2022-09-24

For this tenth year of SeaGL, the votes are in and the winning theme submission is “Hang ten!”. This, of course, calls for Patch to pick up a surfboard and hit the waves.

I took the opportunity to get acquainted with the recently released Stable Diffusion, an open source text-to-image model. I explored various text prompts and after a few dozen trials one image particularly appealed to me:

Seagull bird surfing riding on a surfboard, cel shaded vector art, HD
illustration

I fed the image back in with an adjusted prompt, and got a more interesting result:

Seagull surfing riding on a surfboard, digital painting, trending art

Another starting image had a questionable seagull but a pleasing wave:

Seagull surfing on a surfboard, surfing in the clouds, wave made of clouds
at sunrise, vector art desktop background, HD illustration, trending art

I coarsely combined the best of each—

—and let the model reinterpret it:

Seagull surfing on a surfboard, surfing in the clouds, wave made of
clouds at sunrise, seagull riding a surfboard, golden sunshine, HD
illustration, trending art

This result is satisfying, and the back-and-forth interaction with the model was fun. The LAION-5B dataset used to create the model includes the SeaGL logo, so there may actually be some of Patch in the image.