So I’ve been using DALL-E, the AI art software, to create pictures of mammoths to use as graphics. The only problem is that DALL-E can’t always remember what a mammoth is supposed to look like and has terrible problems with both trunks and tusks, rendering most of the art it produces unusable.
I thought I’d share some of the failures here.
Well, you get the idea. Who would have guessed that tusks would be such a problem?
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
The first one is not a failure. Fight me.
I agree Cheesy, the first one is rather cute tbh.
I’d been meaning to ask where all the new mammoth pics on the posts were coming from, and now I know. (I like the ones with glasses)
I hear/see from everyone else who uses these programs that they have the same kind of weirdness, but what do you expect from software named after a Surrealist?
What does TMOTUS stand for? Terrifying Monster of the United States?
Mind you, I like the cartoon one driving the pink car. I think s/he/they would probably fit some story.
The first one is fine as long as it’s edited to remove the trunk/tusk thing. The elephant in the circus outfit is OK as long as it had hair. Replace the top hat with a fedora and you’ve got a mansplaining MRA.
Yeah, some of these are fine or could get by with a little cropping. I mean, have you seen some of the natural tusks on elephants and actual mammoth skeletons? They aren’t all picture perfect glamor shots
There’s something strangely compelling about #4… and it’s unitusk.
The last one gives off “woodcut print, old-school demon art” vibes, though obviously the artist also used watercolor. (Pretending that this is not from an AI)
Look up “Moab AI Art”. Nightmare fuel.
I’m partial to the green/red-eyed one. I mean, it’s not a mammoth, but I like it. Looks like an awesome D&D monster (whether or not it is hostile remains to be seen).
The first one looks like it’s imitating the style of Finnish paleoartist Tom Björklund. He’s done some mammoths, but more often prehistoric humans, and a human figure might be actually posed something like that.
I’m really partial to the one driving the pink sports car
What the hell is a “TMOTUS”?
@Snowberry
Honestly, it may be the pose, but that last one gives me Robert Crumb vibes. Which, considering Crumb’s attitudes, is kind of appropriate for the site anyway.
Now do “Mammoth in a fedora”
@Robert: I feel like I want to help Unitusk. Maybe he’s the hero of a kids’ book about, I dunno, dentistry or something.
@Battering Lamb: It looks bewildered, so probably not dangerous. Some mammoth/gopher hybrid.
@Snowberry: They train the AI on images of art from the web so you can ask for “Thing X in the style of Artist Y”. For which, of course, none of the artists are credited or recompensed because late capitalism.
@Jenora: Agreed on Crumb.
I still don’t see anything wrong with Pink Car mammoth. The tusks could be a little shorter, but since it’s cartoony, that’s not a requirement. Some MRA or incel could do a “women drivers, amirite?” rant that would fit that pic.
At least there’s editing and you can try inpainting to get a more desired result, providing of course you get a decent result to work with in the first place. 🙂 I don’t use DALL-E as much these days because I haven’t been happy with a lot of the results and 115 attempts (including editing) for $15 is to expensive because you can burn through that 115 credits way too quickly so it starts to add up. I’m using Midjourney now that has unlimited prompts for $30/month (still expensive) and I’m usually much happier with the results.
It still doesn’t understand hands, wings, or horns though.
@GSS ex-noob:
What does TMOTUS stand for? Terrifying Monster of the United States?
@runsinbackground:
What the hell is a “TMOTUS”?
To me, it looks as if it would be quite at home on Sesame Street: a bipedal monotusked relative of Mr. Snuffleupagus. A shaggy land narwhal.
And #4 could be a science fiction writer’s prompt: come up with an evolutionary explanation for this critter’s tuskhandle. (A worldbuilding detail of His Dark Materials that particularly impressed me was Pullman’s realization that a biological wheel could be workable if the wheel and axle were different organisms.)
Me, I would have. But I did research AI programming before. 😛
TMOTUS has my vote. Don’t call her a failure.
Actually I kind of like all of these mutated mammoths.
