There’s been a lot in the press and media in recent weeks about ‘Generative AI’ and the increasingly well-known Open-AI chat bot agent ‘Chat GPT’ and its like. There are now a number of these agents out there to try, a recent addition to the pack is Google’s ‘Bard’ large language model chatbot. Educational establishments have to contend with students using these tools for their assignments. Equally, the tools can also offer environmental researchers a useful structure and starting point in their work.
Another genre of generative AI perhaps less well known is that of image and media creation. Where this has touched the news is around ‘deep fake’ images that are increasingly hard to distinguish from human-generated output.
It is one thing to have a textual summary of a topic, or a meaningful exchange with a chatbot, there is however something of deeper connection with the human psyche to see images, and in fact works of art, produced by AI. There are a number of generative AI-based image creation tools out there, images.ai was an early entrant, and other tools such as NightCafe and starry.ai are also popular. Adobe Firefly is another recent addition, and there are many more.
OpenAI, the creators ChatGPT have released an AI image generator called DALL-E, which will create new imagery from simple text descriptions. With a focus on what Digital Environment can mean, and to discussions above here – we had a go and the results were striking. One can use natural language to describe a scene and then the AI tool will interpret this for us, thus:
A oil painting of a robot digging the soil in woodland with butterflies
We’re not sure what that last robot is up to!!!