The Many Faces of Luna According to DALL·E
A little while ago, Mr. M got early access to DALL·E, the AI tool that generates images based on a text prompt. It’s absolutely incredible, and you’ve probably seen some of the images floating around on social media.
Because he’s married to an author, Mr. M decided to put DALL·E’s might toward creating some new book covers for me. It was close to the release of Eclipse the Moon, so he included Luna in the covers. Here are the results! You can click on the images to get a slightly bigger version.
First, he went with a straightforward request: “sci-fi romance book cover with a woman holding a small white fox-like creature.”
You can see that DALL·E really struggles to produce proper words, getting close in a few cases—I’ve always wanted to read ROMANAC RONCK FENCE!—but not really succeeding. And it’s hilarious that it generated a few classic clinch covers, just with one of the humans replaced with a fox. 😂🙈
Okay, but what about retro covers? Behold “1960’s sci-fi book cover of a woman holding a small, white, fox-like creature.”
The vibe feels like 60s SF, but the words are still gibberish.
To get rid of the words, Mr. M moved on to generating art rather than covers. It’s fascinating how different “60’s sci-fi art of a woman holding a small, white, fox-like creature” is from the cover option above.
The top-right image here is my favorite of the entire experiment. The lady looks absolutely nothing like any of my characters, but she’s so poised, aloof, and elegant—and then she’s holding up Luna with a lobster-claw hand. It cracks me up every time.
Maybe the 70s were a better time for SF art? Let’s find out: “70’s sci-fi art of a woman holding a small, white, fox-like creature.”
I could definitely see some of these on a book from the 1970s, so good job DALL·E!
And finally, just for fun, what if the Starlight’s Shadow crew wandered into an anime universe? Behold “a woman holding a small white fox-like creature standing next to a space ship anime.”
Adorable! 😍 Now I really need an anime studio to pick up the Starlight series just so I can see an animated Luna.
This is such interesting technology, and apparently they just opened it up to a lot more people and are selling commercial rights to the results, which means someone really could make a book cover from the generated images.
Which style is your favorite?
