If you enjoyed the AI art presented at the beginning of Trivia 8, as well as our tribute to Jack O’Neill on Christmas Eve, we’re about to sit down with the man who brought those images to life! Adam Cahill, husband to Yvie Cahill over at Wormhole X-Tremists, has taken on ambitious goal of creating a piece of Stargate art to represent every single episode of the franchise. Learn how to make this art yourself, and submit it for a cash prize right here at Dial the Gate!

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AI Art Contest ► https://www.dialthegate.com/contest
Mage Space ► https://midjourney.com/home/?callbackUrl=%2Fapp%2F
Midjourney ► https://midjourney.com/home/?callbackUrl=%2Fapp%2F
StableDiffusion Interface ► https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
StableDiffusion AI ► https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:19 – Opening Credits
0:50 – Welcome and Episode Outline
2:27 – Welcome to Adam Cahill, Artist, and Cars Made of Yarn
5:00 – Emperor Palpatine in Stained Glass
6:02 – AI Art is Not Real Art
7:35 – David’s Photoshop Art from College
10:50 – Is AI Stealing Art?
12:49 – How does AI Create an Image?
14:47 – AI Stargate Imagery Contest
16:08 – Fan Prompt: Rodney VS a Giant Lemon
17:40 – The Nox as Mona Lisa
19:33 – Wormhole X-Tremists: Stargate AI Images for Every Episode
20:58 – AI Stargate Images from December Show
31:07 – Stargate Movie AI Image
32:21 – Adam’s AI Tools Demo: Mage.Space
33:52 – Demo: Muad’Dib and Sandworm in Mage.Space
38:40 – Demo: Amanda Tapping in Mage.Space
49:00 – Demo: Julia Roberts in Mage.Space
53:37 – Demo: Burns as Goa’uld in Mage.Space
57:07 – AI Tools: MidJourney
58:50 – Demo: Burns as Goa’uld in MidJourney
1:01:19 – Demo: Stewie Stepping Through the Stargate in MidJourney
1:07:25 – Demo: Samantha Cartter in MidJourney
1:21:05 – Dial the Gate AI Art Contest Details
1:24:16 – AI Image for The Broca Divide
1:27:37 – Wrapping Up with Adam and the Show
1:29:38 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

#Stargate
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#TurtleTimeline

TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Welcome to Episode 161 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ve got a really cool show for you today. Adam Cahill, who designed the AI artwork at the end of last year for our show for the Jack O’Neill’s Night Before Christmas, and the beginning of Trivia episode 8. We went through a whole series of custom Stargate artwork, AI artwork. He’s gonna review some of those here and show us some new ones, and we’ve got a big surprise planned starting off today. Before we get into this, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this, continue on YouTube. Please click that like button. It means a great difference to YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely help the show continue to grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend, and if you wanna get notified about future Icons, click the subscribe icon. And giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops, and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. And we should be featuring some of these clips on our show as we move forward here. This is a live episode, so if you have questions for Adam, you’ll be able to submit those in the chat. I’ve got my moderating team standing by for that. Adam is going to be showing off some software and introducing you on how to make some of this art, this Stargate art yourself using some simple tools. So, feel free to ask the mods those questions and we’ll pass those along to Adam. Adam Cahill, who is an AI artist, and I would say an artist in his own right in general. Welcome, sir. How are you?

Adam Cahill:
Good. How are you?

David Read:
I am well. I am blown away by the stuff that you have been able to create so far.

Adam Cahill:
Thank you.

David Read:
And I think the things that really blew me away were you had these cars made of yarn that appeared to be about maybe half a foot wide, and you were posting them on your Facebook. I’m like, “This guy is ridiculous.” I mean, who would have thought of making cars out of it for the heck of it? And it looks like real yarn and it looks like it has little frilly stuff coming off it. And it’s all electronic.

Adam Cahill:
Today we’ll be lifting the curtain on that and I’ll show you exactly how I did it ’cause it’s not that hard.

David Read:
That’s great. So, tell me a little about your background.

Adam Cahill:
I’m trying to remember where this stuff all started. It started with DALLE-2, which is an open AI product. I think it started getting popular last year, towards the start of last year. I don’t quite remember when it came out, but it was invite only.

David Read:
Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Adam Cahill:
I put my name down. And I think it was six months later, I got an email at 2:00 in the morning as I was heading to bed saying that I’d gotten access. And I went, “Well, I’m not getting any sleep tonight.” ‘Cause I’d seen it online. I’d seen videos of people making these, just typing in a text prompt, and it spat out these beautiful images. I played around with that for a while and then worked my way to a couple of others. Then eventually settled and found a company called Stable Diffusion who were just about to release their own text-to-image AI. And that was in August last year. I quickly put my name down. And then I think about five days later, I got access to the beta and played around with that. And then they released it to the public and here we are.

David Read:
It’s just absolutely exceptional what this stuff can do. You think that you’ve got AI pegged in terms of what’s available, and then the further down the rabbit hole you go, you’re like, “Nope, nope, this thing surprised me in ways I didn’t expect.” The thing that blew me away, and I’ve shared this before if you’ve joined us for Trivia 8, is this Emperor Palpatine image that you created.

Adam Cahill:
I’ve gotta get that on canvas. I’ve gotta get that printed and put on canvas. I think it’s very good.

