I read an article about a new AI (artificial intelligence) image generation program called DALL-E that’s supposed to be able to generate life like images based on a sentence that you give it. I was all excited thinking that it would be a great way to create some placeholder photos for Christmas cards and the like without needing to worry about model release forms and all that.
Well… er… um… maybe not! Seriously, I can NOT stop laughing!
But maybe it would be useful for something else? Anyhow, here’s the URL if anybody wants to try it out. https://labs.openai.com/
Maybe it’s better at generating cartoons because they are simpler. If you put cartoon facial features in the correct places on the face, it’s going to be fine. But that’s not good enough for a “photo”.
Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview.
Users have told us that they are planning to use DALL·E images for commercial projects, like illustrations for children’s books, art for newsletters, concept art and characters for games, moodboards for design consulting, and storyboards for movies."
It appears very much in brief in Terms of Use:
"Use of Images. Subject to your compliance with these terms and our Content Policy, you may use Generations for any legal purpose, including for commercial use. This means you may sell your rights to the Generations you create, incorporate them into works such as books, websites, and presentations, and otherwise commercialize them."
I don’t think it’s going to be taking my job any time soon… I thought I’d give it a little challenge to create something that I’ve drawn recently and asked it to make a pair of pickles hanging out after playing pickleball, holding pickleball paddles, graphic art style and this is what it came up with
I just now spent time reading how their pricing works, which is in “tokens.” I can understand why they’ve done this but think that having to constantly consider the math involved whenever designing something would stall me out very quickly. I understand pennies and dollars, but tokens? Nope.
MidJourney does a (somewhat) better job on human faces… but it doesn’t seem to want to output anything that doesn’t look like a painting… This is what it gave me when asked to produce a portrait of a family at Christmas time, specifying that it should be a photograph… it still has a hard time understanding that human eyes really do need to be at least close to the same size and shape, when they are on the same face…
Though if you do some refining and give it a chance, it can come up with some pretty striking images. This is what it gave me when asked to produce an image of a beautiful beaux arts woman picking irises near a pond, after a round of variations and a round of refining. It’s actually quite nice.
You get 50 free credits or tokens when you sign up, and then 15 free ones each month thereafter. Each token or credit gives you one generation or sentence which outputs 4 separate images. So it doesn’t cost you anything to play with it, though clearly it might take some… um… refining of technique to come up with something usable!
It’s a little more technical than Dall-E - you start here: https://www.midjourney.com/home/ , but you need to make a Discord account to actually use it. Definitely look at the tutorials, as there is a bit of a learning curve to setting it up and using it… I’ve only done the free trial version, but there’s a subscription service that gives you more access and as far as I can tell, you own all the rights to the images you make. It is definitely fun.. It does a very good job at dreamy, kind of surreal imagery.
Oh wow! I think your job is safe for the moment! I keep wondering if I just needed to be more specific, or if it simply couldn’t handle human faces - I tried a few flowers and stuff which were OK, but it kept designing them so they were cut off and you only got half a flower. It also didn’t seem to be able to handle generating images of words, which was interesting. Hmmmmm…
Maybe that’s it! I was actually rather shocked by how bad the faces were. I’ve play with other AI facial generation software and while there were always a few things that were a bit “off” it was nothing like this!
