You can probably repeat this blog post headline for any given service every week at this point…

Anyway! I’ve been on board the generative AI train for a few years now and it’s amazing to see how far it’s come. In October 2023, I got access to DALL-E 3 and was pretty impressed with its ability to render text.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced 4o Image Generation and boy does it kick things up a notch or two!

It’s ability to generate images and render text according to your exact prompt is incredible. We can now have full on automated AI memebots.

A four panel cartoon strip

• first panel: a software engineer sitting in front of a computer screen on a Zoom meeting
• second panel: the software engineer tells the participants (with a speech bubble): “I’m telling you, AI is coming for our jobs!”
• third panel: we just see a slight closeup of the software engineer (the computer monitor isn’t visible)
• fourth panel: same as the first panel except all the participants are now robots

Same angle and setup in every panel, reduced art style, broad outlines

Or, how about:

Cartoon drawing of a bored computer programmer sitting in front of a computer just pressed “enter” over and over. He is sarcastically excited and says, “Vibe coding. Wooooo.”

You can also feed it source images and it will run with it as well. So, obviously we need to use the Canine Calibration System.

I even gave it an image of me and told it to make a movie poster:

Create a dramatic cyberpunk 1980s horror movie poster image featuring a Computer Monster (We see an LCD screen with evil eyes and fangs and it has robotic legs) in a dark alley. In front of the monster, we see the man in this source image passed out on the ground, broken glasses lay next to him. At the top of the poster is the title of the movie in digital writing: “BUFFER OVERFLOW” at the bottom in the billing area, we see text that says, “Some bugs were never meant to be fixed.”

Or rewrite history…

Or really, really rewrite history…

It’s just wild. It’s coming for us as engineers, as musicians, as artists, as writers. This 2024 post on Twitter sums it up:

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

– Joanna Maciejewska on Twitter

Hmm, this sounds like a 4-panel comic to me!

About 2 years ago, I found one of these cheesy sites that lists whatever fake holiday happened to be celebrated that day (e.g., “National Avocado Toast Day”)

I ended up starting every daily standup meeting with a call out to whatever the day was. This went on for about a year before I switched to a different internal team. One that didn’t have much in the way of daily meetings.

A few weeks ago, I made a move back to my original team, only to find that they have kept the tradition alive over the past year!

Amazing.

And with that: Happy Museum Selfie Day!

Created with DALL-E 3

Created with DALL-E 3

I recently got access to DALL-E 3 through OpenAI’s ChatGPT+ interface. One of the key features and improvements in their image model is the ability to generate coherent text within the image.

Let’s give it a try, based on one of the most popular StackOverflow questions: How do I exit Vim?

Using the following prompt: Oil painting of a hacker furiously typing commands into an old computer and muttering to himself, “how does one exit vim?”

That… is pretty good!

OpenAI’s censorship is fairly opaque and seems to change daily.

Yesterday, I could generate a political cartoon using the following prompt:

“Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two elephants wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A donkey is pointing and laughing.”

Today, that exact same prompt yields an error:

Interesting! Let’s do some experimentation, shall we? Maybe it’s the phrase “I’m the worst“?

Weird! Maybe it’s related to elephants and donkeys being in the same phrase? There’s no way, right? Let’s change the subjects…

“Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two elephants wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A donkey is pointing and laughing.”

Hah! Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s push things further and slightly change the subjects from my original prompt:

Wide image in the style of a political cartoon. Two mammoths wearing boxing gloves face each other. One is saying “I’m the worst!” while the other says, “No! I am!”. A burro is pointing and laughing.

Okay, let’s bring it back home and just drop the pretense of creating a political cartoon.

WHAT! Okay. Maybe OpenAI prohibits donkeys and elephants interacting with each other (METAPHOR ALERT: just like in real life, eh?).

Alright. So donkeys and elephants CAN hang out with each other, according to OpenAI. Maybe it’s the phrase “laughing donkey”?

Hmmm. So, laughing donkeys can still hang out with elephants. What the heck? Is it the specific term “political cartoon”? Let’s change it to a comic book instead.

Sweet sassy molassy, it worked! So, creating a political cartoon featuring the mascots of prominent political parties seems to be prohibited (at least today… but not yesterday and who knows about tomorrow).