My Experiments with Dall-E

In November 2022, Dall-E 2 was opened to the public without a waitlist. This is a deep learning AI model that generates digital images from natural language descriptions called ‘prompts’. I signed up just to see what the buzz was about and since then, I have been quite thoroughly enjoying the artificial intelligence experience.

A new user gets 50 credits to play around with, after which you get 15 free credits every month – each prompt or variation uses one point. You can buy credits also. I have not yet explored ‘Outpainting’ which is an editor interface that lets you tweak the images that get thrown up with your prompts.

Alas, I did not use my 50 credits too well. First prompts were extremely mundane – a log cabin in the woods, for instance. Nice but meh.

I played a bit with watercolours and some nostalgia. The effects were pretty.

Photo-real images with my rudimentary prompts were a bit hit or miss.

Then I learnt that with its heavy learning material, the AI interface was aware of thousands of artist styles and aesthetics. A muddled prompt for something in the Mughal Art style threw up a pretty but somewhat confused assortment of elements.

I tried a couple of classical elements together: a koel, a mango tree, and an ornate window in the style of Amar Chitra Katha, and I was really pleased with these images.

Line drawings were satisfactory, illustrations of flowers in the botanical style were near-perfect and even this render of a phoenix was very acceptable.

I wanted to represent the epic road trips my sister and I undertook last year and I was pretty happy with a couple of results in a cartographic rendering.

As you see from the column on the right, I seized the chance to represent this blog’s title in an expressionist output.

I explored what might emerge if I suggested ‘EH Shepard’ or ‘Raja Ravi Varma’ or ‘MC Escher’.

A photo-real request for a Pallas’ Cat (this gorgeous feline was one of the highlights of the trip we took to Ladakh in August 2022) was quite stunning.  

Since many users were bingeing on androids and ghostly apparitions, I didn't go down too much the futuristic route, although a neon digital art image of a mesmerising phone screen delivered to the brief.

As this column says, we may never have to use stock images again, or struggle to express an abstract idea. I have mourned for years that I cannot draw. Now who cares?

Touch and Go

Balancing out the pleasure you get from online games is the hoops the makers put you through in order to get you to buy from them – coins, energy, gemstones… all the in-game currencies that apply in that universe. Understandable, I suppose. But I’m miserly and would much prefer to watch their advertisements to support them than fork out cash just because I’m impatient.

Most games would like you playing them – a lot. Anything to keep you hooked and coming back for more. Running out of currency? A sudden gift or windfall will keep you in the game for while longer.

Then I came across Murder in the Alps. It’s a hidden objects game with a lovely 1930s theme. Anna, our protagonist, is the journalist-detective and you must help her find the clues to piece together this very intriguing locked room mystery in which corpses keep turning up with delicious regularity. The set of suspects includes a cuckoo Indophile professor who is chasing after the elusive Vedic recipe for the elixir Soma. The artwork is spectacular, the voice acting is fantastic, the interface smooth and exciting – the atmosphere of the game is top-notch.

 

Except, they don’t want you to play.

You get 200 energy to start off with. And as Anna examines a scene looking for these hidden objects that will help her understand what the hell is going on in this forsaken, snow-boarded inn in the Swiss mountains, every item you touch on her behalf will drain you of 5 to 30 units. Depending on how frenzied you are, you could play for 10 or 20 minutes at the most.

And then, unless you are willing to pay quite handsomely for more energy, you wait. The energy replenishes itself at the rate of one unit in eight minutes. Which means a wait of upwards of 26 hours to max your quota – which, I repeat, lasts you gameplay of 20 minutes. If you are desperate, there are ads to watch that’ll give you 10 energy at a time.

It's perfect sadhana actually. You touch the screen with the utmost awareness and only when you must. And you learn to wait. This view is solipsistic and you must grant me the indulgence: considering I have a tendency to be addicted to games, that’s the sound of my Guru having the last laugh.

Heave ho!

keep this
toss that
    spring
~Carolyn Hall


Clearly, it’s time for spring cleaning. I didn’t know but sometimes, I get a nudge. Or like now, a prod.

I have been wanting to declutter my room. The bed takes up too much room, and significance. Under the bed, I have... why, yes, stuff. So yesterday, the cots went. And I have been wringing my hands all morning over the stuff that used to lie under them. Music Cassettes.

A particularly clingy form of the past, these tapes. Old selves sticking to us like small bits of sticky tape that won’t let go unless they cling somewhere else. These boxes – some six of them – were the refined lot. We threw out a much bigger haul a few years ago but these were the precious ones.

Children today will never understand the trouble we went to to acquire our music. We couldn’t buy everything we liked. When friends and relatives had tapes we wanted, they were borrowed and copied. I remember standing two tape recorders face to face, switching off fans and other whirring machines, closing doors and imposing strict silence, while one machine played and the other recorded. Then technology improved, and we got our double-deckers that recorded internally. I made collections for Shweta, for myself... some filmi, some ghazals, a lot of classical music and qawwalis.