David Read:
It’s extraordinary. It’s Emperor Palpatine done in stained glass, and you posted, “David Read,” you said, “you might like this.” And I said, “You told a computer to make that?” And you said, “Yes. Why are you so shocked every time I show you these?” And I say, “Why are you not?” It just, wow. Other than the eyes not being symmetrical, it otherwise has an awareness of symmetry of some sort. Most of these have some symmetry or other. It’s just beautiful. It’s absolutely insane.

Adam Cahill:
I think that one came out. That one required very little prompt crafting, I guess. Again, being able to write a good prompt is almost an art in itself, trying to nail that.

David Read:
Let’s nip this in the bud at the very top. Adam, AI art is not art. It’s not real art.

Adam Cahill:
People say that it doesn’t take any effort to write a prompt and output an image. But it still takes effort. It’s a different kind of effort. You’re not drawing on a piece of paper or digitally on Photoshop or something. It’s a different form of effort. You still have the image vaguely of what you wanna see and you start crafting your prompts around that and then it’ll spit out some images. It’s not what you want, so you go back and you fix it and you tweak it and all that sort of stuff, and then you can dump it into Photoshop, dump it into some sort of image editing tool, and then you can go in and you can airbrush stuff and you can edit things and then you could give it back to the AI and say, “Hey, I want it like this, but different.” And then it will go ahead and do all that. So it’s a different kind of effort. It’s a tool just like anything else like Photoshop.

David Read:
I think that no one would dispute anyone flinging paint onto canvas, that’s art, even if it takes five seconds. There’s still a differentiation taking place. There’s an eye that’s being used. This goes back to Mona Lisa Smile. It’s art when someone says that it is. And I’ve been meaning to show you this. I made this in college.

Adam Cahill:
Is that a palm tree?

David Read:
It’s a palm tree. Hurricane Ivan destroyed this palm tree and the entire facade of this building back in the mid-2000s. I submitted this artwork to a college course in 2004 and I got an award for it. I think there was a cash value attributed to that as well. I created this in Photoshop. Is it art?

Adam Cahill:
It’s art until someone says it’s art, I think.

David Read:
It’s art when someone says that it is.

Adam Cahill:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Art is everything. It’s not just limited to flat 2D images. It’s performance art. It’s sculptures. Art is just art. I think people seem to think that there needs to be some sort of value attached to it to then be considered.

David Read:
In terms of it can’t just be something that everyone can do. I took my camera and I pointed it at this tree and I took a picture of it. And then I put this in Photoshop and I added a filter on top of it, long before filters were a thing. I added one filter. And then I submitted it and I won against a number of other submissions. And in terms of amount of time that it took me to do it, probably total maybe half an hour, 45 minutes. But my eye differentiated the circumstances that I thought would be appropriate to come together to create this piece. And so does your prompting.

Adam Cahill:
You already had a vision.

David Read:
And your prompting does the same thing. Because you’re not putting it into a text editor and having the AI generate it. You then, as I hope you’ll demonstrate a little bit here, go into certain parts of the image and change things out.

Adam Cahill:
Correct.

David Read:
There I would argue that you are absolutely an artist just as anyone who uses Photoshop and applies any kind of filter is an artist. We’re using tools that do things that we have no physical means of doing in a physical space other than putting hours and hours of the same work into it that we can do in Photoshop lickety split.

Adam Cahill:
And as you say, it’s a tool just like anything else. God, if I could find something that would do 50% of my work for me, that would be great. If you’re an artist and you’re taking on submissions and you have a vague idea of what you want, but you’ve gotta start from scratch, you bust it into the AI, it’ll spit out 50%, you go, “Well, that’s close,” and then you can put it into your Photoshop and you can sort of edit from there and it takes up…

David Read:
You still have an image in your head… that you are willing into reality or you have an idea of something that you want and you’re navigating your way through it until you arrive at it. That’s art. We had to get that outta the way because I saw this when Photoshop came out in the late ’90s. It’s like, here we go again.

Adam Cahill:
If I can, I wanna touch on the point of people suggesting that it’s just stealing artwork. That’s not what it’s doing at all. The Stability AI in particular was trained on something called LAION-5B which means that it was trained on 5 billion images. It’s looked at 5 billion images and was trained on that. But the actual file itself that the AI is on is about four gigs. People say it’s a collage tool or something like that, and that’s not what it is at all. It takes random filtered noise and then produces an image. All that training is doing is saying, “That’s a dog.” And then it goes, “Cool, no problem. No worries. That’s a dog.” So the next time you ask it to draw–

David Read:
Those elements go together to create dog.

Adam Cahill:
That would be dog. But then if you ask it to make a dog, it’s not gonna make the same dog. It’s gonna make a completely different dog. It might still be a golden retriever. If you ask for a black dog, then maybe you’d get a Labrador or a border collie maybe or something like that.

David Read:
Do you have one of the tools open in front of you? Share your screen. Put in dog. Let’s see what happens and start there so that people will have an idea of what we’re grasping with ’cause everyone knows, everyone understands dog. I think that’s a pretty straightforward concept.

Adam Cahill:
That’s not what I want. Where is it?

David Read:
I’m gonna show how the sausage is made here, folks. I apologize.

Adam Cahill:
I had a bit of an image that sort of explains in very quick detail what this does.

