“My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Forrest Gump
The leading quote cannot be more appropriate for my experience trying to render Forrest Gump in a forest. It may be me, but I want to blame the technology. I was trying to render a metaphorically appropriate image of missing the Forrest for the trees by literally placing Forrest Gump in the woods. Let’s just say your mileage may vary.
My first attempt was to prompt Midjourney with this string:
forrest gump standing in a savannah georgia forest cinema photorealistic high detail
I seem to have got [a] (possibly) Forrest Gump standing; [b] a Savannah forest [c] (perhaps) Forrest Gump in a cinema; and [d] a larger-than-life Forrest Gump standing among the trees.
Let’s try something new to see where it goes:
tom hanks forrest gump standing in a savannah georgia tree forest cinema photorealistic high detail
Hmm. I certainly see the rendering engine picked up on the tree tag, but what became of Forrest and Tom. There seems to be a figure standing in the distance. Not exactly impressive. Let’s switch from Midjourney to DALL-E-2 and tweak the prompt:
tom hanks as forrest gump wearing a seersucker suit and standing in a savannah georgia tree forest cinematic hyper-realistic
Note that these are in reverse chronological order, so the lower images were rendered first. Dall-E renders 4 images at a time, as does Midjourney. After the bottom four images, I added Tom Hanks‘ name and the seersucker suit for obvious reasons.
I added his seersucker suit that seemed to (occasionally) make its way into a render. It is looking better, but I am not convinced that DALL-E knows about Tom Hanks. In the final four images (from the top left), I edited the fourth image on the second row and explicitly instructed Dall-E to insert Tom Hanks’ face without much luck.
I had one more idea. I could use the DALL-E render as a seed image for Midjourney. This is the last image at the top of the gallery strip at the top of this page. Certainly more Tom Hanks’ likeness, but at the expense of the trees, save for the first in the quadrant that appears to contain only trees.
In the end, I’ll just say that I did not obtain a suitable render for use as a metaphor elsewhere, but I did get fodder for this post. I have to admit there’s a certain creep factor. I can easily imagine Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise—not to be confused with Mike Myers of Austin Powers and Shrek franchises—in place of Forrest.
DALL-E-2 is now in open beta, and you can generate up to 50 free images your first month and 15 free thereafter. It’s the easier of the two engines. Midjourney needs to be run as a Discord bot and seemed to be aimed more at professionals, but you can still get 25 free images when you join. After 25 images, you’ll be prompted to join.
What do you think? Have you tried these or another AI image generation engine? Let me know in the comments.
Philosophics 