Time flies…

July 2022 – that’s when, somewhere on Reddit, I stumbled upon AI art generated with Disco Diffusion.

That was sort of a “splash screen” / poster on the page of Disco Diffusion. I saw all the art generated by other people, and I got very excited about it and what it does.

I didn’t know much about the detailed technicalities of AI image generation. I knew the general principles of diffusion generation. Read some articles here and there. This, for example, gave me some idea (the image below is borrowed from the article).

I followed some guides and set up on my PC the Disco Diffusion. But after doing the generations manually, one by one, I thought I wanted to scale it up a little bit. Or at least automate to see more results and make them wildly different. I was also tired of coming up with prompts:)

I’ve set up a few things:

• I got the text of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (I own a copy of the physical book…)
• Ran some logic through the whole text to randomly split it into chunks of text. Approximately 200 +/- chunks in total.
• Each chunk I ran through the regular expression to extract long enough, random sentences and collect those sentences into a list (array).
• Fed each sentence as a prompt to the Disco Diffusion with settings set for a certain number of steps and also safe .gif of the generation progress
• Created a Telegram bot that would send each generated GIF to me.
• Ran that through the night.
  

In the morning, I got ± 200 gifs. From awesome to weird. And each of them showed how the diffusion was generating those images. I just sat for hours watching all of them.

Recently, 4 years later, I stumbled upon this Telegram bot, remembered the good old times and thought I should document this somewhere. Hence, below is a subset of these GIFs with the relevant prompts (sentences). First a prompt, then the result. Just to be clear:)

If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom’s Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze ‘n’ Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom’s Truck Stop.

It’s been at least five seconds since Hiro moved, so he checks this area for grappling hooks again and resumes his circuit around the edge of the yacht.

The twentieth century’s mass media, high literacy rates, and high-speed transportation all served as superb vectors for the infection.

The Ports serve a function analogous to airports This is where you drop into the Metaverse from somewhere else.

The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene.

He takes another drag on his cigarette, spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out against the ceiling.

And there are more… ±200:) They are all mostly strange. I used some random model/dataset that was being discussed back then online. Downloaded god knows from where. It surely had a preference for architecture, but there was zero information about what it was trained on. I would suspect it was not respecting any rights of any sources… It was a bit like the Wild West back then.

But I liked that experimentation. Taught me a lot of things. Demystified a lot of AI magic back then, and I’ve stayed skeptical ever since!:)

I will download the whole archive and make another post with a proper gallery. Maybe I will also compress the GIFs a bit or convert them to a smaller format.