Early thoughts on AI prompting

So I've been digging deeper into this new AI prompting and what it means for concept design and visualization.

I've decided to transfer to the Disco Diffusion AI for several reasons which I'm glad to go into detail if anyone is interested. These images shown here are all from this new DD AI. A couple of them definitely have the Syd Mead influence. I also redid the aquarium and alien octopus versions in DD to see how they compared with the midjourney AI.

And, I've been asked to illustrate a new update of a book called Blood Toys by a good friend of mine. I think there are about 50 illustrations and I want to try and do them all with AI. I originally did a number of them years ago and I will use some of my existing image prompts to help generate.

For instance, I created a generator image (above-- the one with the chainlink fence) back in 2008. And, I used that image to seed some of these others that you see above. It took me quite some time to get a formula down and I'm not sure I've got the final version yet as I'm still tweaking parameters.

So, what does this mean for the future of concept development, illustration, and visualization? Well, as I said I'm just starting out but there are some things I have already come to realize. First off, the current state of the art in this type AI is not able to do graphic design very well. Nor can it do product design. I tried unsuccessfully for quite a few hours on both of those types and really could not get anything that I thought was acceptable. I also searched both the Reddit and Discord forms for any information about either of those topics, and got nothing.

The other interesting point for me is how difficult it is to create something that you are trying to target. It certainly is great for ad hoc compositions. That said, it is much more difficult when you are specifically trying to generate a certain type of image with specified content, point of view, color scheme, and composition.

And this sort of brings things full circle too the stuff we do in Blender. It wasn't too long ago where doing photo realistic renderings was considered cheating-- with regard to concept design and illustration. And certainly anybody can create a chrome ball on a checkerboard ground plane and do a path traced render and be proud of it. But, as we all know, it takes many, many hours to really get good at modeling, rendering, and animating not to mention compositing, special effects and all the other parts that go into creating amazing 3d.

And, at least for now, it takes many hours of learning and experimenting with the AI to be able to speak to it on its level with it's own language. Not to mention, everyone will have their own particular favorite prompts and ways of putting words together which can generate a signature of sort.

So, for now, I'm looking at it as just another tool in the toolbox, just like Cycles, or Photoshop or After Effects or any other software tool that we use. And, I think those that already have a good eye, and care to put in the time, can get good at AI prompting just as those who spend the time in Blender can get good at creating wonderful renders.

Lastly, I'm interested to know if any of this stuff interests you guys, and if so let me know and I'll continue blabbing about it and perhaps make a few videos. I can certainly create a starter tute for how to get up and running with the free version of DD-- and start creating your own amazing images. If that's something people want to learn about. Just let me know in the comments.