AI Art Ottawa Meetup Aug 24 2022

Welcome everyone! I am excited to kick-off the first AI Art Ottawa meetup (Aug 24) with this post to help introduce the fascinating world of AI art. I thought it would be cool for members of the AI Art Ottawa Meetup Group to play with the “input language” of AI art known as “prompts”.

3 min readAug 6, 2022

AI Art Ottawa Meetup Group Image generated by DALL-E 2 with prompt: “Cubism painting of a coelacanth swimming in deep blue sea.”

While there are several free AI text-to-image generators publicly available (see list below) the top tools such as DALL-E 2 are still restricted to a closed group of users. Luckily, I was able to get an invitation from OpenAI Labs (the creators of DALL-E 2) and obtain some free “credits” to generate prompts for new AI art creation.

I would like to apply up to 35 of these DALL-E 2 credits to the first 35 members of the AI Art Ottawa Meetup Group (limit of 1 credit per member) and generate an image based on a prompt of your choice. Please share your “prompt” by August 19th with me via the AI Art Ottawa Meetup Group messaging system to obtain your DALL-E 2 generated image.

Your image can then be “showcased” in a gallery on this blog post and the AI Art Ottawa Meetup Photo Gallery along with the prompt used to create the image.

Create an Awesome Prompt

Prompts are the text inputs which most AI text-to-image platforms require to initiate the process of transforming words into images. While prompt creation seems like a trivial thing to do it can be surprisingly intimidating to actually craft from scratch a prompt that will generate interesting images. For example, a prompt using a text-string such as a “cat chasing a mouse” might not generate as interesting an image as a more complex prompt like “a beautiful 3d rendering of a white and orange cat with huge paws, chasing a grey mouse with large eyes, on a country trail, morning sunrise, trending on artstation”.

I highly encourage you to check out this terrific 82-page free guidebook published by Guy Parsons for inspiration and information on how to generate awesome prompts.

Use Free AI Text-to-Image Generators to Practice Prompt Crafting

Another recommended approach to help you learn the ropes of prompt “crafting” is by practicing on various free AI art platforms. Some of the platform interfaces are extremely simple (i.e., Craiyon) while others (MidJourney) are a little more complicated to use.