David Read:
So, I’m throwing you a curve ball, is what I’m doing to you?

Adam Cahill:
A little bit, yes. I have a plan, David. Can you just let me?

David Read:
Can you please stay out of my fricking way and let me make it, mate?

Adam Cahill:
OK, we’re good? Everyone can see it?

David Read:
Yes.

Adam Cahill:
OK. All we wanted to share was this thing, which sort of explains, if I can zoom in, what’s happening. All I’m doing–

David Read:
You’ve already had dog. OK.

Adam Cahill:
This is the example. All it’s doing is that you’re taking original picture, and you’re basically saying, “Hey, computer, please gradually turn this picture into noise.” So this is noise. This is what the AI turns it into. And OK, it goes, “Beep, boop, OK, done. I’ll save it in my memory as dog.” So now we ask it to do that in reverse. This is the basic, absolute watered-down process of what’s happening. It’s taking random noise and every step it is slowly filtering it out and adding a bit of color until it starts seeing what it thinks is what you’ve asked for, until you get a dog. But it’s not the same. It’s not the same dog. Because it’s literally just been trained on the idea of what is a dog, but it’s not then spitting out the same dog. If you ask for a black dog, then it would take some noise and it would start–

David Read:
Gives you a lab.

Adam Cahill:
Gives you a Labrador. That’s what I was saying in my examples, is that’s sort of in very simplified terms is what’s happening.

David Read:
You created some Stargate art for us last year, and I’d like to review some of those. Do you have those first, by any chance? I didn’t do a great job of prompting him. What do you have ready for us now that you can show us in terms of the Stargate art?

Adam Cahill:
Look, I don’t know if you wanna do it early. I don’t know how many people are watching just yet, but there were two people who did submit prompts during the trivia night that I found. I do have those, so I’m not sure if you wanna wait for more people to come on so they can see what we’re looking at?

David Read:
Let’s go ahead and start. I wanna get that process started, and then we will explain how to design this stuff for yourselves, because maybe I should start with this. Adam and I have conceived of a contest for Stargate AI imagery, and I have now set up the web address. We’ll be discussing that in a moment. And this is going to be live through February the 10th for you to submit your own Stargate digital artwork. It doesn’t have to be using AI. You can use Photoshop, you can use whatever, as long as it’s yours and as long as it was made in computer. That’s for this contest. And we’re going to be giving away a $50 prize to the number one winner. Number two and number three will get 30 US dollars and 20 US dollars respectively. The images will be submitted to us by you through the website, and then everyone will get to vote on them after January the 10th, and we will arrive at winners that way. Adam gave me this idea because we were collaborating and making this possible, and I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna have him show people how to get started in using some of these tools.” So if they’ve never done anything like this before and they don’t think that they can, we’re going to show them that they can and you can submit something this way. I’ll talk more about the contest and the terms and conditions moving forward. There we go. Go ahead and show us what the prompts spat out that the fans submitted.

Adam Cahill:
The first one was from Djon. He wanted to see Rodney versus a giant lemon. This prompt was great. From start to finish, I put it into Midjourney to begin with, and it just came out with a bang, and I’ve done–

David Read:
I’m not seeing anything. OK.

Adam Cahill:
I’ll explain it. That’s great. I love that. Doesn’t that hit the nail on the head? A lot of editing did go into this eventually, but the lemon head isn’t the same as what the thing originally did. I’ve gone and made that. It didn’t originally have boxing gloves. I’ve gone and added that. I’ve done a little bit of editing up here ’cause this was all a bit warped. There was a bit of warping around here. I’ve gone and then put it into Photoshop and cleaned it all up. So that’s my physical contribution. But I thought that was a great prompt.

David Read:
That’s crazy.

Adam Cahill:
I know. It was great.

David Read:
Wow. Well done. Rodney versus a lemon.

Adam Cahill:
I think that’s great, isn’t it, though? He’s just in a boxing ring. And it looks like a cartoon Rodney, doesn’t it?

David Read:
No, I’m sure David Hewlett would agree that’s the absolute correct aesthetic. Upper body strength, totally. Very funny.

Adam Cahill:
The next one, ’cause I haven’t put them in order, was from Nox Mama or Mama Nox? and she wanted to see the Nox in the form of Mona Lisa, or what was the exact prompt? It was Nox making out to be the Mona Lisa. So, this one’s really hard ’cause the AI doesn’t know what a Nox is, and it’s hard to explain.

David Read:
Nox, it’s a very specific sci-fi.

Adam Cahill:
What I did was I took a picture of the Mona Lisa, I took a picture of the head of one of the Nox and I slammed the two on each other and then blended it. So, a lot of this was actually me doing stuff in Photoshop, and then the very final thing was asking the AI to make it not look like I’ve just slapped two images together. I thought it came out all right. It was hard to make it do anything that I wanted.

David Read:
Can you zoom in a little bit to the head?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, sure. That’s Julie Dyer’s face. If you can see it.

David Read:
Wow, that’s wild. It vaguely looks like Frida.

Adam Cahill:
That’s who I obviously based it off. And then I told it I wanted the Mona Lisa, I wanted an oil painting, I wanted. Oh my God, I’m blanking on. Da Vinci. And then I asked for wiry, sort of reddish-looking hair, and then I’ve gone and tried to sharpen it up and make it look a little crazy.

