My latest generative AI obsession: Suno. You provide it some lyrics, give it a musical style to emulate and hit the create button. It's pretty wild.

I wrote some fun lyrics about deploying code on Fridays, set to some catchy 80's pop. The result is pretty crazy.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzaA3tDzWY0[/embed]

[Verse] Testing in production (oh yeah) That is how we roll (whoa) Testing in production using my flawless code [Bridge] Why should I write tests (what?) My code is never a mess (oh no) Did I just rhyme, Tests and a mess (yeah he did) [Chorus] It's Friday afternoon. It's time to deploy my code. (whoa yeah) The weekend is almost here. It's time to deploy my code. (watch out) [Verse] It's Friday afternoon. I don't have anything to fear It's time to deploy my code. The weekend is almost here. [Bridge] Why should I write tests (what?) My code is never a mess (oh no) Did I just rhyme, Tests and a mess (yeah he did) [Verse] It's Friday afternoon. (Whoa) It's Friday afternoon. (Whoaaa) It's Friday afternoon. (Yeah!) It's time to deploy my code. (WAIT WHAT) [Bridge] Why should I write tests (what?) My code is never a mess (oh no) Did I just rhyme, Tests and a mess (yeah he did) [Chorus] It's Friday afternoon. It's time to deploy my code. (whoa yeah) The weekend is almost here. It's time to deploy my code. (watch out) [Chorus] It's Friday afternoon. It's time to deploy my code. (whoa yeah) The weekend is almost here. It's time to deploy my code. (watch out)

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!

Alrighty, I updated the logic this weekend and have Mr. RossBot operating on the hairy elephant website (Mastodon). (It's also posting on Threads, if you're into that sort of thing.)

I also updated the image model to use Stability.ai's swanky new SDXL model. I'm pretty impressed with the results.

Using a customized prompt, you can (for now, at least), get ChatGPT to misbehave a bit.

For example, I turned it into an angry programmer.

I think it's time to end my AI art career on this high note. Generated with Stable Diffusion, running on my local machine.

The prompt: "beautiful portrait painting of Barack Obama with a purple mohawk on top of his head shredding on an electric guitar at a punk rock show, concept art, makoto shinkai, takashi takeuchi, trending on artstation, 8k, very sharp, extremely detailed, volumetric, beautiful lighting, wet-on-wet"

A few short weeks ago, I had downloaded a simplified model for generating AI-created images on your local machine. The internet (myself included) had a lot of fun with it, but the quality was definitely lacking, especially when compared to the more serious AI image platforms being created by some big companies.

I recently received my invite to the MidJourney beta and I am just blown away!

For now, I've just been putting in ridiculous prompts that simulate styles for various artists (oh, man. I have a feeling this is going to piss off a lot of artists in the future...)

For example: "Apocalyptic wasteland with crumbling buildings and debris, thomas kinkade painting"

The potential here is pretty crazy -- for people who aren't artistically inclined, they can start generating images and scenes based on what they come up with. Some people can probably use this as a base to get to rapidly start iterating on new ideas. And of course, others are going to be mad.

A lot of the detail in creating these images is how you create the prompt. You're already seeing the phrase "prompt engineering" being used in various places -- check out this Twitter search.

For me though, I'm excited about this new technology and it's something I've been eager to play with.

Earlier this year, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, the latest version of their AI tool that can generate images by simply providing text input.

For example, “people in togas taking a selfie in front of a volcano”, and it will get to work attempting to create an image that includes all these elements.

The Verge has an interesting article with more details. You can see an example of what is possible on the DALL-E 2 subreddit. It’s honestly insane.

For now (sadly), the service is invite only.

More recently, an ambitious engineer named Boris Dayma created an open source version of the service called DALL-E mini. While it isn’t able to generate results as impressive as DALL-E 2, it’s still pretty crazy!

It’s recently taken the internet by storm and you can see people post DALLE-mini generated images and memes everywhere. The official website has been under heavy load, so it’s been pretty tough to try out the service.

Fortunately, you can download the model from Github and get the service setup on your local machine (providing you have a graphics card beefy enough to run the models).

Who has two thumbs and a graphics card just begging to be used? Hello.

I was able to get the service setup on my machine and start playing around with it.

In this example, I used a prompt to essentially create a Bob Ross painting generator. “Alpine forest with river running through the middle, snow capped peaks in the background, Bob Ross style painting."

Pretty neat! The images that services like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can create are miles better and I’ve applied to both services.

While I anxiously await my acceptance, I’ll have to continue generating various memes on my own machine.