DALL-E: Making Actual Jigsaw Puzzles
Painting an Artifact Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle
In an earlier post I had DALL-E create jigsaw-puzzle-friendly paintings of animals riding bicycles, and found only two things that stopped DALL-E from generating puzzle-friendly images: it wasn’t available for commercial use, and the images have only enough resolution for a 3-inch by 3-inch puzzle.
On July 20, OpenAI made DALL-E images available for commercial use.
Well! This was an amusing challenge we couldn’t pass up!
At the Artifact Puzzle factory, we elves considered a few ways to deal with the problem the DALL-E images are only big enough for a 3-by-3 puzzle. We fiddled with variants of the uncropping technique that others have used, then quickly settled on making a polyptych, in particular a nonatych – a suite of nine related puzzles that come together in one box.
Once we decided this, we were surprised by how far we already were toward making a puzzle! We came up with three favorite themes, one of which was Animals in Motion, which started off as, you guessed it, a mix of the themes of two of my earlier posts about DALL-E image creation: animals riding bicycles and animals driving cars. We chose these five images as the first five of the nine:
We got DALL-E to make variations on the image of brightly-colored houses we put behind the pelican, and to one of them we added "a monkey riding a bicycle". We especially like this image because it has a baby monkey (that we didn’t ask for):
Thanks, DALL-E!
To mix it up a bit with the conveyances, we took another variation of the houses scene and added this "penguin riding a unicycle, painting":
We generated dozens of images to get this one we liked – in groups of four, because DALL-E now paints four images per query. We tried zebras, tigers, unicorns, horses, and dogs in front of colorful cityscapes. And we also make other hillside and seaside backgrounds and tried animals in front of them water-skiing, boating, canoeing, hang-gliding, and piloting biplanes.
This penguin on a unicycle and the monkeys biking were the only ones we really liked, and we eventually hit on the theory that DALL-E has a much harder time painting satisfying images when it has a background. As soon as we made the switch to not requiring a background, DALL-E painted this nice "unicorn on a skateboard, painting":
So cheerful! We haven’t asked any little kids if they like it, but we love it! And for a 3-inch puzzle with 25 pieces, it’s ok that it doesn’t have a background.
Still, we do love having a fun background, so Maya came up with the idea of adding “a sunny day” to the prompt, which immediately got us this "beagle on a kick-scooter on a sunny day, painting"
And that rounds out our set of nine small puzzles. And you really can buy them (soon, we’re still designing the puzzle cuts), on this product page at Artifact Puzzles. Here’s the final collection of nine images:
The standard puzzle piece size is 2.2 pieces per square inch, so each image will likely be 25 pieces (5x5), making a 225-piece nonatych puzzle. And they will have whimsies, which are figurative pieces designed by our human puzzle designers. In this case the whimsies will probably be animals and conveyances, though not necessarily the same ones in the paintings. They might look a bit like these pieces that Jimmy Farmer designed for our Mad Tea Party puzzle, a painting by Justin Hillgrove:
When I wrote that first post about DALL-E, two months ago, I wanted to see if #dalle could do a useful task. It turns out it can! There’s no better proof than an actual real puzzle you can hold in your hands.