Feeding A Poem Into An AI Art Machine

Like many, I’ve been thinking closely about the kinds of text prompts I am using with Generative AI models like Bard and ChatGPT and Dall-E and Firefly.

This morning, as I was working on a SmallPoem — in this case, a haiku inspired by the long day of rain yesterday that was desperately needed — I decided to feed the entire haiku into the new Firefly art site, and see what it would design. Firefly works like Dall-e in many ways — you add text and it generates image — but it has many more bells and whistles for artistic design that I am still exploring. What it doesn’t have that Dall-e does (and which I like) is the “variation” button that re-creates the art in different ways. But Firefly does generate four images for each prompt, so there are choices.

I designed many variations and then chose four that I liked best, and moved them into a photo collage maker, and layered the haiku on top. I think it looks interesting, although I am not sure the images created by Firefly gave me anything too surprising, which is too bad, since I was hoping the poem as text might bend me in another direction. It seems to be that the site got focused on the words “rain” and “prayer.”

Peace (and Art),
Kevin