I’ve been comparing Dall-E, MidJourney, and StableDiffusion. Goes to show how much training set and implementation choices matter. But in all cases, you have to think of the underlying labeled text-to-image sets as paint colors to mix, and prepare a palette accordingly. Still haven’t figured out how to get what I want, but to your point, one can get closer.

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Not sure if this is why, but with OpenAI’s Dall-E, you can’t use public figures. You can use proxies, such as “60 year old banker with salt and pepper hair” and then fill in the rest, e.g. “handsome 60 year old banker with salt and pepper hair giving a speech while standing above 12 cucumbers”:

https://i.imgur.com/qYKOWM1.jpg

Telling it oil painting can fudge who the person is, then pick one that’s close and generate variations:

https://i.imgur.com/QRbV7aM.jpg

Or use a reasonable photo and then use edit and in-painting to try to improve the implausible subject. This takes a photo from the first prompt above, erases the lower half of image, and makes a new prompt for the lower half, while keeping just enough of the upper half to orient the collage, e.g. “[photo_edit] + banker giving a speech to cucumbers bin full of cucumbers”:

https://i.imgur.com/OmOK1HF.jpg

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Over on MidJourney, where it’s happy to use public figures so long as you’re not violating terms of service about their use, first a couple prompt experiments with King Philippe of the Belgians.

https://i.imgur.com/KkgIz2w.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ekf9ypG.jpg

Then one upsized plausible painting from among those, where the actual command was “King Philippe of Belgium talking in a large group of cucumbers --q 2 --uplight” which is pretty basic.

https://i.imgur.com/QWUaNFv.jpg

> you have to think of the underlying labeled text-to-image sets as paint colors to mix, and prepare a palette accordingly.

Very insightful tip on how to harness the "creativity" of Dall-E and the like.

I see how the phrase "king of belgium" was too vague for Dall-E, so it didn't produce anything recognizable - but changing the words into known details, like "banker" and "salt and pepper hair", worked effectively to generate concrete imagery.

Hilarious results. :)

It's not that it's "vague", they intentionally throw off when you try to generate a photo of a named person. It's an intentional protection they put in. If you just do "king" it'll likely do fine, but if it's referring to a specific person it won't.

Ah I see what you mean - "king of belgium" is a real person, so they put in some safe guards in DALL-E to prevent recognizable images for such queries. Makes sense.

IIRC, DALL-E filters requests related to politicians/celebrities. A friend had tried to make some funny stuff involving the Greek PM a couple of months ago, and it plainly refused. Now, it seems to process the request, but it will not show anyone resembling the person you asked for.

Could that have to do with Sophie Wilmès, Belgian PM 2019–2020? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Belgium#Livi...)