ChatGPT Illustration Basics

Do you have a ChatGPT4 subscription? Have you ever tried describing what you'd like the model to illustrate? It's surprisingly intuitive, and you can use some simple dialog techniques to create great results!

Start a Dialog About What You Want to See

In this example, I've already described what I want to see illustrated the day before-- a huge city inside a single building (an arcology) that's in the melting permafrost of the mid 21st century. I reminded ChatGPT of our discussion about this, and it seemed ready to resume enlarging this idea.

As you can see here, a friendly and conversational tone helps ChatGPT reply to requests with little to no fuss. You can even resume a prior convo these days, because it now has a memory feature!

Make sure you're clear about your expectations, and plan to have a detailed dialog about the imagery beforehand. Then go ahead and politely ask ChatGPT to create the image result!

Modify the Initial Result

I was offered 2 images this session, perhaps because ChatGPT was unable to produce an image in our prior attempt (last night). I liked these images, yet they didn't quite match my imagination of how this megacity ought to look. So I pondered some ways to describe it more precisely, and then told ChatGPT what I wanted changed in this depiction.

Because I was envisioning a fantastical book cover style, I used these phrases to explain it: “visual appearance that mimics gumoil prints”; “resembles a sensational SF novel from the 1960s”

Imagery Edit, Example 1

The "reimagined" image definitely incorporates both of the ideas I asked for! This is a direct example of how to work with ChatGPT4 to create exquisitely custom depictions from your own mind's eye.

Read on for some examples of how to work with another AI art tool, Midjourney...