Like many, I’ve been thinking closely about the kinds of text prompts I am using with Generative AI models like Bard and ChatGPT and Dall-E and Firefly.

This morning, as I was working on a SmallPoem — in this case, a haiku inspired by the long day of rain yesterday that was desperately needed — I decided to feed the entire haiku into the new Firefly art site, and see what it would design. Firefly works like Dall-e in many ways — you add text and it generates image — but it has many more bells and whistles for artistic design that I am still exploring. What it doesn’t have that Dall-e does (and which I like) is the “variation” button that re-creates the art in different ways. But Firefly does generate four images for each prompt, so there are choices.

I designed many variations and then chose four that I liked best, and moved them into a photo collage maker, and layered the haiku on top. I think it looks interesting, although I am not sure the images created by Firefly gave me anything too surprising, which is too bad, since I was hoping the poem as text might bend me in another direction. It seems to be that the site got focused on the words “rain” and “prayer.”