Last Men Standing appeared in Nature Futures last month, and it had some awesome title art by Jacey. I’m no artist, but I have enjoyed asking AI to produce some scenes from the story, just for fun. Given the legal climate, I wouldn’t use any of these images commercially, but they are fun to experiment with. You can feel like an artist!
The one in the previous post came from ChatGPT/DALL-E, and you can tell because the text in it is kind of strange. Google now has ImageFX, and I decided to try it.
For ChatGPT, I just gave it the story and it did a nice job of extracting a meaningful image. However, the Google offering didn’t do as well with that strategy. It showed a man teleporting in, but he was in a room with a doll on the floor. Granted, those are all elements in the story, but they don’t go together. It would be like a picture of Miami showing the Eiffel Tower in it.
So, I tried a specific prompt:
I need an image of a reservation in a desert (but not necessarily an american indian reservation). In the distance is a run down looking 4 story building. In the foreground a simply dressed man in his 60s is watching a man in a cheap suit carrying a faux leather case materialize on a teleporter pad. Outside the building should be a few old cars in minor disrepair.
The title image came from that, along with these three:
Of course, you can edit these or ask the AI to edit or change them.
I really like Jacey’s style of art and it would be hard for me to envision that style to prompt an AI to even attempt to duplicate it. Art is like software. While a computer might be able to crank out something, it can’t really create.
It is interesting, though. If you want to change something, you can select an area and describe the change you want to make.
For example, I took the title image and selected the Mayor. I then entered this prompt:
Can you make the man have short gray hair, put him in blue jeans, and a ball cap instead of the hat he has on?
They clearly have some work to do. In three of the images, it totally erased the Mayor! Here’s the last one:
Impressive, but not flawless. Especially the editing part.
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