Parti Website Screenshot
In this article I want to share my first hands on experience with Midjourney and DALL-E 2 with you. With midjourney moving to open beta and starting their v3 image generation algorithm on the 25th of July, another player pushed to the market… and I guess one or two days later, finally my invite for DALL-E 2 arrived.
At that day I was happy at first, but when I noticed another day later, that another E-Mail I used for signing for DALL-E 2 only a few months ago, despite the first one, being used for application far more than half a year ago, I was a bit disappointed. I thought it’s all connected to their new pricing model and the beta start of midjourney and I got disappointed a bit. The exclusiveness was gone and “mass-market” arrived.
In general the market on AI Art bots seems to push a lot. So for example DALL-E mini, the free tool I mentioned in my other article, is now called craiyon. There are also other tools Worth being mentioned in the context of AI art tools, such as Latitude Voyage (of course in beta) or Apples GAUDI, a prompt tool for indoor 3D scenes.
Luckily I heard the U.S. Copyright office said A.I. Art can't be copyrighted, so I hope no war will heat up this exiting market in the near future. So far I only know that there are patents on algorithms being used. Hopefully the market will show even more diversity in the future.

Midjourney Screenshot Website
Midjourney beta – first impressions
Let us first look at our new player. Midjourney. The first impression of midjourney is being geekier and less serious than DALL-E 2. It’s a more playful entrance to a world everyone could test right away. After joining the beta, you will be redirected to Discord, no waiting list, no exclusive clubbing.
Before we investigate discord, a quick explanation of who Midjourney is. Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.

IN 10 YEARS, YOU’LL BE ABLE TO BUY AN XBOX WITH A GIANT AI PROCESSOR, AND ALL THE GAMES ARE DREAMS.
David Holz in an Interview with the verge

David Holz, the founder of midjourney, did some other geeky, funny things in the past. He used to be co-founder of leap motion, a great exploration of the power of gestures. Midjourney is a small company right now with around 10 people working there.
Exploring the background of midjourney and all their way, how they speak to their audience, in other words their tonality feels great to me. It has the explorative spirit and playfulness I always try to teach students to get started in digital.
Signing up for a free account, you get 25 credits, these can be used to generate images within the discord channel. For anyone being interested, it is even possible to run midjourney on ones own discord server.
After that, you’ll have to pay — either $10 or $30 a month. The pricing is connected to the number of images you want and the privacy you expect. And if you are a huge company with more than 1 billion revenue a year, you get the corporate membership for 600 US dollar a year.
So how does it work?

Screenshot Discord Channel midjourney
If you never used discord before, see it as a chat tool, kind of a slack for the masses, with a non-business focus.
So, in the channel you will find all the information there are in general, on announcements, updates and so on. If feels like you as beta tester are part of the team, and even the boss is there, and you could influence the development process. After all, that’s what a beta program is about.
In terms of my professional perspective being more experienced with product and user testing, this is a great way for that kind of product, as the product itself is being used in the same environment.
So here are the steps to create images:

Look for a newbies Channel and enter it (in the picture you see newbies-29, newbies-59 and newbies-89)
If you have a picture in mind, about what you want to see, start typing “/imagine”, followed by whatever you want to see.
Within 60 seconds you should see 4 images.
With the 4 images being generated, you could upscale the image or create variations. Therefore, there are U1 to U4 (für upscaling) and V1 to V4 (for version) below the images being generated. Upscaling means that the images scale up to around 1664x1664 Pixels
Save the result, click on the generated image (to enlarge) and with the right mouse button being pressed, select save image to your local computer.
Finally, you could also ask the bot to send the results to your Direct messages, by reacting with the envelope emoji.

Prompt dialogue in discord (taken from quick start guide)
Example from discord stream with 4 generated images

Prompt dialogue to use envelope (taken from quick start guide)

This is enough to create visual beauty.
If you need inspiration, look in midjourney ressource list, there are great links:

The artist visual style encyclopedia (as of Mai 2023: link not working anymore)
The artist visual style encyclopedia – if the style is part of your text prompt it will take effect – such as cyberpunk city, by Franz Marc:

My result on cyberpunk city, by Franz Marc on midjourney
My result on cyberpunk city, by Franz Marc on midjourney

There’s also a prompt builder to guide your inputs and see which variables are available:

Prompt guide
And a collection on “prompt styles and weights”.
All in all, the learning curve, if you are used to discord and used a text prompt before is very flat. Only if you are new to discord and text prompts, you need more orientation.
After all I could say, I loved it. I love the playfulness of the whole app, the results and all the “social” aspects, seeing what all others are building, getting notifications about own results and the whole way it is being setup. It is great fun to try and the documentation is very helpful.

