Stable Diffusion is an open-source AI image generation model that was recently released to the public. You may have heard of Dall-E, which is a similar model, that to date has not been widely available to the public. Basically, these models work as follows: They take a text phrase as their prompt and generate an image based on a model that has been trained on a gigantic database of images and their associated descriptors. The results are surprisingly good. In fact, they’re so good, that may people are frightened about what these models will mean for fraud, copyright, misinformation, deepfakes, etc.

I thought it would be fun to try it out on generating some sailboat artwork using a demo site that had someone else had kindly set up. Because, why not. I like sailboats and need some new artwork to hang on my wall.

I got some interesting results.

Impressionist Paintings

Each text prompt produced four images on the demo site. The first one I tried was “Sailboat in the style of Monet.” Here’s what I got.

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I looked at this one for a while before I realized what’s wrong with it. Initially, I thought it looked like the most realistic sailboat, but just seems to look small. The relative size of the water ripples compared to the boat make it look like a model sailboat to me.

But then I realized what else is wrong: The sail looks like a mainsail and a jib at the same time It has a billowy shape and the foot doesn’t appear to have a boom unless you squint at the clew (or is that the tack). That made me look closer at the bow and stern, which also don’t seem to be very clear. The left end looks like a raised bow, and the right end has what looks like a bowsprit.

This merging of bow/stern and jib/mainsail features will be a common theme with these pictures.

But given the fact that this is “impressionism” this is still the most passable sailboat I was able to produce.

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I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. There are clearly two masts. The sail in the foreground is clearly a foresail. If the sail in the background is a mizzen or main sail, then the boat looks to be broken in half. If that sail is another boat’s jib, then the stern of that boat is underwater, or there has been a serious collision.

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Again, this sort of looks right in certain sections, but if you look at it as a whole, something is off. You’ve got what looks like a jib on the left, and a mainsail on the right. But for some reason there are two masts and the mainsail is not attached to the mast. Then you have a loose interpretation of a hull with red and green reflections of the white sails. Maybe I should have used “psychedelic sailboats” as my prompt.

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Something has gone horribly wrong with this sailboat. It looks like it is sinking, but the jib is magically held up in the air with no mast. Maybe it is being swallowed up by the gates of Hell.

(Synthesized) Photographs

For my second try, I decided to see how well the model generated photographs from scratch. From what I’d read, these models are shockingly good at “making up” photographs. My prompt this time was “sailboat race photograph,” and the results were, um not so realistic.

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If I ignore the configuration of the battens, stitching, or whatever those lines on the sails are, this sort of looks like some sailboats – except the ones that are underwater with just the tips of the sails sticking out. Oh, and the hulls are stand up paddleboards.

In many of these, it looks like the AI is trying to generate a watermark or signature in the bottom right hand corner, but it just comes out looking like gibberish.

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Ok, now we’re getting nuts. This boat has two mainsails running wing-and-wing with a 2-dimensional skipper driving from the cockpit-bow. And then there’s some sort of snow man on top of the mountains in the background.

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If I half-close my eyes, this one sort of looks OK. The two boats look like they’re out of two completely different dimensions. The main boat has a lot going on. I’m not sure what’s what. There a prominent squiggly line for some reason. The mirror finish hull is pretty cool. I’d like to get one of those to match my mirrored sunglasses. But again, we have issues with the reflection being incongruous.

$C:\Users\bdoty\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\F4D19670.tmp$

This looks like line sketch super-imposed several times onto an image of the ocean. And the boats are not really even close to realistic. Again, we have confusion of the jib and mainsail. Something strange is happening on the horizon near the left edge of the photo.

Verdict

I was more impressed with the impressionist “paintings” than the “photographs.” Even though there were some clear technical errors with both, they were more conspicuous and less forgivable in the photographs. Impressionism is supposed to give you the general feeling of a sailboat, not necessarily articulate minor details like sail types and buoyancy, right?