I tried some prompts with OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator around fall 2023. Holmes’s criticism in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” that Watson “degraded what should have been a course of lectures” got me thinking of a contemporary course of lectures: TED Talks. I decided to see how DALL-E would represent a Sherlock Holmes TED Talk of a well-known story. The text in bold is the prompt I gave to DALL-E and the following images are the results.
sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
I then decided to describe the type of scene I wanted, and exclude the subject of the talk, as DALL-E appeared to be interpreting it as instruction to put a band around Sherlock Holmes.
sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
sherlock holmes TED talk in a dark auditorium
To make Sherlock Holmes more recognizable, I gave DALL-E some iconography to incorporate.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Maybe I was overloading DALL-E with imagery. I removed ‘inverness cape’ from the prompt.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Would calling it a ‘cap’ instead of a ‘hat’ make a difference? No.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker cap in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Returning to the first prompt, I decided that DALL-E didn’t recognize “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” as “the one with the snake” and gave it an image to show in the presentation.
TED Talk about snakes, presented by sherlock holmes
Because the “speckled band” prompts were yielding illustrations, I tried specifying that I wanted a more realistic image.
photograph of sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
Finally, I tried a series of prompts where I directed DALL-E to imitate the style of Sherlock Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes giving a TED Talk
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium
(Interesting in this and the following that DALL-E included a light source without prompting.)
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes speaking in a dark auditorium
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
In conclusion, my thoughts about these images align with a statement from the story I used in the first prompt: “some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace.”
BONUS IMAGES
At first, I mistakenly used the wrong spelling of “deerstalker.” I don’t have a problem admitting to that, since the results were pretty funny.
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
The scion where I live is The Notorious Canary-Trainers, and I tried some related images.
a sidney paget illustration of a man training canaries to pick pockets
a movie scene of canaries training with machine guns and flamethrowers, seen through a doorway
(Wayne’s World fans will understand.)
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