DALL-E 2 Intro screen
DALL-E 2 beta – first impressions
With the magic of the new and little frustration about the almost open invites, I waited to test my DALL-E 2 invites after I tested midjourney.
As mentioned, entering DALL-E app is a completely different experience. It is you and the text prompt, not the hectic news stream and the dynamics you experience in midjourney. Based on the interface/overall app decision, one could say, that DALL-E 2 wants you to reflect about what you type, while midjourney is a competing social feed, about who creates the coolest results.
The cost system at DALL-E 2 is based on credits. You get 50 credits for the first month for free and 15 credits every month after. With only 15$ you could buy additional credit packs worth 115 credits, which equals around 460 images. OpenAI allows commercial use of DALL-E images. Compared to the image stock market, the costs of the images will be fairly low, but one must be award that you have to get used to the text prompts and the corresponding structure of the input.
That being said let’s try to get a result for our cyberpunk city, by Franz Marc.
In the case of DALL-E, I couldn’t find a quick hands on, official documentation; so, I tried the sentence as following: A cyberpunk city in the style of Franz Marc, as the example being shown by DALL-E on their homepage also used the "in the style of" syntax.
My result on that one was quite… disappointing. I don’t know why DALL-E missed the style of Franz Marc that much:

DALL-E 2 result on a cyberpunk city in the style of Franz Marc
To investigate further, I needed a prompt guide for DALL-E 2. Googling for some help, you find

The DALL-E 2 prompt book – my recommended choice
OpenAI DALL-E 2 prompt guide

Going through the prompt options, you notice, that there are more parameters than on midjourney. Lightning, Camera position/angles, genres, usage contexts and many more.
So, I gave it another try, changing the prompt a bit leading to a much better result in terms of the style:

DALL-E 2 result on a painting from Franz Marc showing a cyberpunk city
Unfortunately, my tries with real artists didn’t work out so good with DALL-E 2 at the start, so I had another try…
My result from midjourney:

Midjourney result
And the same prompt from DALL-E 2:

First result on DALL-E 2
Getting used to the prompt dialogue on DALL-E increases the results a lot:

Adjusted text prompt
Using the right prompts is the essential part to get the best results. If your prompt is done right, it seems DALL-E is more precise, though midjourney is so much fun to use.
For DALL-E there's even a paid service being launched called promptbase to help you with using the right prompts:
Screenshot from promptbase.
If you want to discover more, I recommend searching the web yourself. On twitter I found some comparisons, having a similar impression I do:

From twitter
Resume
Is it possible to do a final resume on the tools? I guess no. On the one hand I am not experienced enough with both tools, on the other hand I think both tools are great and give us a glimpse into the future. The documentation on midjourney and the entry barrier is lower, so to get started, I would recommend midjourney in any case. The more you are aiming for precise results (as an alternative to stock images), the more it feels DALL-E 2 is the way to go.
Will be exiting what the next two month offer in terms of AI generation tools. 2022 is very exiting so far in terms of AI art generators and it will be exiting to see what's next.
What's next? Update mid August – dreamstudio arrived
As mentioned, the speed new, similar offerings are popping up on the market is impressive. It seems, AI in combination with images is going mainstream. Another tool to check out is dreamstudio. Access is quite easy as well and the results are also impressive. Also the editor looks promising, see my screenshot below. After my family holiday I might try a daily use check of all those great tools.
Screenshot dreamstudio and results on "A dream of a distant galaxy, by Hiroshige Utagawa, matte painting trending on artstation HQ."
Recommended readings

