Thomas Shepherd – An Experiment in AI Image Generation
AI image generation is so incredible, and it gets better every day. I fed the following description into one image generator:
Sheriff Thomas Shepherd – Age 33, sheriff of Nightshade County in the Finger Lakes of NY. Messy sandy hair, blue/green eyes. He has Asperger’s Syndrome.
The AI returned these four photo-realistic images. I can already tell you which ones best describe the Thomas Shepherd who lives in my head, but I want your opinion. Which do you think best matches your internal picture of Thomas Shepherd?
By the way, these images were created with Starry AI, but there are countless tools available that generate stunningly realistic (and accurate) pictures.
As a creative, I find the best use for AI images is “ideation”. If I create a new character and wish to picture him or her, AI is a great help because I can feed it an exact description and have the AI generate a portrait that is far more accurate than a stock photo of someone who somewhat matches those traits.
My friend and fellow writer Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn switched to AI-generated images for blog posts and no longer uses stock photographs. When someone with Joanna’s experience speaks, I listen. I’m only skimming the surface, and I can’t get over the depth of possibilities offered by AI image generation.
Are you using AI to generate photo realistic images? How about book covers?
