One of my tasks for this long holiday weekend was to spend some time learning about DALL•E 2, the AI art generator from the same people—at least, I assume they’re people; on second thought, I’m not so sure—who brought you ChatGPT, which promises to make paupers of writers everywhere. Fortunately we writers are used to being paupers, so this isn’t much of a threat, but if I was a commercial artist, I would be worried by DALL•E.
I had this on my to-do list because one of the tasks we fiction publishers do, which is far more important to how a story is received than readers like to admit, is selecting the right illustration to entice the reader into giving all those dull gray words a look. If you’re a big commercial publisher with gobs of cash to burn you can commission a professional commercial artist to do a unique and original piece of artwork—
For example, I have no idea how much TSR paid Phil Foglio to do the original art for “Jimi Plays Dead” for its one and only appearance in Amazing Stories, but I do know Phil doesn’t work cheap. I can’t afford him to commission him. I could barely afford to buy the re-use rights to this illo.
But for the rest of us, this means either hiring “semi” professional artists or else spending a lot of time digging through stock art libraries and public domain collections, in hopes of finding something that’s close enough to work.
Help Wanted: Do you love to spend hours going through stock art collections and libraries of public domain images, looking for illustrations that might be able to be made to work with a particular story? If so, contact us! We have a job for you!
On the whole, we have had terrific luck with our commissioned artists. We’ve found some brilliantly talented people who are willing and able to deliver great work for appallingly low wages, either because they’re still trying to build their careers or because they have a soft spot for us. But we’ve also encountered some appalling people, who either don’t seem to grasp the concept of specs or deadlines or else simply don’t care, and I won’t waste any more time or words on these sad cases because I’ve wasted enough already.
Which still leaves me with my original problem: how do I find a good illustration to entice prospective readers into taking a closer look at a given story, especially when I can’t afford to spend a few hundred bucks to commission original art for the story, and especially when I’m only paying the author $50 for the words?
This leads to my spending a lot more time than I like browsing through stock art collections, looking for the right image. Sometimes I get lucky: for example, the illustrations I found to go with “Planting the Flag” were the result of purest serendipity. But more often the “original and creative” art I see being offered up on stock art sites by alleged artists is…
“Geez, that’s Battlestar Galactica fan art!”
“That’s from Star Wars! That’s from Star Trek!”
“Good grief, that is a Martin B-26 with a bunch of sci-fi greeblies and Star Trek warp nacelles glommed onto it… in SPAAAAACE!!!”
After a few hours of that, you begin to think: there must be a better way. And that is what got us to the illustration at the top of this page. I went to the DALL•E web site, went through a brief but somewhat cumbersome process to create an account, and then input, “mile-long spaceship, looking partially organic, on a deep space background.” A minute or so later, DALL•E returned with:
Hmm. Not bad. But I don’t like the aspect ratio. I drew a bounding box and entered, “continue image to the right.” A minute or so later:
Better, but not quite perfect. I drew another bounding box and entered, “continue image to the left.” DALL•E returned:
Actually, it returned a different image first, which was awful, and that’s how I learned that by default DALL•E generates four different iterations of each image, and you can select the one you like best.
Next, I decided to start over with a blank canvas and specify, “a hundred-mile-long spaceship that looks partially organic, on a deep space background, coming at the viewer, with pods on the side.” And DALL•E gave me:
So my first impression is that DALL•E is not actual AI, but more like ANVI: Artificial, yes, but Not Very Intelligent. Still, as a way to generate basic concept art, fast and very cheap—
It definitely has some appeal.
I hope it doesn’t stop there, though. I hope DALL•E continues to evolve and mature, and alongside it, the (presumed) people at OpenAI develop the obvious related products:
BIG•E — The AI hip-hop record producer and aspiring rap artist.
MICK•E — The AI hard-boiled formulaic detective novel writer.
ISAAC•E — The AI hard sci-fi writer beloved by robots everywhere. Seriously, if anyone’s writing style and body of work can be cooked down to a library of simple shticks and tropes, it’s his.
BRADBUR•E — Unless it’s his.
DAVEBARR•E — The improved version of the Dave Barry column generator.
WALL•E — The AI adorable Disney cartoon generator…
Omigod? Have we just gone into a recursive loop?
3 comments:
The "pods" image gave me a good laugh.
Sorta grim...but humorous also: which is, of course, your forte!
This was especially...poignant because I just finished reading Neil Clarke's commentary on his response to ChatAI recent submissions(?) to CLARKESWORLD. I honestly had no idea...though now I do, and it seems to be a problem. SORT OF reminded me of the changeover from paper SF magazines to Digital SF magazines...It seems we found our way and the AI writers issues might be a steroid-grown extension of that? I don't know enough to do more than ruminate, sometime out loud...
Anyway, I liked this piece.
Guy
Having read Neil Clarke's commentary, what this says to me is that we will very quickly be going back to the bad old days of "No unsolicited submissions," "No unagented submissions," and "Query first," which will make it VERY hard for new writers to break in to the pro magazines.
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