The AI that creates any picture you want, explained – The process behind DALL-E 2 (and others) explained
What AI means for human artists – great collection about views from the artists/designer perspective
Making AI Art with Midjourney – great article with examples and explanations
The Creativity of Text-based Generative Art – paper on text-based generative art
The trouble with DALL-E – Five thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate the digital art market
My follow up article on Stable Diffusion: Stable Diffusion celebrates new forms of creativity

Generative Art – how to get started with AI ArtThe world of art is a diverse and beautiful place. The more we explore new forms of art, the more we are
How AI Assistants Can Help You with Text and ArtHave you ever wished you had a personal assistant to help you with your writing or with your artworks?
AI
Speaking computer language – welcome AI ArtThe command prompt: A black, empty screen and a blinking line, waiting for my input. Could you imagine

Contentforge dialogues
Ryte dialogues

Just like any tools, it has its limits. But if we use it in the right way, and with common sense, AI writers could be great writing assistants that help us to get over the writer’s block or come up with ideas at scale.
To give you an idea, about my used tools in this article: I used contentforge as the holder of my article, then I used rytr to write the blog section, mentioned above. In contentforge I used the "generate content" button from time to time, to see what happens.
Some of the generated text is great, and I can see myself using this type of tool in the future for smaller tasks or ideas generation. For longer articles or books, I absolutely believe that a human writer is needed to create a compelling story.
(so, this paragraph before was added "generatively" as an add on to the article I just wrote 🙂 quite funny)

But yes, these tools could be a great support. I am more worried about all the people using them for just pushing their SEO stuff instead of writing contents reflecting their believes, experiences or research.
When it comes to research and real articles, they don't help you to create the real content. But they could be handy to assist some SEO parts, such as a summary, some headlines in between and so on. To do a deep review, I miss the experience.
It is likely that all these tools make use of deep learning and GPT-3, a generative pre-trained transformer. So in my special case, not being a native speaker, tools (also grammarly, jasper or others) could help to improve my writing in terms of grammar or the words being used in general. The other bigger help I see in the area of SEO, if you want your content to be fully optimized for SEO. So it's kind of a polisher for your contents and an ideation source as well.
If you wonder, why I don't speak about chatbots in the context of text,... cause I think they are an own category, there are also many tools around, most act in a conversational way and are trained by machine learning principles. Here's a good entry/overview.
AI assistants in graphic design
I already mentioned some tools to create so called "AI art" in my article "Speaking computer language – welcome AI Art". I guess I also mentioned some logo generators out there already, maybe I also shared a link to Nikolay Ironov, a designer and neural network.
To wrap it up, I clustered some of the tools in some categories here:
AI generated images
For generating images at a general scale, we could include all the tools being mentioned in my other article on AI art before. DALL-E (1,2, mini) or Imagen and all the Ganbreeders such as artbreeder, nightcafe, wombo.art are some of the AI assistants for graphic design, to name a few.
But there are also tools to create people that operate with AI, like the incredible Metahuman builder from the new unreal 5 engine, there are AI driven ways to create people images. Generated photos is such as platform. There’s also a face generator available to create an image. Of course, you could get quick results, that look like fake quickly, but there are also images, that look quite promising;

Image from generated photos
Similar to generated photos, you could create AI actors with notaperson.ai. In my point of view the characters sill fell a bit static, but the powers of creating random people is there. If you don’t believe, watch the random results on thispersondoesnotexist.com. With the help of StyleGAN2 a lot of images are generated in a GAN way. The world of fakes is real, and besides images, also speech could get modified easily.
If you don’t like real pictures, look at thiswaifudoesnotexist.net. (A waifu is a fictive female Japanese manga/anime character).

