Sign in Subscribe
ai

A Few Things To Try With DALL·E

Lighting, perspective, variation chaining, and other tricks to try with DALL·E.

Bram Adams

Bram Adams

— 3 min read
A Few Things To Try With DALL·E

DALL·E. Is. Amazing.

DALL·E is intuivitely understandable on an emotional level while simultaneously being quite unintuitive on a logical level. (I'm sure Aristotle would have a fit)

Due to this quandary, I'm having a helluva amount of fun pressing this technology using solely imagination, being guided by my sense of wonder instead of reason.

Here are some things I've picked up so far that I think can help push the dialogue around DALL·E forward.

IMPORTANT: CLICK THROUGH HERE TO SEE GALLERY IMAGES WITH CAPTIONS ON THE ORIGINAL POST -- ONLY THE PLAINTEXT VERSION LIVES ON THIS SITE. COMMENT BELOW IF LINK BREAKS.

Album Covers And Movie Posters Work Really Well -- And Be Sure To Try Puns

Amidst all of the Twitter bios being generated, I've been really impressed by DALL·E's ability to understand puns, and cultural significance.

DALL·E lends well to pairing with human creativity as well. Here I took an output from DALL·E and turned it into a Kanye-type album cover.

Two For The Price Of One

By merely appending "side by side", or "two frames", you can get two seperate DALL·E renditions in the same image!

Let There Be Lighting

I've been testing DALL·Es understanding of ISO Stops and exposure, and I've been quite surprised by the results. I'm also using the side-by-side trick mentioned above.

Perhaps All It Takes Is A Change Of Perspective

In the same vein, DALL·E seems to have some understanding of how angles of a camera or a painter affect the resulting image.

Animations -> Variation Chaining

In DALL·E one can create variations of a singular result. I'm going to go ahead and venture to make two predicitions right now:

  1. The term 'variation chaining' will enter the vernacular, and animators will need to learn the curation technique of how to "chain" correctly
  2. 'Variation chaining' will spawn multiple animation "universes" from a single root image. Each variation is a tree of 6 variation children, which have 6 variation children, and so on, and so on. I can't even begin to postulate the effect this will have on the definition of "original works". It just got 6^n more complex.

bramadams.dev is a reader-supported published Zettelkasten. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.

Here's the evolution of this photo by Alex Holt into a volcanic crater of some sort.

In Sum

We're just scratching the surface of the creative applications of DALL·E. With a technology like this, it's best, and possibly in fact even necessary, to leave preconcieved notions checked at the door and be able to approch it with two things: An open mind, and a penchant for play.

Read more