This week’s selection is “Create Stunning AI Art” by Antonis Tsagaris and Andreas Pampoukkas.
This is a book about generating incredible 2D artwork using advanced AI technology, and it would seem to have little to do with 3D printing. But read on, as you’ll see there is actually quite a strong connection.
The book is about new “text to image” AI tools that literally take a string of text (words) and convert it into an amazing and highly detailed picture. Think of it like writing the caption for an image, and then having the image appear from thin air.
How does this work? It’s AI magic, where software is trained by examining millions — or even billions — of images online and their captions. Essentially, the software can “recognize” images.
There are a number of online tools one can use, both paid, free and DIY open source that provide text to image capability with varying quality.
Using such systems is a profound experience, where the images you receive are certainly not of real scenes, but instead strange, dreamy visions that have a strong “flavor” of what you requested.
This book explains in basic terms the concepts behind the technology, and details all the currently available options for accessing the technology.
A considerable part of the book is dedicated to the science of “prompts”. These are the text input statements that drive the image generation. You might think it’s an easy matter to simply “ask for what you want”, but it’s actually more complex and nuanced. Slight variations in text sequence, word selection and other factors.
Learning to create “good” prompts is the key to using this technology.
That’s where the 3D print angle comes in. It’s my belief that while “text to image” exists today, “text to 3D model” will emerge soon. Such a technology could enable general users to easily create highly complex 3D models with those forecasted tools in the near future.
But to use such tools, one would have to become familiar with the concept of prompts, which is why I’m recommending this book. If you learn the “text to image” workflow using prompts, you will have a much easier step to “text to 3D model” when it arrives.
If you can get through this book, you’ll be in a great position to be AI-enabled for the future. And you’ll certainly create some interesting images along the way.
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Via Amazon