Generated Waifu Image
AI generated logos
There are also a bunch of logo generators out there. Nikolay Ironov offers one and on logoai.com, you could quickly generate your own logos with some guided dialogue. A similar builder could be experienced here as a service from shopify or at logomaster.ai.
You might think, how scarry this is? No, it’s not. Honestly, I included AI tools in my exploration on the branding of a client already. Of course, branding is more than a logo, as it’s about the identity of the brand. Each personality has different characteristics that need application to the branding guidelines.
But now let’s assume you type in a DALLE Mini interface the attributes of a brand or a short description and look at the result; now compare it to some other text-input based generator. Won’t you think you get some kind of color scheme on that?
At least for my last branding project, I included AI Tools in my research. I got some straightforward color schemes I could extract and that were helpful. I didn’t use one of the mentioned logo generators though, but they could also be helpful in the exploration process as they help to narrow down the chosen path we want to follow.
In my case the brand itself was connected to AI and Edge Computing, so there was a brand fit with the tools being used. At that moment it felt right to ask the question, how an AI might see the company, reminding me of a nice piece of art by Christian Mio Loclair called Narciss, a a robot, built to analyze its own physical embodiment. Looking at itself and reflecting, what it sees; so why not use such tools, if they match to the brand?
AI drawing
I am not too experienced with AI drawing tools and so I only share the one I discovered some years ago. Autodraw. A Tool to help you create icons. It gives you proposals based on the shape you were drawing. So, in my case it recognized my fish shape and gives me proposals about other fish related shapes at the top.
Form recognition from autodraw
Another fun application in a similar direction is https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/. Challenge your Mouse drawing skills with form recognition.
Other AI tools for images
Finally, another tool you could give a test is an deep learning based image upscaler.
Screenshot from imageupscaler.com
Resume
Is there a final wrap-up on my mentioned AI tools at all? Yes, there is... we are getting more and more tools that could distract and being applied wrong lead to bad results. Whether it be a world full of fakes (in terms of visual, text, voice) leading to less trust in digital environments or a tendency we often see when tools streamline processes. A lot of trash gets produced.
The danger of expecting magic with the tools is also there. These are tools that could assist, but they don’t define the plan, what you are aiming for. So, define the strategy upfront and evaluate afterwards. A sentence that sounds so true since 20 years and more being in digital for almost anything, whether it be creating websites, apps, designing things or any business objectives. Tools can’t replace goals and a strategy. AI assistants or tools are in this case not different from any other form of tools.
The perfect AI tool must integrate to your own process. In my case I see most potential in the exploration stage. As most creative processes are similar and alike, I refer to an easy system, such as human-centered design. We speak about inspiration, ideation, and Implementation. During these stages of the creative process,
AI could help you exploring your thoughts, flipping the problem and many more things that help you to get going. All the mentioned “methods” would be placed within the stage of inspiration. Also, in terms of a reframing of the topic, AI could help, as it is another perspective on the problem – often from a “wisdom of the crowds” perspective, as the trained algorithms are trained by the masses.
During the Implementation I see AI as an add-on to evaluate own results, in terms of writing to check the grammar, in terms of design to check for uniqueness or testing.
So finally, I could say, I believe in a lot of the automations being possible with AI, but like UX-Design, that got streamlined over the years with bet applied patterns (and corresponding dark patterns), AI-tools will lead to the same effect, some rebound effects: Imagine a lot of sites being written by AI and google ranks being strongly influenced by AI. The overall quality of the content will drop, and a search won’t be user friendly anymore. Hopefully AI results will get recognized and filtered.
Or on the graphic side, customers think of using AI builders for logos and more website design from finished templates. This will lead to less identity, uniqueness on the web and meaningless branding as all look the same. Uniqueness will be the struggle of the future as it is the struggle for all streamlined processes.
I recommend anyone being interested, to have a look at the tools yourself. There are enough tools with a free version to play around. Have fun and use the tools for good!

Stable Diffusion celebrates new forms of creativity2022 is the year of text to image generators so far. With a crazy hunt for new tools starting in summer.
Speaking computer language – welcome AI ArtThe command prompt: A black, empty screen and a blinking line, waiting for my input. Could you imagine
Value, objectivity and the risk of being trapped by searchDear Google, could you please eliminate the stupid goldfish attention span myth?
I know the myth is a
Artificial intelligenceintelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has
Midjourney and DALL-E 2 – first hands on impressionsMaybe you remember my article speaking computer language – welcome AI art, speaking about the new role of t
Generative Art – how to get started with AI ArtThe world of art is a diverse and beautiful place. The more we explore new forms of art, the more we are