This morning, I hunkered down to paw through them and shook my head again over the whimsical coot I used to be. Never truly artistic but I liked pretty things. And I went to work at it with quite a lot of enthusiasm, even if no great talent. The album covers for my favourite music were never good enough for the ambience they created within me, so I would go about trying to creating the right ones. I had a bag full of greeting cards, which I would cut to size and fit into the covers. They had to match. Afternoon ragas got afternoon light and lazy pastoral scenes. Ghazals got flowers, bowers, peacocks; Talat Mehmood got a mountain and a river... and Lata Sings Ghalib got a royal, gold Mughal motif.

A few years ago, we bought a music player that was also a music ripper. I could play my tapes on it and it would store a digitised version on a USB drive. This was a god-send, and I managed to prioritise my ‘save-first’ music and convert something like a 100 cassettes of music before the player started to misbehave. I’d exhausted my drive and that’s how that stayed. Unless I got that fixed, these half a dozen boxes were just lying there, waiting for me to do something about them.

I considered it deeply. And then came to the conclusion that I would have to let them go. I might have changed my mind, but the raddiwala came right away to take the newspapers and I knew it was time. In compassionate silence, he paid me Rs 3/kg: Rs 54 for 18kg of music cassettes.
And oh, they were priceless.

Tech Upgrade

Every neighbourhood carries its own sounds - we all know that... from years of listening to those hawkers, this traffic, the driver with the annoying backing tone who takes forever to park, tinny Suprabhatam from a distant temple every morning, that moulvi as he raises his voice in azaan five times a day, the coppersmiths, the tailorbirds... there must be a unique sound palette for every street in the world.

Ours is seeing a new trend. Loudspeakers. The Cantonment Board is sending out an auto with warnings of the dire things that will befall citizens who do not pay their taxes. We get blaring voices asking if we have any old zari in our coffers that we'd like to recycle. The sofa repairers have a neat professional set up in rather chaste Telugu: "We have all the material, equipment and wherewithal to set your living room right again."

Now into this rather ambitious terrain has sailed our Muggu man. He sells rai muggu - white stone powder that we use to make adornments on our doorsteps. He need not have bothered, in my opinion. His hawking call was very distinct... "Rai Muuggggu! Amma, Raai Muugguuu!" Anyone with a ear cocked for the sound would hear it several houses away and rush to the door to accost him. None of the vegetable, flower or broom vendors have felt the need to improve their system, which is already very effective.

However, there is no gainsaying an adventurous nature. So Muggu Man has employed a 'friend' to record his call for him. It has not worked very well. First he runs it from a small contraption in the front of his moped, which he finds uncomfortable. Then the recording itself is a 12-second audio: "Mugguammomuggu!" The voice is fraught with self-conscious anxiety and since there are no spaces between what should be words, it feels like someone is trying to sell the last grain of muggu before he dies. Certainly, for the householder, there would not be enough time to go out and enquire.

"So, what's all this?" I asked him the other day. MM switched off the sound in disgust. "He has not done a good job," he complained about his friend, "I have to go to him again!"

I heard him again the other day. Some spaces had been inserted but the voice was still tense. And since then, I have not heard him at all.

Test

So I finally downloaded Swype on my iPad, which makes it an absolute pleasure to type out long sentences. Makes it possible to blog on the go, respond straight away to urgent mails when earlier I found myself waiting till I got to a computer. I learned to type on qwerty keyboards as a teen and type fairly speedily, so you can imagine the torture of tapping.

Hurrah for Swype.

The unkindest cut

We feel that the local man in charge of our regular power cuts has given over to megalomania. We used to have them initially in two-hour slots spaced out considerately for households needing to use kitchen gadgets for the day's meals and such, for harried people leaving for school and work as well as others doing their morning kriyas. (Electricity is strictly not a requirement for this activity but it helps, of course – the buzz of household gadgets keeps other intruding sounds away, and there is always the menace of mosquitoes that can be held at bay with a breeze propelled by electric power.) Of course this also served for everyone requiring to charge their tech paraphernalia.

The first cut used to occur promptly at 10.30am and was restored at 12.30. As humans, whose thing in life is adaptability we, accordingly, adapted. Early in the morning, we fought over power plug points, made our chutneys, sent off last minute mails at 10.25 and sat back in somewhat of a smug attitude. In the break, we puttered around the garden, caught up on the bird scene in the neighbourhood, read the newspapers, and some even going so far as to read a book! It was idyllic.

At 4.30 in the afternoon was our second cut of the day. Walkers would reach promptly for their shoes, others for grocery bags, the colony uncles chose to huddle for leisurely powwows. Dusk would gently fall, leading some to make quite a to-do about their sunset pictures. With normal life restored at 6.30, the populace would withdraw indoors to prayers, television and dinner.

