AI generated images are all the rage right now with people using Craiyon (previously known as DALL-E mini) to create mindless memes. Now Meta is launching into the arena with its own image generator, but with a greater focus on creating artistic pieces.
The AI tool is called Make-A-Scene (opens in a new tab) and uses a combination of text prompts and sketch outlines to generate a 2048 x 2048 pixel image. Meta demonstrated the tool in a video in which the company asks various artists to create a piece of art.
One artist, Alexander Reben, prompted Make-A-Scene to create a high-definition image of a hot dog floating in the sky and entered the system with a simple sketch of an oval on a square. Sure enough, Make-A-Scene created a detailed image of a hot dog floating on a body of water. The sketches themselves don't have to be super detailed. This is to give the AI a general idea of what the final image will look like.
AI art
Meta added sketches as part of the image generation process because, in their opinion, text prompts alone don't reflect an artist's intent very well. The company gives the example of asking the tool to create an image of a zebra riding a bike. With just the text message, the zebra in the image may be too big or facing the wrong direction. Sketches give Make-A-Scene a structure to follow.
Images created with Make-A-Scene are more faithful to the outline of the sketch than to the text message. Based on testing by developers and reviewers, generated images were found to be "best aligned" to the outline 99,54% of the time. The tool considered the text prompt 66,3% of the time.
It's unclear if and when Make-A-Scene will be available to the public. Meta refers to the tool used to help people in their own creative endeavors or an art director in their marketing campaign. We also don't know how the sketches will work.
Will users be able to upload their own schemas to the image builder or will they be provided by the developers? We've asked Meta for more information on the sketches and will update this post if they ever respond.
Meta says it will host a Make-A-Scene presentation at this year's ECCV (opens in a new tab) (European Conference on Computer Vision) event in Tel Aviv, Israel. The event begins on October 23 and will run until the 27.
Analysis: the future with AI
AI generator tools are a fascinating concept that have created incredible results. We've created some of our own unusual AI art using the Google Image AI generator.
AI imaging tools are not yet ready to compete with expert artists, and most are not publicly available due to fears of misuse, with the exception of Craiyon, which uses an open source model (opens in a new tab) to replicate OpenAI's DALL-E. But there are developers who create AI tools outside of creating art. Namecheap, for example, is an AI tool that can generate a name for your business if you get stuck with ideas.
There are also AI writing tools to help compose content quickly. In fact, we have a list of the best ones for 2022, but they require human intervention to modify them. We just hope they're not too good or we won't have any more work.