The command prompt: A black, empty screen and a blinking line, waiting for my input. Could you imagine that this prompt is the access to art or AI art? The command line shows a visual result of your terms, not ASCII art or related items. Nowadays, those prompts have different shapes, such as a form field or the use of voice interfaces.
Your imagination of thought, translated to words in your natural language (mostly in English), gives you access to new creativity. In the words of advertising, you need to express a good core idea, you want to get visualized. Similar to creatives being used to Image search engines, the need to find the correct words gets more and more important.
To explore my thoughts I look at the evolution of the way we tell machines, what to do and how CLIP and other neural models transform the way we could create what we are looking for. Whether it be AI art or maybe any picture we want to see, in general or what I would call AI graphics.
Computer language
A computer language is a language we use to talk to machines. It has been in use for about 70 years.In terms of human history, a very short time.
The first, more popular programming languages found their roots between 1960 and 1970. The first “high-level programming language” was Plankalkül from around 1945. Even earlier, the roots of programming go back to Ada Lovelace, yes, a woman, in the year 1883.
Nowadays, we even have low code or no-code ways to speak with machines. Mostly those use visual environments to drag together code components or nodes and are called visual programming languages.
So, in the past, we needed to write code in a language, following grammar. Now, we could also drag together many nodes and hope for an effect, while playing with parameters. At some point of customization those visual environments also allow to add code manually. But it's not essentially necessary to write the code yourself anymore.
DALL·E and other neural networks allow access to Artificial intelligence as a source of processing your thoughts via a text prompt. If you want, you could say that you tell the machine, what it should program with your natural language. Your chosen words define the quality of the output you are aiming for.
Natural language and natural interfaces
The natural language is the way we as humans speak with each other. To some extent even our voice-interfaces around us are now able to communicate with us in a way that feels almost natural. In this case our command prompt mostly starts with “Alexa”, “Siri” or “Hey Google” to initialize the dialogue. Natural language processing takes the task of converting speech into words in the background to take the right commands.
In 2013, there was a trend to use natural language forms in interfaces to make form usage feel more natural. Forms were integrated into sentences rather than presented as a separate option. Stats are more usable in natural language, but confusing numbers make it difficult to understand the impact of improvements.
The tendency to make interfaces more natural or more human, so we could use our natural senses to interact, is present. But the evolution of the interfaces also depends on technological developments.
Venous materials from MIT lab – Watch example on Vimeo
There are many interesting developments, especially if you investigate the MIT Media lab and the tangible media group. They strive for seamlessly coupling the worlds of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. Research on venous materials and human-flora interaction provides insights into our future.
One of the easiest ways to interact now is our language, expressed by voice interfaces. When using Neuralink or similar chips inside our bodies, it's likely that we'll need to use interfaces with a well-structured language initially.
If you are looking for more scientific terms on how the language is being used for generating visual results, look for text-to-image synthesis.
GANs produce visual effects resembling the WebGL example on alteredqualia.com that utilizes DeepWarp, a method commonly employed for gaze movement.

CLIP, GANs or AI driven Art and approaches of deep learning.
Natural language processing is also an important tool when it comes to playing with so called CLIPs. CLIP is “Contrast Language-Image Pre-Training”, a neural network trained on a variety of text-image pairs. CLIP got introduced around January 2021.
Before getting into CLIP, a short excursion on learning. Deep learning is part of machine learning and helps machines to learn. The machine is supposed to increase its own skills without the help of humans. On contrast to machine learning, where humans interfere in the learning process, in deep learning humans take care of providing information for learning. To do so, we could also use our input prompt. The process of analysis is up to the machine itself.
An example for machine learning would be connecting words and images by labelling the images with the appropriate word. A typical combination for this cause would be ImageNet and WordNet.
CLIP is a neural network model that is already trained on 400,000,000 (image, text) pairs. So, this means that this is the data that is used in training the CLIP Model. You can input an image to the model and get the most probable caption or summary of it. Alternatively, you can use natural language as an input. The true magic comes when you see examples. Travis Hoppe shares some interesting applications in his Twitter account.
To get a full “beginners” understanding of the CLIP model, I recommend this article: “A beginner’s guide to the CLIP Model”. You will find many interesting articles on kdnuggets.com around artificial intelligence, computer vision, data science, machine learning, natural language processing or programming (Python).
To try CLIP yourself, you could use VQGAN developed by the University of Heidelberg. It’s a GAN (a generative adversarial network), those are special types of neural networks consisting of “Generator” and “discriminator” networks. There is a GAN that generates images. The generator is like an artist and the discriminator is like a critic during training. When the generator can produce an image that the discriminator can't distinguish from a human-made one, we can use it for creating art.
There are huge libraries of available GANs for very different purposes. Some of the lists I could recommend:
The GAN Zoo
GANS awesome applications
To play with the technology to learn, use artbreeder and generate new images; Artbreeder is also based on GAN based image generation.