David Read:
And it looks like paint.

Adam Cahill:
An oiled oil painting. You can probably see my shitty brushstrokes here that don’t. really match with the rest of everything else. But it’s there.

David Read:
That’s wild, man. That’s really cool.

Adam Cahill:
I hope she’s watching ’cause I thought that one came out really well.

David Read:
That’s great. We’ll make sure she sees it.

Adam Cahill:
Those were the only two that I’d done for those prompts. But obviously, you and I have been talking and working out…

David Read:
So, Wormhole X-Tremists, Evie, your spouse is one of my co-hosts on Wormhole X-Tremists. We’re going through, it’s a separate channel from Dial the Gate, we’re going through all 350 plus episodes of the franchise. We’re on episode 13, I think, tomorrow, if I’m not mistaken. And you’ve taken it upon yourself to design, much like Game of Thrones did with beautifuldeath.com back in the day, a custom image from every episode based on a theme from the show or an element of the show.

Adam Cahill:
I’ve got some catching up to do.

David Read:
But we’re going at two a week for the next while. And then it’s gonna be over a five-year period. So, I completely give you the right to say, “OK, I’m done. I’ve done 50. That’s it.” “It’s been an interesting experiment. I’m moving on.”

Adam Cahill:
I think I’m coming up with some really good ideas for episodes you haven’t watched yet, though.

David Read:
That’s the thing. It’s like, “Well, what can I do with it?” ‘Cause with the AI, you can do any medium, you can do any concept. You can do it black and white. I hope you show this off, because this is absolutely cool. You can do anything that you want with it, symmetrical, asymmetrical. Show off some. Do you have some of the other pieces that were made in December?

Adam Cahill:
Yes.

David Read:
Let’s walk down memory lane real quick for some people who didn’t have a chance to see.

Adam Cahill:
What have I done here? I’ve got the edited and unedited versions as well. So, we’ll just start with, this is leather-clad Ka’lel sitting by the fireplace, petting a symbiote.

David Read:
That became that.

Adam Cahill:
He doesn’t understand what a symbiote is.

David Read:
Symbiote is.

Adam Cahill:
I was like, “Big snake.”

David Read:
Simone Bailey asked for that, and that’s ultimately what it became. Absolutely cool.

Adam Cahill:
I have the draft for that. So, here’s some behind the scenes. This is what it started as. It was like we would bike around.

David Read:
That’s cool in and of itself.

Adam Cahill:
I know, that was cool in and of itself, ’cause it’s tents out there, and I’m like, “Yeah, well, the Jaffa are old deal, do business in tents.” But it didn’t really hit the brief that she was asking for, ’cause she wanted it by a fireplace. So, I filled it in and added a round-ringed fireplace. But that was one of the drafts for that.

David Read:
It’s like if Adria and the Goa’uld, and perhaps Apophis, ever worked together in an alternate reality. That’s really cool.

Adam Cahill:
Then we had yours, which was Jack O’Neill and John Sheppard golfing through the Stargate with Roswell Gray alien. Oh my God.

David Read:
As the caddie. Beautiful piece.

Adam Cahill:
One thing I don’t think I ever pointed out is I could not get the bloody golf bag to look like part of the painting. So, if you actually zoom in, it just looks like a bloody stock image of a friggin’ golf bag. But zoomed out, it’s fine. But zoomed in, it just doesn’t look. Doesn’t work.

David Read:
I can’t imagine how much work these took, man. Some of them are absolutely wild.

Adam Cahill:
I can rip through the drafts that I had for your thing as well, if you like.

David Read:
That’s how you came up with Jack. Look at that. Its the same guy from our Night Before Christmas. Wow, that one that’s in the back, that was John. That’s John.

Adam Cahill:
That looks like John there as well.

David Read:
It does.

Adam Cahill:
It’s got his face. I thought maybe an impressionist style, nah, not really. And then I started hitting this kind of style, and I was like, “Yeah, this is OK.”

David Read:
Wow. You narrow it down.

Adam Cahill:
You can see, for every 100 I generate, I might only get 25 good ones. You know what I mean? And then I got to here and I went, “Yeah, OK, now we’re getting somewhere.” The prompt was meant to be Richard Dean Anderson in a sand trap on a golf course angrily trying to chip a ball out of the sand. Why is it on fire?

David Read:
He combusted.

Adam Cahill:
Where has fire been asked for?

David Read:
That’s funny. The other thing about Thor was exactly the same thing.

Adam Cahill:
Then we got to there and built it out, and that’s where we got to.

David Read:
You have the ability to tell it, “I want more of this landscape in these pixels on the left and right,” which I think is mind-blowing. It’ll continue the scene.

Adam Cahill:
You can out-paint and stuff like that, which, if we’ve got time, I can show. So, we’ll keep moving along.

David Read:
Teal’c menorah.

Adam Cahill:
I can’t remember whose this was.

David Read:
This is Sonya Malkoff’s.

Adam Cahill:
This is Sonya’s. There’s Teal’c lighting a…

David Read:
Hanukkah Menorah.

Adam Cahill:
Menorah. Thank you. I was trying to do the other word for it. Candelabra, there we go. That came out really well. What did we end up calling it?

David Read:
The HP Prime.