The main reason wheels are almost never seen in nature is that wheels are not useful in nature. Try using a wheeled vehicle in forest, or even on a nice large level-looking expanse of floodplain that, up close, is hummocked, contains gopher holes, and is more mud than solid in places. One SF author (Robert Sawyer in “Starplex”) also came up with a wheeled critter (and it was also a symbiosis with the wheel and axle, among other things, being separate organisms) but it’s hard to think of any environment where it would actually be able to move easily, aside from salt flats, which are void of anything useful to eat. Perhaps a niche might exist for something that can scoot quickly across a salt flat and forages at its edges, where the advantage is predator evasion, but nothing on Earth has had the wherewithal to specialize in such a niche.
What could be a bit more plausible is a critter that moves on something akin to tank treads. An SF author did this, too: Robert L. Forward in “Dragon’s Egg”. That one had the whole creature slowly rotate as a unit, with a plated exoskeleton acting as the treads, and it simply crushed vegetation in its path and sucked up the juices to feed, making it a “destructive grazer” herbivore of the sort that the huge and fuel-hungry sauropod dinos might have been. A symbiotic version could have a separate “tank body” and “treads” and either could operate in any terrain where actual tanks can operate, so, not too steep or too densely bouldered (which would act as natural tank blocks).
Obvious counterpoints are that some life forms would be incentivized to evolve “antitank mines” of some sort. The indiscriminate-grazer one is obviously vulnerable to anything poisonous growing in its path, though the poisonous thing only benefits if it badly thins their numbers or else sticks up and is brightly colored or something so they learn to steer elsewhere when they see those. (And then they protect everything sufficiently close by, so expect something akin to the immune critters that shelter under sea anemone tentacles to not have to deal with sharks.) Trees with big, thick, sturdy enough boles would act as tank blocks, but would need time to grow to the needed size before they were safe. And God help one of those things if it drove over a bullet ant nest in its bulldozing of the landscape …
Following up on the almost in the opening: some life forms (bacteria of a particular group?) apparently have a flagellum that attaches by a nano-bearing that allows it to rotate freely. The flagellum is a nonliving thing akin to a fingernail or a feather, so avoids the problem generally attendant a non-symbiotic bio-wheel. If it breaks or falls off the microorganism will just grow a new one, complete with the attachment bearing, using the same methods used by cells to assemble and emplace other transmembrane protein complexes. Same when it divides: obviously, one of the daughter cells will initially lack a flagellum and need to grow one. (In case anyone here doesn’t know, a flagellum is essentially a nano-propeller, though water is so viscous at those scales that the shape is elongated into something like a corkscrew rather than the flattish design used on your rustic uncle’s Evinrude. It would be interesting if a microorganism with a flagellum turned up in the outer solar system where there might be a high ammonia percentage. Would it have an intermediate shape between these extremes?)
@Surplus: I enjoyed your comment.
@ gas ex-noob
So did I; so thank you to Surplus for the post and gss for making it pop up again.
In terms of useful body form, nature seems to like the crab format. That is apparently the layout that’s evolved most times separately.
“Oh please daddy, he’s coming round tonight. Please try to be nice.”
“Harumph, I just don’t like crabs, it’s that creepy way they walk sideways. It’s not right.”
At that moment the doorbell rings. Upon opening, the crab boyfriend comes in, walking forwards!
The lobster girl is delighted “Oh darling, you’ve learned to walk forwards to please my dad!”
“Shussh” says the boyfriend “I’m pissed.”
@ Surplus to Requirements
I recall a wheeled creature in the Lensmen series. If I remember correctly, it was found as practically the only lifeform on a very flat desolate planet. About remote control car size. Traveled in a straight line unless it encountered another of its kind to mate with.
The protagonists were momentarily unsure of what it ate until someone almost killed one by standing between it and the sun, demonstrating it was at least in part solar powered.
I don’t believe it was actually relevant to the plot at all, just something stumbled across as a world building detail.
@ Alan Robertshaw
I am not sure I get the joke there
@.45:
@ Alan Robertshaw
I am not sure I get the joke there
The crab hasn’t deliberately adjusted his gait to conform to lobster kinesthetic respectability; he’s walking forward because he’s stumbling around drunk.
@ Full Metal Ox
Ah. I am American if it isn’t clear. Pissed means mad to me, not drunk
@.45:
I’m a fellow Yank who learned the usage from this Monty Python paean to the great Western philosophers:
@FM Ox: I once sang that out loud in semi-public with a number of other people, led by an actual philosopher. And a few years later in the audience of an Eric Idle live show.
I can’t reliably remember any philosophers who aren’t in that song.