Artbreeder, Image generation based on GAN
Exploring Applications of CLIP
How to get started? I would always recommend playing with the technology. Most technology is too complex for an early deep dive, so start by playing. If you found your motivation to dig deeper, do it with all your might as you need a lot of patience to get a good understanding.
So, let’s look at VQGAN + CLIP you could use directly yourself online. This is a collab notebook, a small development environment running Python programming language. Your task is to input some values... To get started, I would recommend to only change the “natural language prompt” of what you want to see. In my case I tested some results of different apps with the sentence “Children playing in the forest” (because my kids are attending a kindergarten in the wood while writing these lines).
These are my first results using the CLIP linked above (to try yourself, open the link, basically go through the page and always execute the play button to the left and wait till there’s a check icon next to it, to signal it’s loaded), only for chapter “Parameters” enter a text. In the end you could also create a video. The results here are early iterations. The program would continue till the “free” volume is used up.

First iterations with VQGAN + CLIP
Number 100
Number 150

from wombo.art
from nightcafe

To compare my result, I checked for other applications out there and their result. So there’s for example an application that is also available as an app; In wombo.art you could test directly. The result from wombo art had similar patterns as my test with YQGAN and looked like the picture on the at the top left.
Then I used another popular web-service to compare: Nightcafe you can see on the right.
You see, when using a webservice, you end up getting one result. Using a google colab, you get many iterations and it's not as fast as the webservice or app. (Google Colab or Colaboratory is a way to execute Pyhton code in the browser).
There are also other CLIPS on google colab you could use. The following picture is the (an early iterative) result of the combination VQGAN+CLIP (z+quantize method):

You could continue playing with many more version out there. Here you will find an overview of newer applications: https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/
You notice that the basic style follows one pattern and it’s obvious nightcafe also uses some way of VQGAN combination. To create magic, or what I would call magic based on a text prompt, there’s still some way to go.
The magic I aim for: I tell the machine what I want to see, and they give me iterations of the thing I type in in. It mustn't be art or AI art.
To create this magic, we look at DALL·E. OpenAI released DALL·E 2 in April 2022. They show the real magic of the future. By the way, I wouldn't call the results art. Mostly we generate graphics.
DALL·E 2 screenshot, see more on their website
A short introduction to DALL·E, DALL·E 2 and DALL·E mini
“DALL·E 2 is an artificial intelligence model that takes a text prompt and/or existing image as an input and generates a new image as an output. DALL·E 2 was developed by researchers at OpenAI to understand the capabilities and broader implications of multimodal generative models. To help us and others better understand how image generation models can be used and misused.” (From their own description)
To make it shot, look at their website and get a feeling of the beauty that could be generated with DALL·E 2 or watch the short video on youtube:

Unfortunately, DALL·E 2 is not easily available to test yet. But you could sign up on their waiting list.
According to OpenAI DALL·E 2 isn't trained on faces, to avoid the risk of deep fakes. The danger is already there. Finally it the time to doubt any images being shown to us!
On twitter try a search for #dalle or #dalle2 and you find many inspiring pictures. Going through the magical results, it feels as if image searches could get a relic of the past soon or will only be needed for special causes. Image stock market could be AI generated in my point of view. Here are some randomly selected shots from some twitter members (all linked):



Yes, it’s a pity, we all can’t directly play with this fascinating technology!
Luckily I found DALL·E mini. And that's your friend to play! By the way, I also created my post image with Dall-e mini. I asked for "AI Art blue and yellow". One of the results could be found on the overview site of my writings.
The description of DALL·E mini: “OpenAI had the first impressive model for generating images through DALL·E. DALL·E mini is an attempt at reproducing those results with an open-source model.”
They also have DALL·E mega, a large version of the mini, that is being trained. To see the fascinating world of training, look into the training space.
And finally, here’s your playground to play with the DALL-E mini: https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini
That’s my result on "playing children in the forest"; quite an improvement in a very short time. If you play more with DALL·E mini you will notice, that faces still are really not trained much. But I already love it!

