Not long ago I presented my experiments on illustrating famous fairy tales with #Midjourney v4 at the #IRCDL23 (http://lacam.di.uniba.it/IRCDL23/) This experimentation is part of the VAST project https://www.vast-project.eu/ that studies values present in different texts, including some fairy tales recorded by the Grimm brothers. My generations were an aside activity, and I attempted to generate 5 illustrations for each of 5 fairy tales: #LittleRedRidingHood, #Cinderella, #LittleSnowWhite, #HanselAndGretel, and #FaithfulJohannes
With AI text-to-image generator models gaining popularity, there's a lot of talk about #promptEngineering, the process of refining the textual input used to obtain a desired result. However, calling the current practices "engineering" is an exaggeration considering that 1. it commonly limits itself to everyone using their ad-hoc techniques, 2. that are barely validated, and 3. and transferability across models is not even considered. For an overview of practices among #aiartists, consider Jonas Oppenlaender's ethnographic study (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13988) He gives a good idea of some of the employed witchcraft, such as quality boosters, repetitions and magic words
What does it take to be more rigorous about the composition of prompts? Well, first of all, not only talking about what words are used, but also about how they are chosen, why one choice of words might be better than another? Then, it is important to be careful how features are tried, putting an effort to separate different effects as much as possible. This takes time, but allows for a better understanding of the interplays (https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls1502_2). And this is only for a start of a long reflective practice that allows for the collection of insights that can be valid also across models, hopefully also for models that are yet to come.
@mapto Great diagram, wish I had that talent!
@davoloid yes, it is great, but credits go to the author of the link in the post, not to myself. Anyway, there's a whole market for this, and it has lots of names like https://twitter.com/hashtag/liveillustration and https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=%23graphicrecording
To initiate such a process, I engaged with an investigation following the principles of action research (https://sonyaterborg.com/2016/02/17/action-research/) - an iterative methodology where research and practice go hand in hand. While a task is being completed, in parallel a reproducible process is being developed, lessons learned are being collected.