DALL-E-2 (#dalle) is an AI painting program that takes a few words and makes surprisingly on-point images based on them. Last week I gave it the task of making 'playable' jigsaw puzzle images, and it did well. This week, let’s give it a different task: painting the covers of famous books. This is a real need for the people who publish books, and it’s a real need for me as I’m creating Didero Books entries, which have pictures:
The image there is okay, but it would be better if we could easily create our own, could influence aspects of the picture, and had more options to choose from. So let’s jump in. Ivanhoe starts with a tournament that involves jousting, and I got good results with “two knights on horseback jousting face-to-face with lances, oil painting”. I generated 20 or 30 images with roughly this theme, and sorted through them for ones where knights were big in the frame so they can be seen prominently, and I like the artistic qualities (nice red!).
Next I went to Moby-Dick, and selected "Captain Ahab, oil painting" as the subject. The image below is my favorite, with a bit of a maniacal look and a nice yellow painting style for the foreground.
I tried to make covers for several Jules Verne novels. I failed to get a coherent image of two men riding in a hot-air balloon, because DALL-E wasn’t entirely on board with the notion that riding “in” a hot-air balloon always means riding in a basket hanging from a balloon. Perhaps with a few more attempts I would have found a phrasing it understood. But I had better luck with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with the prompt “an octopus attacking a submarine, oil painting”. It’s one of the most epic images I’ve gotten out of DALL-E with a single prompt.
Next I wanted to change things up a bit. What if our series of book covers had more of an absurd theme? “An octopus reading a book titled 20,000 leagues under the sea, oil painting” is the result. I do love his expression. As you can see, DALL-E wasn’t willing to put the title on the book, but the absurdity has stuck with me all week, and I like it. If I encountered a physical copy of 20,000 Leagues with this cover, I would certainly be amused.
This raises the obvious question: what other classic books contain a distinctive character that might look amusing reading a book. Indeed there are! Here’s Frankenstein’s monster. “Frankenstein reading a book, oil painting” was enough of a prompt. DALL-E brought the fact that he looks green, and much of his look.
Here’s Dracula. Love the full red lips:
And here’s a nice cuddly whale, enjoying his favorite book, Moby-Dick:
Finally, here’s Little Red Riding Hood, reading a book with her grandmother. So adorable. This would make a perfect front cover for the new edition of Grimms' Fairy Tales.
Conclusion
Generating cover images is another task DALL-E can do. There were some books, that I couldn’t get a satisfying image for, like Around the World in 80 Days, mentioned above, and that seems partly due to DALL-E’s limitations with more complex subjects, but just as often I found myself limited by my weak memory for the details of the books, and especially by my beginner’s understanding of how to speak DALL-E’s language.
I give DALL-E another task next week. If you have ideas for next week’s task, leave a comment on substack or reply by email.
More Reading
DALL-E-2 and Disco Diffusion face off on 11 prompts (nin)
Google researchers announced Imagen this week. In many ways its images look better than DALL-E’s, but you can’t use it yourself.
OpenAI announced this week that Codex, their GPT-3-based computer program writer, now powers 70 applications.