To feel the new power of words and to discover some magic along using words, go out and play for yourself!
By the way, there's another tool on the web, giving you similar results. It's neuralblender. Here's my kids results from them:

If you want to get inspired by other AI Artists, look at the work of Refik Anadol, his process is the application of a lot of machine learning to a real world of art. As I said, in my point of view, the term of AI Art is mostly wrong, looking at the output of DALL·E or other CLIP applications, as the outputs are not expressive. In my point of view, we speak about AI graphics.
Maybe you could guess, what my prompt in this case was (created with DALL·E Mini):

Have fun playing!
And guess what... My challenge is to build websites via a text prompt. Currently I am looking for available sources to have a good segmentation (Structural attributes, Style attributes). Let's see when I will share my results or findings.

Some more tipps on playing with DALL·E mini... use objects. To avoid deep fakes, faces won't work. Play around with the text prompt. You could try with the attribute, in the style of... or try the DrawBench prompts being used for Google Imagen first.
Dalle Mini: a rocket in the style of Matsuo Basho

Google Imagen
While publishing this article on Mai 24th, Google came up with a competitor to OpenAI DALL·E 2. The market is on fire! And Google-Imagen impresses the same way, DALL·E 2 did.
Be excited to check out the first tweets on the topic #imagen.
And we will all be happy to play with the first, real demos!
Screenshot from Imagen website

Recommended further readings

Infinite Images and the latent camera
Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents
DALL·E 2
Imagen by Google
StyleGan 3
Explore my newer articles around the topics:How AI Assistants Can Help You with Text and ArtGenerative Art – how to get started with AI ArtMidjourney and DALL-E 2 – first hands on impressionsStable Diffusion celebrates new forms of creativity

FAQs
What are AI GraphicsVisual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain being generated with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
Deconstructing AI Art masterpieces: Create Art like Refik AnadolWhat If you were asked to create art like Refik Anadol? Or to produce some "AI art"?
In case you
Midjourney and DALL-E 2 – first hands on impressionsMaybe you remember my article speaking computer language – welcome AI art, speaking about the new role of t
Generative Art – how to get started with AI ArtThe world of art is a diverse and beautiful place. The more we explore new forms of art, the more we are
How AI Assistants Can Help You with Text and ArtHave you ever wished you had a personal assistant to help you with your writing or with your artworks?
AI

What if you were asked to create art like Refik Anadol? Or to produce some "AI art"?
In case you haven't heard of him, go directly to the vimeo channel of Refik Anadol and enjoy the moment of discovery!
When I first saw his pieces (only virtually so far), I was flashed. I really love that look of organic movement and abstract shapes. And one question that came to my mind was… how on earth was it done? As I did some research about him a little while ago, but recently rediscovered my love for his work, I wanted to share my findings about him and what could be called AI art.

For me, art reflects humanity’s capacity for imagination. And if I push my compass to the edge of imagination, I find myself well connected with the machines, with the archives, with knowledge, and the collective memories of humanity.
Refik Anadol in an interview with MoMA in 2021

To get an idea who Refik Anadol is and what AI in the context of art is, I recommend watching the ted talk with him.
Art in the age of machine intelligence, title picture from ted talk. Watch Talk.
Painting with data
Melting Memories or Machine hallucinations are examples of his stunning artworks collection. Many of his artworks take the perspective of the computer: what does it look like if a computer is dreaming?
In a world surrounded by data, Refik Anadol uses this data and presents it in a visually stunning representation. These data sets could include many terabytes.
To work with the data he uses machine learning (ML) to produce interactive AI projects. If you are up for Quantum AI by google, there’s also a project you could check out: Quantum memories. And here’s some insight from the data perspective on youtube.