Adam Cahill:
HP Prime.

David Read:
That’s funny.

Adam Cahill:
That one came out pretty well. I don’t think I have any interesting drafts, really, for that one. Then we had Goa’uld System Lords attack Earth to steal all the pumpkin spice lattes. I made sure it had a pumpkin, Egyptian symbols of some description, and a constellation, and a little Starbucks–

David Read:
The Starbucks logo.

Adam Cahill:
Starbucks at the top. That was like the cherry on top. That came out pretty good. And then we had Schrodinger possessed by Anubis rules universe.

David Read:
It’s just madness.

Adam Cahill:
It came out really well. I tried to do the super soldiers in the background here, but couldn’t really get them to do anything in any sort of formation. Did I see someone @MamaNox?

David Read:
Yes, she’s in now. I love the MamaNox Mona Lisa, there you go.

Adam Cahill:
She’s seen it? Excellent, OK. Then we had Rodney, which I think we’ve all seen.

David Read:
Rodney. Oh my God. This is my favorite.

Adam Cahill:
I know, it looks great.

David Read:
Ah, this came out so well.

Adam Cahill:
Then there was Evie’s Van Gogh Stargate, which came out pretty good as well. This was the only one that used DALL·E 2.

David Read:
A Stargate in Vancouver is what she wanted. The peacock designs where the glyphs would be are cool.

Adam Cahill:
It came up with some really cool drafts. It’s kinda like a watery portal. This one’s active silver ring portal containing blue portal to another world. I’m trying to get… that’s OK.

David Read:
That’s cool.

Adam Cahill:
That one’s OK. In fact, that kinda looks a little Vancouver-ish. That looks like the front of the–

David Read:
Some of the buildings.

Adam Cahill:
Anyway, that looks like it’s about to–

David Read:
That’s cool too.

Adam Cahill:
You can just hear it… images you can hear. About to hear the whoosh. Similar here. There were some cool drafts that came out of it. But ended up with that one. Then we had Rodney McKay and Samantha Carter playing chess.

David Read:
From Melting Chess.

Adam Cahill:
I think he wanted Eli Wallace as well, but getting three people into one of these images at the moment is not easy…

David Read:
That’s a fair point. But like you said, the wood, I want that table. That is a gorgeous table.

Adam Cahill:
I told you, I want that table. I know, I kept out-painting it, I’m going, “This is amazing, I want this table. How do I make that?”

David Read:
“I wouldn’t mind that chess set. Wouldn’t really be able to play with it, but it’s legit.”

Adam Cahill:
Don’t look at the chess set, ’cause it’s not a completely definitely real and accurate chess set. Then we had the mountain from the moon being pulled by reindeer.

David Read:
Remingtons.

Adam Cahill:
I liked this one. This one was cool. That was fun to play with. Wasn’t too many interesting drafts outta that one. Samantha Carter…

David Read:
Samantha and Schrodinger.

Adam Cahill:
Telling Schrodinger. Actually, this one did have some. I showed you this one, but…

David Read:
You just had to basically pick one. Some of them were just really on par.

Adam Cahill:
As far as drafts go, they’re not bad.

David Read:
They evoke Carter.

Adam Cahill:
You could’ve played with it and messed with it. That cat’s got three ears.

David Read:
Hey, there you go.

Adam Cahill:
That looks like she’s in her server room. One of those sort of lab, with servers in the background. Starting to get a little bit more artist. What are we doing with the cat? Put the gun down.

David Read:
What he has looks like he belongs in The Flash or something.

Adam Cahill:
It sort of got to here, and obviously then worked from it from there.

David Read:
That’s crazy.

Adam Cahill:
Then we had Teal’c as a detective investigating Stargate artifacts. Which I thought looked cool, the fucking dentists.

David Read:
Kind of an Atlantis style. Plus Firefly.

Adam Cahill:
Then we had… this one was funny, because this was meant to be gray alien Thor with Stargate on taco Tuesdays, and I have no idea. Still to this day… it haunts me and it keeps me awake. I don’t understand how we got that prompt to this. It just… anyway. I eventually got it to be Thor.

David Read:
Now this, oh man.

Adam Cahill:
That was cool.

David Read:
That is so cool. Linda wants that for her wall. We have to do something about that. Absolutely cool. Taco Tuesday.

Adam Cahill:
Aurora borealis Stargate in the Antarctic back–

David Read:
This is Summers.

Adam Cahill:
Reading back her prompt, I didn’t know whether she wanted the Stargate to be the aurora borealis, having re-read it. But that’s how I interpreted it, anyway. And that one’s quite pretty.

David Read:
It is. And it gave you inspiration.

Adam Cahill:
Yes, of course. For my own paper cut. With the Stargate and the paper cuts.

David Read:
That’s so insane. The diorama. See, when I looked at this, my mind was blown again, because you can have whatever style you can think of to input it. It’s got five billion images. One of those has gotta lead to something. Extraordinary. Absolutely insane.

Adam Cahill:
Let’s be correct. It’s not taking from the five billion images. It’s literally just referencing them, like any artist would.

David Read:
That’s right. The references have gotta lead to something.

