I guess that by now you've heard all about various AI art generators. Here's a prompt I got to try yesterday:

fantasy creatures in alien landscape

Prompt: Concept art of fantasy creatures in alien landscape, dragons, unicorns, spaceships, futuristic transport, artstation

This was the 14th sample out of 20 images generated using Stable Diffusion (latent text-to-image diffusion model). I don't have a setup yet, Rodrigo GirΓ£o SerrΓ£o did me a favor by generating these images based on my prompts (you can also submit prompts to his stablediffbot). Here's a collage of some more results that I liked:

fantasy creatures in alien landscape collage

info The last keyword artstation was added based on some of the prompt tricks I've seen on the /r/StableDiffusion subreddit. You can visit the artstation site to understand why this helps.


First impressionsπŸ”—

So. Generating an image just based on a few words of text definitely feels magical to me. Especially when I have zero chances of being able to draw anywhere close to the quality seen above. Not to mention that you can work on the image further using tools like Upscayl.

I had a bit of an existential crisis moment as I was looking through these images. I had been following the news related to AI art generators for a while. However, even if it was just a few words, getting results for my prompts caught me off guard. Trying to come up with exercise ideas for my Computing from the Command Line ebook felt insignificant compared to the magic of art generators.

On the other hand, the results I got from the model wasn't what I was hoping for. All I got were dragon like fantasy creatues in an alien landscape (and I suppose the unicorn horns were blended in instead of separate beings). The spaceships and futuristic transport were entirely absent, unless some of the hovering dragons were yet another instance of blending. To be fair, I haven't yet fully understood what this model is capable of, what are the limitations, and so on.


MotivationπŸ”—

The prompt presented earlier wasn't some random thing I tried. One of the reasons I'm interested in AI generated art is that it could be a potential way for me to make posters for my blog posts.

Escapist Reviews poster

Poster from my Escapist Reviews site for fantasy and science fiction book reviews

I created the above poster using Canva, trying to present both fantasy and science fiction elements. If I can get better at using the AI models, I'll probably start using the generated art for creating posters. I want to also experiment with generating illustrations for pivotal scenes from the SFF book I'm reviewing. Though, I'm still undecided on the ethics of using such AI generators.


Another exampleπŸ”—

This one was just for fun. I had read a book (Baking Bad) that had pet-sized dragons, deploying all sorts of shenanigans trying to solve a mystery. So, I wondered how would a classroom of such dragons look like in a magical academy setting.

dragons attending a magical academy

Prompt: Pet-sized dragons attending a magical academy, trending on artstation, masterpiece

Most of the images had normal sized dragons and hints of learning/academy were rarely present in the 32 images generated. Here's a collage of some more results that I liked:

dragons attending a magical academy collage