An AI robot drawing a portrait
In a world where hyphens are the delicate bridges between identities, one might ponder: how do AI image generators parse hyphenated subjects, such as Indian-American? And what happens when a Labrador Retriever enters the mix? Random test results from an experiment on online and offline AI diffusion models. The title image above is a composite of hand drawn artwork and AI art created using SD1.5 and Dall-E 2.
1. ‘An Irish-American’
2. An Irish-American?
Dall-E 3 created Image 1 using the prompt “An Irish-American”. It created four images: all contained heavily freckled, ginger-haired men holding a glass of beer. Image 2 was close to what I had in mind. It was created locally using SDXL Base, SDXL refiner, a custom illustration Lora, a bloated prompt, and few rounds of in-painting. I haven’t drawn anything into the image.
3. ‘An Indian-American Woman’ 4. ‘An American-Indian Woman’
Images 3 and 4 were both created by Dall-E 3 using the prompts shown in the captions. Merely switching the words around the hyphen resulted in a person that looked significantly different. The “Indian-American” looks more “Indian” while the heavily bejewelled “American-Indian” looks like a Caucasian wearing Indian clothes. Both characters seem to be shopping for vegetables and spices in an exotic market! Image 3 could easily be “an Indian woman”.
5. ‘An Indian-American Labrador retriever’ 6. SDXL
Image 5 was created by Dall-E. It is identical, in content, to images created using the prompt “a Labrador Retriever”. I’m not sure how DALL-E interpreted the Indian-American aspect of the prompt. Image 6 was what I wanted to create. Again, it was made using SDXL using the setup mentioned earlier.