Adam Cahill:
Like an artist would take all those drafts that I had. They might even reference stuff online, and they’d put it all up on a nice little storyboard. “And I like the lighting from that guy, and I like the dark shadows from this guy.” And then they go and they draw it on their own. That’s all the AI’s doing. It’s going, “There’s nice lighting stuff from there, there’s nice shadows from there.” And then it puts it into the prompt. It’s not copying and mashing together. Better drive that home.

David Read:
That’s insane. That’s so cool. All right.

Adam Cahill:
I do have some of the ready Wormhole X-Tremists ones, but I don’t know whether you wanna…

David Read:
Let’s show a couple.

Adam Cahill:
Show a couple?

David Read:
Yeah, let’s show a couple.

Adam Cahill:
Good, ’cause that’s all I’ve got.

David Read:
No. I thought… whatever you have, divide by two, and then we’ll show some at the beginning of this, then you’ll show us the tools, and then we’ll show the others at the end.

Adam Cahill:
All right, we’ll do one more. This one’s for the movie. This one I did for the start of the movie, which is big pyramid land… a ship landing on a pyramid on Abydos. It’s a desert planet of some description. This one’s been heavily edited by me. The ship is entirely edited. It was two pyramids hovering above each other, but I went, “There’s a start.” All I did was add streaks to the ship, and then told it I wanted it to be a spaceship, and it came up with that, and then I asked for blue underglow for it to show an engine. I’ve physically gone in and edited this. I don’t have the drafts for it. I’ve added starlight here. There’s a starlight painting brush that you can go and do, and then I’ve blurred everything together. That one was quite heavily edited, but that came out really well.

David Read:
That’s crazy. Beautiful, man. All right.

Adam Cahill:
You’ll have to watch Wormhole X-Tremists to see the others.

David Read:
All right. So, what are some of the tools that you’ve used to make this possible?

Adam Cahill:
How do you wanna do it? Do you wanna do easiest, hardest? Or do you do ascending?

David Read:
Give people… I don’t wanna scare them off. More or less.

Adam Cahill:
More or less. OK. There’s a website which David has, or has not linked somewhere In the description. This one is Mage.Space. This one is a website that you can go to. It’s literally mage.space. I’ll get out of full screen. It’s literally www.mage.space, and it brings you here. You can run StableDiffusion.

David Read:
These are in the description. Do these cost anything?

Adam Cahill:
No. This one is completely free and that’s the beauty of this one. The problem is that StableDiffusion does require some… If you wanna run it locally on your own computer, you can. You need a graphics card and it needs to be vaguely modern. It needs about four to six gigabytes of what they call VRAM, and most GPUs in the last two years will have that. But if you don’t have that, then your next option is Mage.Space. They run it on their own computers. You don’t have to run it on yours. You don’t have to worry about all that kinda stuff. You can come and put in a prompt. What do you wanna see, David?

David Read:
Gosh.

Adam Cahill:
Putting you on the spot.

David Read:
Anything?

Adam Cahill:
Anything you wanna see, man.

David Read:
What’s really big right now? Give me Muad’Dib and sandworm.

Adam Cahill:
You’re gonna have to spell that.

David Read:
I think it’s M-U-A-D apostrophe D-I-B, I believe.

Adam Cahill:
Like that?

David Read:
Yes, that’s it.

Adam Cahill:
And then what did you want?

David Read:
And sandworm.

Adam Cahill:
OK.

David Read:
This should be pretty straightforward.

Adam Cahill:
Then you can choose a couple of settings. You can have different models. StableDiffusion 1.5’s kinda like your bread and butter. This is the main one most people will use. If you just come to the website and you don’t log in, you can use it. If you log in, you can use their StableDiffusion 2.1, which is meant to be better, arguably not. Anyway, I’m not gonna go right into that. If you upgrade, you can get a couple of different models, which focus more on certain styles. If you want more anime kinda style, you can have that. There are not safe for work models, which I won’t scroll to. Which exist. Then you’ve gotta choose an aspect ratio. It says it here, whether you want landscape or square, or kinda like a phone.

David Read:
For your mobile devices.

Adam Cahill:
If you’re looking for something from… What’s this friggin’ thing from?

David Read:
Dune.

Adam Cahill:
Dune, thank you. Sorry, it’s 2 AM here. My brain isn’t firing on all cylinders. Probably let’s go landscape. I think that might… be better. Tip number one, the aspect ratio you choose will help the AI determine what you’re after. So, if you wanna see a person standing, you make it, you do profile. Or, what does it say? Not cinema. Phone. No, you want it to be taller rather than wider.

David Read:
9 by 16, yes.

Adam Cahill:
But if you want a landscape, then you’d go wide.

David Read:
That makes sense.

Adam Cahill:
you can do wide with people.

David Read:
It clues you then.

Adam Cahill:
You can do wide with people. You might be asking, like, a scene or a still of something. Then you go and choose your quality. Why you would choose low, I don’t know. It doesn’t cost you anything to do it at high, so do it at high. Then you have what’s called the guidance scale. Let’s open the theme. So, guidance scale is the level of freedom or strictness you allow the AI when creating from your prompt. High values force the AI to follow your prompt more. So you might say, “Why wouldn’t I go very strict all the time, ’cause I want exactly what I’ve written up here?” The problem is that it doesn’t allow for any creative freedom, if that makes sense. … sometimes it comes out blurry, too much saturation, really odd contrasts, so you don’t always necessarily wanna go that high. Feel free to experiment obviously, but generally I don’t ever go higher than 12 personally. But let’s stick with normal. And then we hit go, and then hopefully this will generate pretty quickly.