Now this is a thing of the past. The man at the switchboard has lost his rhythm. Sometimes, at 6.30am, when most of God’s creatures and snuggling in their razais, dreaming their last dreams of the night, they are awakened most rudely by a cessation of fan-blades. Now having thus dragged oneself out of bed, there is no easy method for obtaining hot water for one’s ablutions, the overhead tanks have not been filled and plans for breakfast must be altered very quickly to include Spencer’s wheat bread. You will note that I said ‘sometimes’. For, at other times, it is another time. Sometimes, 7am, sometimes 7.15, once 8am, occasionally 11am and now he has passed over the morning slot altogether. For two days now it has been 12-2pm and 4.30-6.30pm, which gives us barely two and half hours in between to get the fridge cold again. Food is spoiling and for persons who worry about laptop batteries forming the wrong kinds of memory, this is bad indeed.

Although I have described vividly the torments of unexpected cuts, I have not yet touched on the other kind – the torment of uncertainty and hope! What happens when the citizenry is expecting a power cut and it doesn’t occur? As a sample, I studied my father. At 10.40, it becomes clear that the schedule isn’t being adhered to. Having put off eating so that he can maximise on the router being available, he is famished. Should he have breakfast anyway? Or perhaps he should fit in one more response to an email in the next five minutes before it might be shut down? He teeters, Dear Reader, between work station and kitchen in the most piteous manner. But worse, when we have braced ourselves comprehensively and nothing at all happens. “Is it a festival today? Or some holiday?” Why, we wonder in private, aloud and during every interaction, has there not been a power cut. Having no faith in free lunches, we wonder what retribution will be like.

The maid discusses the cuts as much as she discusses the weather: “Ee rozu teesinadaa, akka?” and then tells me how it was in her locality these past 24 hours. We have concluded that we have a control freak on our hands. Our lives will run, he imagines, on his say-so (as indeed they do). Do you think he breaks out into maniacal laughter every time he pulls the plug? Or that his eyes gleam when his hand hovers on the button and then withdraws, knowing well the consternation he is spreading?

As I write this, my father has been wandering around the house muttering to himself. Tufts of hair stand upright on his head, and he wears a pinched look. There has been no cut today.

Rabba Rabba mee barsa

Praise be, it’s raining! Coming down purposefully, bounty intended in every drop.
August is nearly ending and it seemed as though the winds had died, the clouds were no longer drifting and we in Hyderabad haven’t received even half our allotment!

But a good, prolonged shower (accompanied with thunder and lightning, if you please) dampens those complaints – the ixora is looking up, the car looks scrubbed in a way we can’t manage and I have occasion to share this video (via Sowmya) that is many kinds of smart. Indeed, what is the right way to conduct ourselves when caught in a sudden downpour?



And, whyever not a haiku?

reaching
where the hose won’t —
summer rain
Harriot West

Steep curve

My father was telling me today about a talk he gave in 1995. He’d been asked to give an address at the Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India. He had talked on this subject before but it had been to smaller groups comprising more general audiences. But on this occasion he was talking about ‘Demystifying the Internet’ to people who worked in the field of computers. The talk went well – the packed hall was peopled by hundreds of curious specialists and it was, he says, quite the largest number of people he had addressed.

My father jumped on to the internet bandwagon fairly early. He was part of Shammi Kapoor’s ‘Internet Users Club of India’ in 1994-95. He would bring home dot matrix sheets full of lawyer jokes in font Lucida. On our first computer, I remember playing code games on DOS mode. He signed me up for my own hotmail account in 1998 (I think!).

And now in 2014, he sent me this infographic that tells us how far we’ve come, how rapidly the world has changed. 2.4 Billion people chattering away!

My father was born in 1941 – he has seen technologies come and he has seen them go: the VCR, the pager, floppy drives of various sizes...  “I’m blessed in many ways,” he said to me today, “and I feel so lucky to have ridden this wave.”

Teething troubles

So I succumbed and acquired a tablet.
I enjoyed Nishu's iPad tremendously when I visited her and she urged me to get one as well. I was very susceptible to that suggestion. I seriously considered an android - they said terrific things about the Nexus 7 - but then came down in favour of this solid 3:4 aspect ratio. And there was the matter of the retina display that spoilt me for the rest of the world.
I felt elitist, my middle-classness raised a din at having to pay more than I strictly should but I let instinct subdue my samskaras.

But what a lot of work this new gadget is! I'm unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, so suddenly Apple ID, iTunes and iCloud... it all hit me at once. Giving them my soul's deepest secrets was a mandatory step - they would need my credit card details to even let me over the threshold. And bummer, they charged me Rs 60 right away, confirming their dastardly intentions of charging me whatever they felt like, whenever they felt like it. Some frantic netsearch later, I am assured they just need to check I had been truthful - my 60 rupees (just one dollar, some superior First World person said) have not been snatched away, just held as surety. Yes, but they should have said.