gives me exactly what I am looking for either. Yet Dall-e, which has a much better moniker than its sister ChatGPT, has this little ace under the sleeve. You can select one image and ask it for variations:

If the good old Dali would wake up and see what the AI tongue in cheek named after him had created, he would probably fall back in his grave. Yet, for me, the search was over.

And this rendered the image that I selected for the first chapter of the novel I am coauthoring with ChatGPT. Now, before you throw your hands in the air, you should know that I am terrible at art, and when it comes to selecting, I’m more of a satisfizer than a maximizer.

It is a characteristic, call it a flaw if you are the kind that has some flair, of my character. I’ve worn Levis jeans, 550 and 505 for most of my adult life. It is easy to buy them, and barring some changes in waist numbers, extremely boring to go shopping for jeans with me.

Yet, the variation feature allows you to upload an image and have the AI dream some variations of it. So, I took one of my favorite HDR pictures and had the AI have a go with it:

And since the next chapter of my coauthored novel takes place at a convention in an exotic place, this variation of dreams from Dall-E has provided me with its cover.

Somehow, I now feel in the same league as my friends who know about art. They start wondering what the author was trying to express. All I know is that the algorithm that takes a pic like this:

And turn it into a rendering that:

• Likes cloudier skies than me

• Dreams of white sandy beaches

• Is not the best gardener, creating not perfectly round bushes

• Likes its Corinthian columns with some plants on top

• Feels like a garden needs red flowers

Is definitely an AI I can be friends with.

And so, I have gotten my new illustrator. Give it a try at https://labs.openai.com/ And tell them I sent you.