We have two employees helping us build the SciFiwise website: Dall-e and ChatGPT. And though they’re not perfect, they are quite good. Scary good.
Just about all the graphics on SciFiwise come from Dall-e or other AI image generators. It took a while to learn how to give good keywords to select compelling images. Some features, like outpainting and editing, were essential to this process. Outpainting allows you to load in an existing image (in this case an image Dall-e created itself) and then add onto it seamlessly. Editing allows you to erase pieces of an image (including an outpainted one) and then regenerate replacements.
For example, the image above was the original banner we created for SciFiwise.com. It was supposed to be a montage of science fiction and fantasy themes (and was eventually replaced with the current banner of images from our stories automatically loading at the top of the page). It required dozens of generates using the outpaint and edit features. And I’m still going back at it to refine little bits I think aren’t quite right from time to time. The banner was mostly generated with a directive like this:
Digital art, scifi montage, row of marching robot soldiers, futuristic stone architecture, planets in sky, volcano, dragon, spaceship, comet in sky
Then there were many edits and regenerates of specific pieces where I often limited the keywords to just what I wanted in the erased bits. We eventually improved the image above a bit but never got it perfect.
Sometimes it takes a dozen attempts to get something good. But with patience and some luck it tends to get better and better.
Much scarier, though, is chatGPT. I’ve used it extensively to write custom JavaScript code for SciFiwise. At first, I thought it would just be a nifty way to search for information in technical manuals. For fun, I asked it to write me a program to display a floating image that flies in from offscreen.
I was expecting some info digested from the JavaScript references. But instead, it gave me working code, exactly to my spec!
I then asked for various enhancements, like the fly-in should happen 5 seconds after page load, and clicking on it would make it fly back offscreen. In each case, it immediately did what I asked. It never misinterpreted my instructions, which I started to make very terse.
I’ve been using it this way for days, and it almost never failed me. In just one or two cases it took two tries and required a bit of clarification from me. But even a human programmer would do that.
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