A side-by-side experiment… by nin_artificial 17th April 2022
I talked to Scott Gray of OpenAI on Twitter after he commented on an image I made with Disco Diffusion (see first prompt, “God out of the machine”). I’ve been using Disco for a while and love everything about it. So this was a chance to test some prompts side by side between DALL-E 2 and Disco Diffusion. Scroll to see the fun!
Quite a few of these prompts have taken me a while to work out but to be honest it’s not much fun keeping them all a secret. I figure if OpenAI, the Disco Team, Katherine Crowson etc are all willing to share their code, then I might as well share the prompt. I think it will end up with us all making better art together. Also — it’s worth stating that Scott and I started chatting without any preparation so although I had researched the prompts for Disco, DALL-E 2.0 would probably need it’s own special style of tweaking which he didn’t have time to do. So it is a slightly unfair comparison in that regard. But hey — it was still fun and maybe we can do a follow up second round (@Scott) !? This kind of competition sounds like something we should be having more of :)
On that note, I am really interested in developing more focused art collaborations, for instance around poetry-as-prompt animations (I’m working through a video for Kubla Khan by Coleridge at the moment, latest version here. Please get in touch if you’re interested in working on particular projects together or developing styles as a group. I think a lot of art movements have worked this way in the past and it would be great to see the AI Art community do this in sub-genres, especially as the tech is improving so fast that the barriers to entry are lowering with each release. Surely we will need to focus less on adjusting the technology and therefore switch our attention to the purpose of the art itself?
Before the fun starts, just want to say thanks everyone who’s worked on these projects, it is amazing frontier stuff. I recently got to give a little back as I’ve just finished the VR module for Disco, allowing users to output stereoscopic VR180, using depth estimation and transforms (MiDaS) to generate left/right eye views and a new spherical projection transform for Pytorch3D that I wrote. If anyone at OpenAI is reading this — please reach out to us at the Disco team — the guys have built an incredible animation system and we would love to contribute this to DALL-E 2 in a collaborative project. There have been loads of learnings about achieving smooth animation and we would love to share.
Stop all this chat and take me to the prompts!! Ok….
Prompt #1 — A view of God being created from the machine, dystopian, volumetric light, warm unreal engine 3, by Felix Kahn
Prompt #2 — A scenic view of a Scottish loch in the Isle of Skye
Prompt #3 — A lady in a long white dress lying amongst many large snakes, tropical jungle, by Prateep Kochabua
Prompt #4 — A scenic view of the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, by Canaletto
Prompt #5 — Elephants drinking from a swimming pool outside a suburban house
Prompt #6 — A group of angels having a board meeting in a summer garden, by Asher Brown Durand
Prompt #7 — A close-up view of a man meeting the devil, by Caravaggio
Prompt #8 — A scenic view of a lake in the fjords, by David Noton
Prompt #9 — A view of the gateway to the Great Temple at Baalbec, by Paolo Veronese
Prompt #10— A scenic view of the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan in the tropical jungle of Xanadu, by Asher Brown Durand
Prompt #11 — A beautiful wilderness in which a lonely monolith glowing, by Asher Brown Durand
Thanks to Scott for entertaining some of these mad prompts. DALL-E 2 looks great but difficult to tell what artistic styles can be achieved with extensive prompt engineering. Coherence and fidelity is certainly through the roof.
Disco has become a workhorse for those in AI Art with its animation features and great community. Special thanks to the Disco Team:
https://twitter.com/Somnai_dreams
https://twitter.com/gandamu_ml
https://twitter.com/zippy731
Exciting times ahead!
Tom Mason
nin
https://twitter.com/nin_artificial
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