A baby playing Solitaire

Generating Images with Bing AI

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.

Faces

If you ask Dall-E via Bing Chat to generate a face then it can. It wanted to generate the face of a woman with curly hair so I did, and the image looks realistic. I then asked it to draw the face of a tired man and it did. It’s when I asked Dall-E to draw a woman cyclist exploring the Dolomites that I saw that faces are a mess. It’s fine with generating human faces, in isolation, but if you ask for a landscape, and a human with a face then the face is wrong. This is both great, and a shame. It’s great because it means that we still need to photograph real people doing real things, but it’s bad because if all we need is a face then AI is ready to provide us with some.

Cycling Ducks

I asked Dall-E to create images of ducks cycling around the Vallée De Joux and it drew ducks, where instead of legs, the ducks had wheels. Sometimes these wheels were not round. In one case a duck had the front forks and a wheel coming out of the front of its body. Dall-E obviously hasn’t spent much time reading Duck Tales stories. If it had then it would draw flawless ducks.

Drawing Monuments

I asked Dall-E to draw the Palais Wilson with the Ballerina in one instance and it failed. It took a generic building and showed it within the scene I described for it to draw. I also asked it to draw the broken chair at Place Des Nations in Geneva and it failed to do this too. Dall-E doesn’t imagine real things we describe as accurately as I would expect. In fact it doesn’t, at all.

Firefish

I asked Dall-E to draw Firefish providing IT support, staring at a phone, and writing a post. In most of these cases Dall-E worked well. It was able to provide amusing or interesting images. When I asked it to draw a frog waving at a heron it generated one image that was better than the others.

People and Meerkats Cycling

I asked Dall-E to draw people cycling down a cycling route with a railway tunnel and the result was quite good. I then asked for the people to be replaced by meerkats and the result was amusing. If you use your imagination Dall-E can generate some interesting results.

A Flock of Geese and a camera operator

I asked Dall-E to draw a camera operator on a crane filming a flock of geese bobsledding and it drew the camera and the crane well, as well as the geese but it ignored the bobsledding part, and the face of the camera operator was awful.

And Finally

Rather than write more, I will include a series of images on my wordpress blog for you to enjoy.

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During a pandemic one of the safest places to be is on a bike on quiet rural roads. The only people you meet are sporty so there is a higher likelihood that they are sporty.



Today I had to be respectful when passing two horses. They can often be afraid when they see cyclists, as we look strange. Bright colours, a strange machine underneath us. It can also be that the rider is also a little afraid. I always pass or let horses pass with caution.


A few bike rides ago I was told that they get spooked when they don’t know what is behind them. In this case I was in front of the horses.


I take the paths because I want to avoid dangerous roads and cars. The weather was good for cycling today.

Yet Another Sunny Day

Yet Another Sunny Day

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Today I looked at two of the masks I used over summer and they are both bleached by the sun. So is my hat. I normally expect things in Spain to be sun bleached, not Switzerland. The reason is simple. First, it never ever rains, and even clouds are rare today, and second, I spend an hour and a half outdoors a day walking. Plenty of time for my things to get sun bleached.


If you’re an extrovert you could go out into the street and ask people “Is the covid virus airborne” they would probably either say that they don’t know or that it isn’t. The second introvert option is just to observe people. See how many people wear their masks as moustaches, how many of them wear them as neckerchiefs, how many people observe proper social distancing. If these methods are how you determine whether people know that COVID-19 is airborne, then the answer is “very few”.


It makes you question whether self-isolation is justified. It doesn’t seem to be, because not that many people are falling sick now. There is one detail. The point of self-isolation, and the point of eradicating a disease, is that you don’t wait for things to seem safe, to resume normal life. You wait until they are. 2200 people fell sick this weekend. That’s a lot of people. That’s 733 a day. That’s an infection rate of one person every two minutes.


We are at the trough of a wave, but there is every chance that another crest is coming, and none of the barrier gestures are in place at the moment. If the virus has an opportunity it will spread quickly between communities with current behaviours as they are.


Sunflowers And the Mont Blanc


Due to the pandemic I am still going for my daily walks in the countryside. I go along roads with less human and dog traffic. I find that if I go on routes with people out for their walks they walk side by side and make it impossible to pass them without entering their safe space. I can and do wear a mask but when you cross people once or twice in 20 minutes the mask is not justified, and you need the sunshine. I walk in the countryside. If I was in town the mask would either be on, or I’d be keeping three or four meters between myself and others.


I might be eccentric, but the pandemic is over one and a half years old, so I have had time for pandemic habits to become automatic.


I had to stop walking at two moments during this walk. Tractors had to turn around. To do so they had to drive over the road I was about to walk on. I prefer not to have a tractor with seeding equipment too close to me. It is interesting to watch them as they work different fields, with different tools, at different times of the year. Daily, I see what they’re up to.


Become A JavaScript Developer Completed and GeoJSON

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Byrichard

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I could see this as especially useful for climbing, hiking, archeology and other activities. This reminds me of photosynth, mixed in with photogrammetry and other technologies. When images are taken they are geo-tagged but another layer is added, by detecting the angle the picture was taken at. Whether it was looking down, up or in another direction. In other words in three, rather than two dimensions. This is great for modelling, but also for helping people get a sense of the images that they’re looking at. Climbing pictures, where we can see the upward or downward angle would be interesting.


It would also be fun to write a blog post, find the api information, and include that within a geojson file, to provide location info, angle, and other data. This data could then be ported from a photo app, to a hiking app, to a website and more. With more images 3d models become possible. Imagine gathering Via ferrata images and documenting the route.


Of course they can also use this for mapping glacier progress, or regression, coastal erosion and a multitude of other topics. I found this talk really interesting, and I see plenty of uses for such data.

Five Storks In A Field and A High River

Byrichard

Rain filled river


It has rained enough to fill the rivers now. I walked in the rain for an hour and a half and might have crossed one cyclist and one other person. I did count five herons in a field.


Hay balls in a field on a rainy day. Spot the five herons.


In one location several roads are saturated by rainwater flowing off of the fields.


Shoes in high water on a road.

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