Coarse Is Better

When DALL-E came out, it took me a couple of weeks to pick my jaw up from the floor. I would go to sleep excited to wake up to a full quota, with a backlog of prompts to try. It was magical, miraculous. Like discovering a new universe. I compiled the best art in this post . The other day a friend ran some of my old prompts through Nano Banana Pro (NBP), and put the old models side by side with the new. It’s interesting how after years of progress, the models are much better better at making images, but infinitely worse at making art. Electron Contours Electron contours in the style of Italian futurism, oil on canvas, 1922, trending on ArtStation. The old Midjourney v2 renders this: NBP renders this: Admiteddly MJ’s output doesn’t look quite like futurism. But it looks like something . It looks compelling. The colours are bright and vivid. NBP’s output is studiously in the style of Italian futurism, but the colours are so muted and dull. Maybe the “trending on ArtStation” is a bit of an archaism and impairs performance. Let’s try again without: Meh. The Kowloon Walled City Painting of an alley in the Kowloon Walled City, Eugène Boudin, 1895, trending on ArtStation. MJ gave me this: And it looks nothing like the Kowloon Walled City . But it’s beautiful . It’s coarse, impressionistic, vague, evocative, contradictory. It’s brimming with mystery. And it is, in fact, in the style of Eugène Boudin . This, by contrast, is the NBP output: Sigh. It looks like every modern movie: so desaturated you feel you’re going colourblind. Let’s try forcing it: Painting of an alley in the Kowloon Walled City, Eugène Boudin, 1895. Make it coarse, impressionistic, vague, evocative, contradictory, brimming with mystery. This is somewhat better, but why is it so drab and colourless? Is the machine trying to make me depressed? The Dream Garden of the Poets Attar and Ferdowsi in a dream garden, Persian miniature, circa 1300, from the British Museum. Midjourney v2: It doesn’t quite look like anything. But it is beautiful, and evocative. I like to imagine that little splotch of paint on the upper right is hoopoe . The NBP output: Well, it looks like a Persian miniature . The “from the British Museum” bit, I meant that to be interpreted evocatively, rather than literally. The prompt cites a fictional object, bringing it into the existence. But NBP reads this as: no, this is a photograph of a Persian miniature in the British Museum. The Sack of Merv The Burning of Merv by John William Waterhouse, 1896, from the British Museum. Midjourney v2: It does look like Waterhouse . Semantically there’s room to argue: it looks like a woman being burnt at the stake, not the sack of a city. But aesthetically: it’s gorgeous. The flames are gorgeous, the reds of the dress are gorgeous. Look at the reeds in the background, and the black water, that looks like...

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