New Jobs for a New Age: Job One-DALL-E Driver

Video killed the radio star

In my mind and in my car

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

Pictures came and broke your heart

Put the blame on VCR

Welcome to the first Perfecting Equilibrium Vlog! (I keep calling it a podcast in the video for some reason or another.) Let me know your thoughts; we’re planning to improve! Transcript below, for those who would like to read through. Plus links!

Transcript

Greetings! Welcome to the very first Perfecting Equilibrium podcast. I'm Chris Feola, the equilibrium dude. The?great Gary Solomon?has been suggesting for years that the stuff that we're doing here might be a lot more understandable if I did some videos on it. So Gary this one's for you.

Alright, today, the first in a new series: New Jobs for a New Age: Job One-DALL-E?Driver. Now, there's been enormous stern about all the jobs that are gonna go away for creatives now that these supposed artificial intelligences are available. And that's true to a certain extent, but it's true in the way that professional photographers whose only real ability was to get things in focus, lost their jobs when autofocus came along.

You'll be pleased to know that there are many, many, many, many photographers out there today working professionally. What's changed is that if anything, there's more, because the raw skills such as developing film and printing and focus and exposure have largely been automated, especially since we rarely print anymore and push everything to a screen. Now, we're gonna see the same things happening here with graphic arts and writing and other similar textual things.

So we're gonna kind of do an overview with these prompt-based artificial intelligences by doing DALL-E Driver today. And then we'll get into more direct job things in the future, like designing logos and some other similar writing blog posts, among similar tasks.

So let's start today with something that I actually did last year, which is to just type in the name of my blog, newsletter, LinkedIn newsletter, whatever you want to call it. And let's see what we get from DALL-E out of that. Now what you'll see, by the way, I'm going to have all of these linked down below the links to DALL-E and the rest of these.

And these are interesting, but really they could pass for you know, ads for, or, or a logo for a yoga studio. It doesn't really focus on the things that I want to focus on. So let's try adding some more words, more detail to the prompt and see if that changes things at all.

So we're gonna add the word digital. Now, one of the nice things about DALL-E is that it gives you a history. You can see it on the right side. Okay, so now that we have yoga with a laptop… interesting! A little better, but not really much better here. So let's see what this one… yeah, not really, as I was starting to say before. What you can see here is if you go to history, you can see the last ones that we did here, and if you scroll over them, you see what prompt gave you that.

So what we're doing is basically working our way through and learning what words drive DALL-E in different directions. So let's try “in cyberspace,” and see how that changes it from just the term digital. Okay, this is a little more interesting now; it's kind of spooky interesting. We're starting to get less detailed in the features here, which I actually kind of like. And even the ones that have more traditional features have them in odd and peculiar and interesting ways.

Let's bring some more flavor to this. Now what we can do here is you can also tell DALL-E to do it in someone's style. So let's say instead of just letting it choose the medium here, you'll notice that this is kind of painterly where this is more of a photograph. So let's make it a painting by?Gustav Klimt. It would help if I spelled Gustav correctly. Artificial intelligence, defeated by Feola’s spelling.

Then we use a coma to cordon that off. Let us generate and see what we get. Now you can also add digital art at the end of this, which tends to now that's kind of intriguing. Now I'm not sure that it is what we want. I'm not sure how this is perfecting equilibrium. So yeah, this is more of a generic Klimt it seems like to me.

We're gonna do two things now, as I was starting to say before if we add digital art onto the end, it tends to sharpen up the results, but now we're gonna go, let's do?Joan Miro. He has some equilibrium-ish paintings, do you not think? Let's see what that does.

Well, this is much more interesting to me. Now again, this is, there's no right or wrong here. There's what do you like? So this is much more intriguing to me, but it's, I don't know that anyone would understand this if I used any of these as the logo for our Substack.

So let's change this to?Salvador Dali. Sorry for the pause there. I'm used to just using DALL-E, not talking about it while I'm using it. And we're gonna make some improvements in the Vlog as we go along, this being the first one. And we'll see if we like this camera, whether we like the software we’re using, which is?Loom. Pretty?happy with the microphone?so far, but there's lots and lots of learning here. Lots of new stuff that we can get to.

And of course, while I'm dancing here, metaphorically speaking, DALL-E is taking its time, that's for sure. So the system must be pretty loaded up. Well, here we are finally. And interestingly, it's giving me something similar to the ones I had the first time, but not exactly the same. So that's another piece of information for dealing with DALL-E is that notice that the prompt here of painting myself perfecting equilibrium.

Oh, I put “in cyberspace.” Let's try it one more time without “in cyberspace.” Last one for today, digital art. I'm curious to see if I get the same results that I did when I first started driving this thing last year.

And I do not. It's intriguing that the same prompt gives you different results. That's intriguing. But let's go to the history for a second here and let us scroll all the way down to the bottom here. Give it a second to catch up. And you could see that here is my current one that I used for our logo. And it's the exact same prompt, and yet I got a very different result. I find that fascinating. I sure do.

And what I did after this is I took this as a starting point and I built the logo by bringing this in Photoshop, getting rid of this bird up here, getting rid of this and this here and this stick, and put the words “Perfecting Equilibrium” on his hands. But you can see that on the accompanying graphics. So you can see how that ended up.

Well, thank you for joining us for our first Perfecting Equilibrium podcast, vlog, whatever this is. And feedback is really, really appreciated here because we're getting started, so we’ve got a lot to learn and hopefully you'll enjoy the journey too. Thanks, and have a great day! Chris Feola out.

Here is a link to the?video on Loom with a clickable transcript?that takes you directly to areas of interest in the video.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

March 3rd: Foto.Feola.Friday and the Perfecting Equilibrium Digest.

March 5th (Substack): New Jobs for a New Age: Job Two-Midjourney Logo Designer. Part II of the PE VLog series New Jobs for a New Age: Creating a corporate logo with Midjourney, and comparing the results with a logo from a professional designer. The transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is destroying entire fields of work and creating a new generation of Luddites, but it’s also creating new jobs requiring new skills.

Christopher J Feola founded PrivacyChain, which provides Data as a Service to Web3 projects and restores the value of content. If you liked this post from Perfecting Equilibrium, why not share it?