David Read:
Create anything. It doesn’t take long. That’s the thing that blew me away initially was, in a few moments.

Adam Cahill:
There we go. You got a sandworm. Most people are gonna look at this and go, “That’s crap. Why? AI’s not that great.” Prompt crafting in itself is an art form.

David Read:
That’s the thing. It’s differentiation.

Adam Cahill:
I would argue. And there’s lots of websites out there that will help you make a good prompt. There’s websites out there where people have uploaded their own AI art, and they’ve put in the exact prompt they’ve used. So you can go and then look at it, and what they’ve used, and then get inspiration from that and go, “Oh, he’s referenced it.” You can reference camera settings. If you wanna get a photo, you reference camera settings and apertures and all that sort of stuff. Shutter speeds. And it will go, “Oh, it’s after a photo.” And you sort of go from there to get inspiration from something. I do have my own prompt that we can try and use. So, this is what I’ll also use in testing when I do the other ones that I was gonna do, but we’ve got a beautiful pencil sketch of Amanda Tapping. Sam Carter is a custom thing, so I can’t have that. In the Air Force, in uniform, standing and saluting. All right? Let’s hope we get that, ’cause I got some good results on my local copy. “Is that Kevin Bacon on the worm?” Yeah, definitely was.

David Read:
Interesting. And it’s not even all of her face.

Adam Cahill:
It’s not even all of her face, and what we might wanna do in this instance is we might wanna go… Can we do negative prompting? Let me see. Ah, you bastard. OK. I don’t wanna log in. How can I make that slightly better? We can literally just put in…

David Read:
In this one, does it take the first words into greater consideration, or does it… take it all equally?

Adam Cahill:
No. So it’s linear. So, the words you put at the end are gonna have less weight than the words you put right at the start.

David Read:
It’s got military.

Adam Cahill:
So, it’s starting to sort of get there. It’s starting to come across. And then from here, if you like this prompt, you can ask it to enhance, which I don’t quite remember what that does. I think it just blows it up and makes it bigger. Again, I’ve gotta log in. I wish I’d known that before I did that. But yeah, it’s just blown it up and made it bigger, which is cool. So, if you like what you’re seeing, then there’s these three other features here that you should be able to choose when you use this website called Re-run, Remix, and Re-imagine. I think Re-run just means scrap it, start again. Remix basically takes this image, takes your prompt, puts them together and says, “I want something like this with this text prompt. Do it again.” And then it’ll spit out something else. And I think Re-imagine takes the seed here, which means that if anyone goes onto this website, uses this seed, puts in the exact same details as I did and the exact same prompt, they should get that same image. All right?

David Read:
Using those parameters.

Adam Cahill:
Using those parameters, they should get the exact same image that I have. So you can always recreate this stuff.

David Read:
So it’s never permanently gone.

Adam Cahill:
’cause the seed is just the noise. It’s basically random bunches of pixels of varying different colors, and you’re just asking it from there to slowly but surely start creating an image. That seed is just that particular kind of noise. So that’s why it can do it again and again and again. If you went for a different seed, it would be a different layer of noise, and then you’d get a completely different image.

David Read:
OK. All right. So do you wanna release us from your shared screen so you can log in and I can ask a couple of audience questions?

Adam Cahill:
Let’s do it.

David Read:
OK. Let’s go ahead and do that then. You go ahead and log in. I’ve got, let me see here, from Judicon, “Is there a website where your Stargate art is featured yet?” We’re working on that.

Adam Cahill:
Twitter at the moment?

David Read:
Yes. Your handle is Robot Elbows, is that correct?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, it’s my gaming name.

David Read:
Handle.

Adam Cahill:
Gaming handle, I suppose. At the time, I just thought, ’cause I did a little bit of writing as well, and I’ve obviously done this as well, and I just went, “We’ll just keep using the same name,” I guess.

David Read:
OK. That works. It’s you. Ray Wood has an interesting question for you. “I think AI art is missing a critical element. How do you program inspiration?”

Adam Cahill:
You are the inspiration. You can’t inspire the AI. You are the inspiration. It’s just all maths effectively. It’s got no inspiration itself.

David Read:
ChatGPT, they’re having this issue with it right now. You can’t give it novelty. You can’t imbue it with “Oh my gosh, it’s done something truly revolutionarily surprising.” No, you have to prompt it. What comes out is only as good as what you put into it. So, have you played with ChatGPT at all?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, a little bit. I’ve played with the GPT-3 AI in general. The GPT-3 Chat is a more refined version of that that they’ve made to do something more specific. But I played with GPT-3 as well, and that’s pretty good. There’s a website called AI Dungeon and it’s like a text-based, almost like a Dungeons and Dragons thing.

David Read:
That’s cool.

Adam Cahill:
It’s like, “You’re doing this adventure. What do you do?” And then you give it an action or you can say something and it’s like “Now I’m running to these villages. Do these things.”

David Read:
And it evolves it. That’s really neat.

Adam Cahill:
It does all that sort of stuff for you and can keep track of what you’re carrying and what weapons you’ve got and all that sort of stuff.

David Read:
It keeps track of the rules I’m sure, too.