In the past five years, we’ve trained more than 100 AI models, and used close to five petabytes of raw data.
Refik Anadol in an interview with MoMA from 2021

As I mentioned Refik Anadol works a lot with data. For the piece “Melting Memories”, he used EEG data to paint. In the description of the artwork you could find more details on how the masterpiece was realized. Refik describes the use of EEG data and some challenges converting it to vvvv. A live programming environment, everyone, who ever looked at interactive environments might have heard of. IIf you are searching for software that is native to mac, you could give touchdesigner a try. If you are more of a programmer, you could also look at openframeworks.
Besides data, it seems Refik Anadol likes giant canvasses for his art. So he also likes facades to transform architectural spaces. The illumination of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall is an iconic example. Titled WDCH Dreams, he makes use of projection mapping to illuminate the building. Google Arts & Culture has an interesting page about Refik Anadol, explaining more facets of the piece.
WDCH at Youtube
To get the projection right, you could see that he had a model of the building in his office.

In my practice, I’m not just creating a bunch of shiny pixels. I’m doing my very best to bring depth to surface by understanding exactly why technology may be purposeful and impactful for my imagination. Not because it’s the hype, or because it’s new, or because it is popular.
Refik Anadol in an interview in Harpers Bazaar Arabia

What are the takeaways from AI Art?
It is truly fascinating to see how Refiks Anadols' work circles around our current digital, AI-driven and real landscape. Of course, the work does not address every aspect that is relevant at the moment. This includes environmental aspects, as I mentioned in my article Improving the world as a designer. However, his art makes future aspects of AI tangible in a visually appealing way. Everything I expect from art.
There’s an interesting discussion in MoMA magazine on “Modern Dream: How Refik Anadol Is Using Machine Learning and NFTs to Interpret MoMA’s Collection”. The article describes Refik's Journey to get into his machine hallucination series. It is an excellent source of inspiration, as well as an overview of the status quo of AI-art and its beautiful perspectives. In terms of the ever emerging NFT landscape maybe even an option to get into AI-art yourself. If your alarm signals are ringing, when i mention NFT, be assured, there are eco-friendly NFTs, too.
By the way, if you want to dive deeper into equipment, I guess one piece I forgot about is the projector he is using. And if you want to get a comprehensive overview of his most famous pieces and the money he earned, you can find more on artnsketch. Unfortunately I didn't find details on how he creates the depth in his works. However, I am pretty sure it's the combination of architecture and the illusion of the depth, that creates the magic you might know from playing with generative art.
If you want to dive into the world of generative art, I would recommend getting started with p5JS or processing, but also touchdesigner offers awesome tutorials to get started. Another way to learn is following Daniel Shiffman, aka the coding train on youtube. No matter if generative programming or getting started with Machine Learning (ML). Watching him is already a classic. There's also an impressive collection of AI artists, tools and resources at aiartists.org.
Those principles being applied within AI-artworks are, in my opinion, relevant to design disciplines as well. Interacting in 3D space and mapping visually engaging worlds in a metaverse or other VR experience is challenging and requires more thought, as the world of AI is already showing. Maybe Refik offers such a world for us in one of his latest projects: dataland.
For now my final summary is, thank you, Refik Anadol, for inspiring creative visual discoveries and an inspiring combination of contemporary technologies to provide beauty.
❤️ @refikanadol

Other articles and sources:

AI Artists
Some resources I collected in my article "Generative Art – how to get started with AI Art"
My other writings often focus on how AI is being used in Design, Art, and society in general and I often share some thoughts.
AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning | HOW TO SEE LIKE A MACHINE – great video from MoMA with some more description of Refik's work

Recommended tutorials to get started:

Refik Anadol Particles in TouchDesigner, Part One - Tutorial
Refik Anadol Particles in TouchDesigner, Part Two - Tutorial
Some more links to tutorials and how to get started with AI Art you will find in my article Generative Art – how to get started with AI Art

Artificial intelligence artThere are many mechanisms for creating AI art, including procedural 'rule-based' generation of images using mathematical patterns, algorithms which simulate
Generative adversarial networkused to generate art; The Verge wrote in March 2019 that "The images created by GANs have become the defining look of contemporary AI art." GANs can also
Speaking computer language – welcome AI ArtThe command prompt: A black, empty screen and a blinking line, waiting for my input. Could you imagine