So, I started seeing all these wild pictures online – animals that looked kinda real but also… not quite right? Stuff like squirrels in tiny hats or cats that looked like they were painted by aliens. Figured I’d give this AI image thing a shot myself, see what all the fuss was about.
First off, I just jumped onto one of those generator websites. Didn’t really know what I was doing. Typed in “dog”. What I got back was… well, it was sort of dog-shaped. More like a blurry nightmare version of a dog, honestly. One had three legs, another seemed to be melting.
Okay, so clearly just typing “dog” wasn’t gonna cut it. I realised I had to be way more specific. I started trying longer descriptions. Stuff like, “A fluffy golden retriever puppy sitting in a field of flowers, sunshine, detailed photo”. That got me something a bit better. Closer to a real dog, at least, though the flowers sometimes looked like they were growing out of its fur. Weird.
Playing Around Got Interesting
Then I really went down the rabbit hole. I started throwing all sorts of silly ideas at it:
- “A penguin learning to fly” – got some very confused looking penguins, mostly just standing there.
- “A raccoon wearing sunglasses and riding a skateboard” – this one actually worked kinda well sometimes, though the skateboard often looked like it was part of the raccoon.
- “A majestic lion with butterfly wings, fantasy art style” – these were pretty cool, very colourful, but the wings often looked stuck on.
I spent hours just tweaking the words. Adding things like “highly detailed”, “cinematic lighting”, or “drawn in the style of a cartoon”. It felt like trying to explain a picture to someone who’s never seen anything before. You have to spell out everything. And even then, the results were a total crapshoot. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes just bizarre messes. Got a cat with six legs once. Another time, a bird that was also somehow a fish.
What I figured out pretty quick is this: the words you use are everything. You gotta be super descriptive. But it’s also unpredictable. The AI doesn’t ‘know’ what a cat or a dog is, not really. It just mashes together images based on the words you feed it. That’s why you get those weird extra limbs or strange blends.
In the end, I got a few images that looked pretty neat. Made a cool-looking wolf in a snowy forest and a funny picture of a squirrel chef. Took a lot of tries, though. Lots of failed attempts deleted.
It’s a fun way to kill some time, that’s for sure. You type in some words and boom, you get a picture back instantly. It’s not gonna replace real artists or photographers anytime soon, the results are too random and often flawed. But it’s definitely an interesting tool to mess around with. Kinda makes you think about how these machines are learning to ‘see’.