An experiment with an A.I. to create The Shrike

As a fan of the Mortal Engines book series, I was recently playing around with OpenAI's Dall.E, an AI system that generates images from textual descriptions.

My focus was on one of the most intriguing characters from the series, the Stalker known as Shrike. I was excited to see what Dall.E would come up with based on my description of this mysterious character. 

At first, my prompts were not specific enough and I was disappointed with the results. But after a few tries, I finally managed to give Dall.E more descriptive inputs and I was blown away by the results. 

The images that Dall.E generated were exactly crazily close to what one could imagine the Shrike may look like for a book reader. 

My initial chat prompt was "the shrike creature from mortal engines with green eyes". It would seem the AI interpreted the definition of Shrike as the bird:

 

So I updated the prompt to make it clear I was talking about a man / robot:

"the shrike man  / robot AI from "mortal engines" book with green eyes"

I then focused on what The Shrike's face could look like:

"the shrike man  / robot AI from "mortal engines" book with green eyes - scary and ugly face"

I then tried out:

""the shrike" from the "mortal engines" novels. He is a man with a robot body. Evil green eyes with a nasty looking face. whole body image. His hands have knives for fingers. He looks haunted and hours away from death."

These works were pretty cool and in a sense will give concept designers a run for their money. Still, nothing beats Nick Keller's original Mortal Engines concept art!

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