Ryan Mercer's thoughts, mostly random musings, spanning form 2001 to present. Freemason, geek, nutter, Whovian, 8-bit Atari enthusiast, SciFi fan.
While I don’t necessarily get “ancient” out of these images, if you showed these to me I would just believe they were real photos of shipwrecks. These artificial images were created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 with the following query “Photo of an ancient shipwreck on the ocean floor”:
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Finding ancient ruins really fascinating, as well as the woods, I decided to have DALL-E 2 tackle something along these lines. Here is what the query “A mossy sculpture in the woods depicting a human face” generated:
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Have you ever seen a hippogriff bathing in a waterfall? Me either, until now. I asked OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to generate images with the following prompt “A photograph of a Hippogriff bathing in a waterfall”. Bewm baby
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
I wanted to give DALL-E 2 a change to create “real” objects in “real” space, so obviously I had to give it the following query “A photograph of a leather chair that looks like a dragon in a forest”. WOW
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
I had the image of David the gnome riding a fox in my head and thought I’d task DALL-E 2 with something along those lines so I gave it the query “A photograph of a gnome riding a fox by a creek” and, well, what we got were essentially garden gnomes with scaled down foxes, still cool though!
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
A co-moderator of a discord I am on has been in Germany on a work trip, he’s been sharing with us all the gummies he has been eating and how he has 22lbs of them he is bringing back to the United States when he leaves tomorrow. In the discord chat someone joked that he’d eat them all before his submarine docked so I gave DALL-E 2 the prompt “A German submarine made out of gummies” and some look like artificial baits.
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Recently my wife and I visited Nauvoo, IL and stopped by the Nauvoo Illinois Temple and I took this photo:
I took this photo with my iPhone SE 2020
One of the features DALL-E 2 has is that you can upload a photo and either edit it, or produce variations. I opted to produce variations to see what it would do, and how well it could edit a real building - would it mess up the corners and windows like it does when it generates a building purely from your text input. Here are the results (spoilers, it still messes up architecture):
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
Created with DALL-E 2
So it would seem that generally DALL-E 2 is just not good at generating buildings, and possibly even vegetation as it has done some weird things with trees in some of these.
I wanted to see how DALL-E 2 handled food requests, I gave it the following query “A 7 patty cheeseburger surrounded by thick cut fries with a glass of soda” and thought it did alright. It even gave me the option of both regular and cheese fries in one image. Some of the glasses look a bit odd, that’s blatantly a can of Coke, and I don’t know what is going on with the bowl of cheese or butter in the one image but not bad. I will say it didn’t take the number “7” into account at all, although it was a very wordy query. I imagine with some refinement of the input you could get a much better image but not bad for my first cheeseburger query!
All of the below images were generated by DALL-E 2 from a text input.
Patty looks real and possibly like ribeye, fries look real, the glass is peculiar, the bun is almost perfect but the eggwash reflecting the light in the top right is ever so slightly off. Hands down this is the most realistic-looking burger of the lot.
Fries look real, that’s blatantly a coke can, the glass isn’t very good, I’m not sure what’s going on with the paper in the top right by the coke can, the bread and patty look fake but the plasticized cheese looks very real compared to cafeteria food as does the visually unappealing lettuce.
This table is beautiful, something weird going on with the chair, the fries look like they’ve accidentally merged with some sort of chicken or fish breading in spots, the bun looks more like a super chonky pancake, and the glass is perfect except for the weird ice anomaly at the back of the roughly 12 o’clock position where it looks like the ice physically goes through the glass, I’m not sure what’s with the slabs of butter or cheese in the mirraging metal dish though, and the burger patty reminds me of McDonald’s ‘steak’ in their old steak, egg, and cheese bagel.
This glass looks good aside from appearing like it’s been photoshopped in from another image. The cheese fries look good but overexposed, the regular fries have all sorts of weird things going on, the bun here looks very blah and the edge of the patty is just odd.
Someone smashed the top of the bun but it looks real, the bottom of the bun is a bit less real, the plasticized cheese looks real and the patty just looks like your generic cafeteria super processed patty. The fries, as with other examples, are just slightly strange looking in places and metal tray they are on looks good except for that “11” bar roughly in the middle. This glass doesn’t appear symmetrical but it’s one of the better ones of the lot, I would 100% hate that ice in real life though.
Bun, cheese, fries, and bowl all look fine. The glass again though has issues with the rim although the rest of it is probably the best of the lot and the ice looks decent especially given how opaque the drink appears to be. The patty though, the patty just looks wrong.
The other day Sam Altman’s tweet about Dairy Queen’s Blizzards got me curious (and hungry, grrrrrr, thanks a lot Sam!)
dairy queen blizzard is by far the best fast food
— Sam Altman (@sama) June 16, 2022
so I fed (pun not intended) DALL-E 2 the query “An artificial intelligence enjoying an oreo dairy queen blizzard”. This one was my favorite (and a rather interesting way to enjoy ice cream):
It generated some other nice results as well, just not as fun:
These are the best “eyes” I’ve seen DALL-E 2 generate to date as far as imitating photographed objects is concerned.
See how it does weird stuff with the left eye in this one as compared to the one immediately above?
Again, the eyes are a bit odd here, notice what looks like clumped clay/paint on both?
I found it interesting that it took “oreo” and created all of the entities with the white and black, it really seems to like blue too for this query, perhaps from the blue ‘swoosh’ in the Dairy Queen logo?
