The latest AI bots are all the buzz lately, from chatbots that cheat on your homework for you — saving you the time of plagiarizing something you found in the library — to imagebots that violate your friends’ copyrights.
The site I manage for The Broadway Bach Ensemble is a WordPress site, like this one, and it’s very dependent on featured images. Every work we’ve ever performed, every guest performer, every program, even every season, has a custom featured image.
For performers, it’s straightforward enough. A head shot. Seasons of concerts usually get a wide shot of the orchestra. Musical works and programs are a little trickier. For a musical work I’ll try to identify a public-domain image of the composer, or a landmark associated with the composer. For a program I’ve done photo montages, grouping together composer portraits that I can find in similar styles or compositions. One year I went with postage stamps.
Being always on the lookout for something new, with a dread of repeating myself, this year I experimented with DALL-E. The results? Occasionally useful. Often useless.
Helios
For Carl Nielsen’s overture “Helios,” an image of the sun seemed appropriate — and easy. Because images of sunsets and sunrises are a not exactly scarce I calculated this to be an easy start. The dedication page of the score offers up a poem:
“Silence and darkness, The sun rises with a joyous song of praise, It wanders its golden way and sinks quietly into the sea.”
To which DALL-E replies:
No problems there. Not an improvement over a stock image, but perfectly serviceable.
Erik Satie
The next experiment was to try for an image that would reflect Satie’s “Two Gymnopedies.” Now as you may know, a Gymnopedie referred to an ancient Greek contest between unclothed male athletes. The title of the work is clearly a goof, but still, DALL-E should do better than this with the cue “Two Gymnopedies.”
Because these were completely off target, I went with a stock image of an amphora depicting Greek athletes.
Léo Delibes: Sous le dôme épais (Flower Duet)
Delibes’ best-known work, a duet from Lakme, imagines “Two women in ancient greek costumes throwing flowers into a mountain stream” in a number of rewordings. I was never entirely happy with these; in every case the heads of the figures were a little bit too on the grotesque side.
Al right, but not really suitable for the kind of site we’re running.
Working up a program image
For the program with music by Satie, Mozart and Vivaldi, I tried a straightforward description of the three composers, “Antonio Vivaldi, Erik Satie and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing violas.”
Now none of these look like the composers in question, but not terrible as a general concept. This re-try was better; the fellow on the left actually looks like Satie.
The WALL-E folks recommend suggestions like, “in the style of.” So here is “Antonio Vivaldi, Erik Satie and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing violas in the style of Picasso,” probably the best of 12 iterations for “Antonio Vivaldi, Erik Satie and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing violas in the style of Picasso.”
A couple of problems are arising here. One, the free version of WALL-E only gives you so many images a month before you have to give them your credit card. Not that I’d have an objection to paying it, but I’d like to get a firm handle on whether it can do what I want or not. Leading to the second problem, it has no idea was Mozart or Vivaldi actually looked like.
Vivaldi
So I tried to go for an image of someone who looked like Vivaldi — a musician with flaming red hair, and because “style of Picasso” was more interesting I went with a period artist and asked for the “style of Vermeer.”
“A red-headed man, Erik Satie, man in a powdered wig, playing violas. Style of Vermeer.”
Ignoring Erik Satie and the man in a powdered wig, this one has a certain beauty about it.
Others in the set got some things right and some things wrong.
And you can see how with so many trials and so many errors, I wasn’t getting anything useful out of this.
Erik Satie
And many many iterations of “Erik Satie in a Grecian Urn” were especially vexatious.
Dark Forest
The last attempt was the most successful, and yielded an image I could use. Variations on the phrase, “musicians in a dark forest” gave lots of striking images I could use. But the faces are always distorted in the style of an old Twilight Zone episode. And a couple of them showed accordion players. “Musical instruments in a dark forest” finally yielded the winner.
Conclusion
So we’ve got a ways to go. DALL-E seems to have limited understanding of how specific people look. That may be intentional. For privacy reasons I wouldn’t want to be responsible for figuring out who’s alive and who’s dead, who’s an adult and who’s underage. So unless it’s a person with a very distinctive appearance — like Satie — it might not work. Specifying a setting, and physical objects, seems to work well. It understood the concept of musical instruments, and even a viola. It nailed the wardrobe of the Grecian maidens tossing petals by the stream, but not in an attractive way. It hit Vermeer’s style pretty well, though Picasso’s was cartoonish. Maybe if I specific cubist?
We’ll continue onward.