Crafting a Portrait: My Hilarious Journey with Nightcafe AI
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Chapter 1: An Artistic Ambition
In my quest for an artistic avatar, I turned to Nightcafe Creator, a renowned platform featuring various AI art algorithms like Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2. These tools are accessible for free if you limit your creations, and by logging in daily, you can accumulate five units to create art either from scratch or using a starter image. While the algorithms handle much of the creative process, success hinges on skillfully choosing the right keywords to avoid producing truly bizarre results.
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Section 1.1: The Challenge of Keywords
Despite a few minor achievements, I prefer to keep those creations under wraps for future tales. Currently, I’m honing my drawing skills and developing my own images offline. However, I still feel hesitant to showcase my work, as I consider it rather rough around the edges.
In this article, I focus specifically on my mug. Utilizing Nightcafe’s Style Transfer feature, I aimed to transform my face into a portrait reminiscent of Van Gogh’s artistry. The process is straightforward: you provide an image and select an artistic style, eliminating the need for complex prompts.
For my first attempt, I used a photo of myself wearing sunglasses, selecting a darker self-portrait of Vincent as the style reference.
After enhancing it with GIMP—adjusting brightness, contrast, and color temperature—I still found the results lacking. Perhaps I’m just overly critical of my own appearance.
Section 1.2: A Splash of Color
In my second attempt, I opted for a different preset: Van Gogh’s Starry Night, characterized by its vibrant cobalt blues.
Would Van Gogh have captured my mug in such a way, or did he reserve those blues for actual blue subjects? The brushstrokes are bold, but they don’t quite resonate with Van Gogh’s essence for me.
As I experimented further, I utilized a preset inspired by Beeple, the prominent NFT artist. Unfortunately, the outcome didn’t align with the original digital style.
Next, I tried a different Van Gogh preset, capturing daylight, expecting a more vibrant result but ended up with a muddled orange-yellow mix.
I also ventured into DALL·E by mistake instead of Stable Diffusion, which only accepts prompts. The result was a poor imitation of Van Gogh.
Funnier Section: AI’s Interpretation
This is how Stable Diffusion perceives my appearance, based on the prompt “Avatar, art, impressionism, starry night, portrait, high clarity, detailed.”
A subsequent attempt resulted in an amusing “cooked” version of my avatar.
The final rendition was even more exaggerated.
For a fresh start, I used my original image with the prompt “Artful avatar, minimal change,” leading to a surprising transformation.
The AI’s interpretation of “minimal change” was quite dramatic, altering my features significantly. I’m tempted to push boundaries with “major change,” but that might require a chat with my therapist, and I’m currently not in a position to afford that. What do you think of my various avatars? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Another article by Nikolaos Skordilis about AI:
Musings About the End of The World
Will the robots come and get us after all?
And the intriguing prologue of a sci-fi novel by Kate Granger:
Cantari # Prologue
I once saw a dead guy float past my viewing window.
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