The Unnatural Selection of Chunky Dogs with DALL·E 2
Minimize paperclips, maximize huskies
Content warning: extreme inside-baseball. If you don’t care about generative neural networks you might not get anything from this.
We’ve all seen DALL·E 2 generating amazing images from the simplest of prompts. I’ve done it a lot myself since I got access, and I’ve been impressed by how good it is at everything that doesn’t involve realistic faces or text, or keeping track of multiple objects’ traits, or prepositions.
Actually, it’s still got a long way to go. Google’s Imagen is far better, but private.
Regardless, I feel like people have been squandering some of the potential of DALL·E 2 by completely skipping over the Variations feature. This feature takes a square image as an input, and outputs five similar images.
Let’s try it out with my all-time favorite animal, Fat Husky, Esq.1
Variations are great. I could pet literally any of these huskies all day.
BUT THAT’S NOT ENOUGH.
After posting the above, in my server, user Barkley#24052 suggested the following
I wonder if it starts like uhhh
Degenerating
If you keep making variations of variations
We have a holy task now, to unnaturally select the most screwed up Huskies and keep applying variations to them until we create a monstrosity.
Let’s start with 1-2. It’s a slightly purple Husky, so maybe we can breed some kind of Emperor3 mutation into the species.
It’s working far better than anticipated! It’s even starting to generate weirdly blobby dogs. Let’s now select for the “blob” trait.
Okay, we’re definitely reaching diminishing returns here. Let’s pull out the Husky from his purple egg.
At this point (probably earlier), the huskies reach the uncanny valley, starting to look like 90s video-game CGI.
We’re selecting for the strangest shapes now. In retrospect, I could have probably generated some kind of mecha-husky.
Let’s go a bit backwards and see if we can get something better.
No, these are starting to look disturbingly like something a furry would enjoy. Let’s go back again and narrow down the frames. Maybe we can get rid of the husky entirely and do something fun with the colors.
Nope, let’s try again.
Perfect, that’s some creepy shit, enhance.
Hmm, we’ve reached some kind of loop, let’s continue to go backwards and try weird faces until we get out of this rut.
There we go.
Unfocus a bit more, crop a bit more…
And there we go, DALL·E has lost the ability to identify these images as huskies. We can go crazy now.
Interestingly, it seems like at this point the AI takes the colors in the foreground to be the focus of the image, giving them extreme amounts of detail. Let’s continue doing that.
This looks like a good time to stop. The uncanny huskies have been fully defeated. We MIGHT be able to spin this into some kind of pool-related art, but we’ve done this gimmick far too long as it is.
Last but not least, Fat Husky has helped us unlock the mysteries of the universe, so he deserves a reward. Let’s inpaint him a party hat.
Good dog!
He’s only been sighted once, at a Singaporean animal hospital. A few pictures were taken by a heroic photographer, and he was never seen again. He probably ascended to a higher, fatter plane of existence.
Appropriate name.
Emperor is the sometimes purple, always based giant dog in the web serial This Used to be About Dungeons.