Random Poetic Series
by tommy o
My baseline image was created by using the poem Bluebird by Charles Bukowski. As a starting point I asked for a literal interpretation of the poem in the style of the 20th century “Realist” movement. From this baseline my theme was random prompting focusing on the previous image as context for the text image in the series. I asked for random information and used a basic prompt to see what simple prompting would generate, how it would be interpreted by AI. This was to explore how randomness and potentially vague prompts can create unexpected paths to explore in the creation process.
For my first random prompt (for image two) I asked for a random country in the world. The response was Peru. I then asked for image two to be based on image one, but to make it more Peruvian. I followed with requests for a random mammal which led to an argument about whether a pangolin should be pictured in the image or simply have the image reimagined from its point of view. This came to the point where the AI insisted there was no longer a pangolin in the images it was producing. This was an interesting limitation for chatGPT with Dall-E. The argument yield an unexpected outcome where the ana (the GPT I used) started describing its images on creation.
Using these descriptions I picked random descriptors from its own output to re-prompt for successive images. For instance, make the next image more epiphanic, give the next image more clarity, etc. while maintaining the routine of basing each new image on the previous image in the series.
The result is a series of images with random progression. Each image can be used as a new point of departure to either refocus on a specific theme or explore using differing techniques like complex prompting.
Despite the randomness of the prompting, or perhaps because of it, the output eventually shifted to a style that I consider to be increasingly characteristic of AI. This may be where simple random prompting leads.