The Art of Iterating
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”
To illustrate the process his Grade 8 students went through to complete their assignments, Art Faculty Hugh Mosher created his own book cover – inspired by Jules Verne’s classic “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”
Mosher’s vision for the final output was to have a squid with its tentacles wrapped around the Nautilus, illustrated above. And since the goal is to have a cover wrapping around the book, Mosher wanted to display the final image against a scenic panorama.
He began by dropping in a short passage from the beloved book:
“The Nautilus had returned to the surface of the waves. Stationed on the top steps, one of the seamen undid the bolts of the hatch. But he had scarcely unscrewed the nuts when the hatch flew up with tremendous violence, obviously pulled open by the suckers on a devilfish’s arm.
Instantly one of those long arms glided like a snake into the opening, and twenty others were quivering above. With a sweep of the ax, Captain Nemo chopped off this fearsome tentacle, which slid writhing down the steps.”
The resulting images were unusable and confusing. “Students need to know that AI can’t imagine what is in their heads and will follow short descriptive prompts better than the passage from the book,” Mosher said.
Based on the passage above, the program produced the following images:
“I tell students that AI is like a giant stack of reference pictures they can cut and paste together to create something which they can put their creative problem-solving skills into to make an image that is truly their own.”
– Hugh Mosher, Art Faculty
The output was far from Mosher’s original intent, so he released a series of new prompts with the following instructions:
“The steam punk styled submarine should be in the distance with a giant squid wrapped around its hull. One of its tentacles should be holding a sailor while three other men stand in fear. The captain on the deck holds an axe.”
This resulted in the following images. →
Mosher was getting closer, but he was still not satisfied with the output, so he entered more prompts. He asked the program to generate an ocean scene with a distant island using a style reference. He was given several options and selected his favorite. →
Mosher then wanted to integrate the visuals of the squid, the vessel and the panorama. He generated more prompts and the system created the following image. →
Mosher continued making new prompts to further refine the imagery. He asked the program to move parts around and to stretch the image to make it as believable as possible. The final image is a wide panorama. The right side of the image page would be the front cover with the back cover wrapping around to the left side of the image. In total there were 15 steps along the way. →
Main Article: Prompted: Intentional AI Literacy for a New Frontier
Related Article: Cover to Cover