The Art of AI dreaming

The Art of AI dreaming

Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.
Carlos Castaneda

Welcome to the art of AI dreaming. In this era, where we might see the start of another industrial revolution in the future, the AI-generated images are getting more and more realistic.
However, they are still a dream. Imagine most surrealistic vivid dreams. They are like that. You ask something, like in your own dreams, but you don't usually get what you want, usually suprises.
This blog introduces the Stable-Diffusion-generated images. It's a start of a new art form, and an artist must know its tools and especially the commands to make the strokes he or she likes. As with any form of art, it needs practise. Though the form of suprise is one of the most amusing things of this painting media.

2023-05-27: Pictures of Madina the Peacemaker

When AI sees a mirage, an object, and image many enough times, it starts to dream it more vividly. Here, my best friend is sent to make peace to the world. Introducing Madina to the Stable Diffusion. The model was trained in 30 minutes by Google Colab and the tool to generate pictures is called InvokeAI. With InvokeAI, the base model used is Stable Diffusion 1.5. The first picture gives the reference of Madina. It's seamingly difficult to prevent doubles or even triples.
InvokeAI
Stable Diffusion 1.5

2023-05-29: Hokusai

Continuing with the theme of own trained pictures. This time testing different art style, Hokusai.

2023-06-05: Cyborg in different styles (Ryohei Hase, Arcimboldo Giuseppe)

Madina as a cyborg in a dark science fiction city, detailed face.

2023-06-11: Voice of God and responsibility

Here we are the God, having the power of voice to generate almost any kind of images. Feels very strong without any filter with the Stable Diffusion, but we should also carry some responsibility. However, the art generated can even be very mind-blowing. If you want horror, AI is an expert. Right from your most vivid nightmare during the highest fever. But hidden humane feelings that words or human brush sometimes cannot catch are sometimes a result of a Stable Diffusion artist.

2023-06-25: Tickeling ideas

You can express your ideas quite freely with Stable Diffusion, there seems to be mysterious touch but still the message comes through. "Praise people that are different, and stop discriminating aliens."

2023-07-02: Reviving old friends

Training Stable diffusion with pictures bring possibility to bring your old, passed away, but loved pets into new surroundings, even play with you in the pictures. I don't recommend playing too much, as it can be heart-breaking, but yet another approach to use AI-generated pictures (and later videos) to bring back some people and animals, long passed.
The first picture displays my original friend.

2023-08-05: Home landscapes

How well can monuments and landscaped be taught to stable diffusion? There can be a lot of tweaking and prompt refining needed to get better results than below. However, the tower here (original in the first photo) is somewhat recognizable. One image is an actual watercolor painting of the tower.

2023-08-15: More home landscapes

Here we display variations of Sapokan vesipuisto. The first picture shows the original waterfall. Last one is an impression with watercolors.

2023-08-26: Tuning Stable Diffusion

Some technical details of painting with Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion 1.5 has a wide range of so called LoRa (low-rank adaption) models which fine-tune existing models. No need to train a full model, like in Dreambooth. Here is one example of using LoRa model "(r1ge - AnimeRage)": https://civitai.com/models/115100/rage-unleashed. Samples may not introduce the best way differences, but you could add styles, characters or details with LoRa models that are of small size. First image without LoRa (rage), second one with rage effects and lightings. Prompt: "happy monk meditating in cyberpunk city, glowing, magic, aura, energy, style of Richard Anderson art."

2023-08-27: Rivals of ShutterStock

Ready to rival with ShutterStock and iStock? AI text-to-image models, Stable Diffusion being one of them, pose a real threat to their business models, I'm afraid also to the photographers, models and artists. Soon it's difficult to differentiate AI-generated photos from real ones. So far, there are certain areas that still reveal Stable-Diffusion- 1.5-generated pictures but, with a bit of fine-tuning prompts, even SD 1.5 generates terribly authentic pictures. AI-generated pictures:

  • commercially free
  • you own them and can define license
  • people are AI-generated (though likely represent someone), not real people
  • it's free to generate pictures, but you do need a modern graphics card on your laptop.
  • 2023-09-03: Inpainting experiment

    One hidden gem of AI-painting is possibility to paint inside existing image. So, for example, you could paint a happy group of xmas elves dancing into your yard or just paint a polar bear to sit next to grandpa. There are special models for inpainting, however, I just used my own trained model and standard Stable Diffusion models (1.5 + 2.1) to generate the following suggestions of murals to our town hall.

    2023-09-03: Inpainting experiment, part 2

    Inpainting makes it easier to combine several concepts. Althrough it's possible, there is tendency to duplicate the color themes and even disregard other concept if it's a rear combination in the model.

    Copyright Niko Sipola 2023