AI image generators can churn out fantastical images and now the photorealistic, but just how easy is it to get believable AI images in 2023? This photographer put in the time and thousands of word pr
Take a good look at the sweet elderly lady artistically pictured above – real or not real? It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?
If you know anything about AI art generators already like openAI’s Dall-E, you probably know they can churn out fantastical art with frightening efficiency, but recently they have also been hitting the headlines for getting better at making photorealistic images, like a drone shot of surfers on a beach that won a photo contest.
Back to that image – yes, that sweet elderly lady, with a striking (and personally worrying) resemblance to my dear late grandmother – is not real, it’s generative AI and one of my early attempts using a text-to-image AI art generator.
One question hangs heavy for photographers like me – could AI art generators make us and our cameras insignificant, niche, or even obsolete? In a bid to find out I have got to grips with some of the best AI art generators.
The good news for photographers is that there are currently way more scenarios that AI art generators can’t do so well as in the headline image, but the technology is only just getting started.AI image generators – getting started
Along the way, I have landed on Midjourney – that uses an app called Discord – to be the most effective at generating photorealistic results straight off the bat. Over-saturation and high clarity are the norm and often not the most realistic, but the end results boast the sharpest detail. openAI’s Dall-E 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion follow word prompts more faithfully.
I started with a few simple word prompts – window light portrait, black and white, elderly lady – and a minute later, a reasonable selection of four portraits popped up. Not as believable as I expected, but not bad.
Midjourney’s Discord app contains breakout chat rooms, inside which you make your own images and see other users’ word prompts and resulting images appear on the feed. Bamboozled by the constant flow of word prompts and resulting images while waiting for my own to appear, I started seeing other’s prompts like photorealistic, 85mm f/1.
