Today I was weeding the bricks of my patio. I would pull out the grass and other things growing between the bricks and shake off the soil to see the root structure. I find the tiny world that lives in between the bricks fascinating. When you get up close, you can see a thriving ecosystem of plants sharing resources, and providing building materials for the ants that live nearby.
Later, I opened my laptop to play around on deepdreamgenerator.com, an AI art generator with an emphasis on dreamlike images. I tried out AI image generation for the first time on this website for another article I wrote on HackerNoon a few days ago, and by now there were enough credits left for 3 default-quality images. Once my credits were done, I went to my email looking for what to do next. Lo and behold an email from HackerNoon with a link to try out their new embedded AI image generation tool.
“plant roots interweave and ants crawl across, it is like a highway for bugs” - prompt used for all images in this article
The reason I wrote this plant is that I wanted to show a bit of what I see when I examine plants up close. There is a tiny complex world living all around us, in the gaps. The lifespan of the creatures and plants that are the inhabitants of this small world is typically many degrees shorter than ours. These tiny worlds, that we are mostly unaware of, or consider to be a minor inconvenience, are surviving through generations of evolution during the span of a month for us.
This first output does not have fully formed ants, but somehow they seem to have a more realistic character of an ant - a real ant, not a cartoon of an ant like the subsequent images. @hackernoonAI there aren’t even any ants in yours!
Even though I kept all settings the same, the next image seems artier overall. The plant grows in soil which is more ‘correct’ than the first one. The ants, soil, and roots are in the same style. Aesthetically, it is probably the best one. I still prefer the first one but that could just be my proclivity for the strange.
In this image, we now have a mix of styles between the elements: the soil is photo-realistic while the ants are cartoon-like. There are no roots visible which was one of the main features. Once again it seems the first image was the best, same as last time. The level of detail of the roots and the tiny hairs on them is similar to the grass tufts I was pulling out of the bricks. Despite the ants not being fully formed, they are overall more lifelike than the more anatomically correct subsequent images.
The deep dream generator is designed for people to describe their dreams and get corresponding images. This could be part of the reason why its AI seemed to get a better sense of the overall importance and size of the ants. This picture, generated on HackerNoon’s new tool, definitely looks the most realistic and would probably be the hardest to pick out as an AI-generated image (even though, when you take a closer look there is a blurry seam running down the right of the picture). But to be honest, it’s a pretty boring picture, the other ones are more interesting, and, frankly, that is what I want from my AI images: something strangely evocative and off-tilt that has a chance of sticking in a person’s head - the opposite of generic.
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