Adam Cahill:
It’s not perfect. But it’s pretty fun. All right. I think I’m good to bring this back up. OK. Our prompt was–

David Read:
Beautiful pencil sketch of Amanda Tapping, Sam Carter, your custom code is still there.

Adam Cahill:
My custom code?

David Read:
/SamCarter.

Adam Cahill:
Thank you. Advanced.

David Read:
OK. What we’re saying is he has a local copy and he taught it Amanda’s face. Just so we know.

Adam Cahill:
Yes. You can train the AI on your face or anyone’s face, which does open up the question of deep fakes. But I trained it on my face to get a little sidetracked here as a Jedi.

David Read:
That’s pretty good.

Adam Cahill:
It’s pretty good. It’s a rough approximation.

David Read:
A Sith. What are you talking about? You’re no Jedi.

Adam Cahill:
I did myself as a knight as well.

David Read:
Oh my.

Adam Cahill:
I’m holding the wrong end of the sword.

David Read:
You sure are, man.

Adam Cahill:
It’s a rough approximation.

David Read:
That’s cool.

Adam Cahill:
It’s fun. I think the thing we did wrong is that I didn’t put it in portrait mode for Sam. Let’s try that again.

David Read:
OK. That’s a fair point. Let’s see that again.

Adam Cahill:
What advanced modes do we have? OK. It gives you access to this. This is where you can choose your seed. If I’d bothered to copy that seed down, I could have done that, but I didn’t do that.

David Read:
Do we wanna continue? OK. Negative prompting.

Adam Cahill:
There’s another thing in here, again, this is for the more advanced users. There’s something called negative prompting and basically you’re telling it what you don’t wanna see. That could be quite literally prompts such as ugly, bad art, all that kind of stuff, funny enough, works. I might just take one of the ones I’ve got and dump that in. There’s ugly tiling, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, out of frame is probably what we needed for–

David Read:
Mutation, extra lips.

Adam Cahill:
All that kind of stuff helps, it does. I think some people’s prompts are so long, they’re like two paragraphs long. They’ve written a bloody essay and you’re reading some of the stuff for the first time.

David Read:
Draw it out yourself at that point.

Adam Cahill:
And you’re like, “I don’t think it’s doing half the stuff. I feel like it’s not working for you.” We’ll let that generate and see what we come up with. It only takes a minute or so, so I don’t know if you wanna throw another question. There we go. So, now it’s doubling it. So, now it’s doubled up. What I might do… Cinematics that way. Let’s do tablet ’cause sometimes what can happen is if it’s too tall it starts doing double ups of things. We might make it a little smaller and try again. This is all stuff that I’ve learned throughout doing this stuff. It’s all the little quirks about it that you start learning about. Here we go.

David Read:
Isn’t that interesting? It’s not exactly saluting.

Adam Cahill:
Amanda Tapping obviously isn’t the most famous celebrity, so in its databases it’s not quite sure who she is. So, if we put in someone more…

David Read:
Can you ask… Do Julia Roberts for me. Let’s see what happens.

Adam Cahill:
Julia Roberts?

David Read:
Yeah.

Adam Cahill:
Should be pretty…

David Read:
Julia. You’re good. There you go. Let’s try that. Let’s see how good it can get. Could’ve gone with like Angelina Jolie, but I’m not gonna give it that…

Adam Cahill:
It’s a little not safe for work.

David Read:
What is going on?

Adam Cahill:
It’s really not. You’re not helping me out here.

David Read:
No. It’s really not making a case for itself. I’ve seen this thing, I’ve seen you do wonders with some of this stuff. This is not the best example, everybody. There we go.

Adam Cahill:
Let’s go… Because it should be hard to screw that up.

David Read:
OK, smiling in a park.

Adam Cahill:
I want someone standing and…

David Read:
In a park. Interesting.

Adam Cahill:
It’s close.

David Read:
What is this with it not putting the subject in the middle? Why?

Adam Cahill:
That’s where this one’s probably limited. Yes, it’s free, and yes, it doesn’t require any installation. But you’re gonna have to learn its quirks. And if we try Stable Diffusion …

David Read:
Let’s move on.

Adam Cahill:
…to the next one. Let me see if that maybe does a bit better. I personally–

David Read:
It certainly was her. I mean, you show this image to anyone …

Adam Cahill:
It’s definitely her.

David Read:
… it’s no one else, so.

Adam Cahill:
If we went in and readjusted the prompt, we’d probably come up with… There we go, 2.1’s doing better.

David Read:
That’s her. There we go.

Adam Cahill:
2.1’s doing better.

David Read:
Yes, very tall Barbie-like her, but that’s…

Adam Cahill:
So, it’s close. You could take that into a Photoshop if you wanted to and edit it, or you can… Let’s show… Is it reimagine what I want or remix? Reimagine, I think. So, it should…

David Read:
Your re-image is ready.

Adam Cahill:
Here. OK. So basically it’s taken the image. We’re giving it… It should be the same prompt, dude. Julia…

David Read:
Roberts standing and smiling in a park.

Adam Cahill:
Hang on. Let’s do this.

David Read:
The Moon. OK.

Adam Cahill:
So, we should be able to do… So, this is what’s known as inpainting. We can basically modify it. I’m gonna remove the background. That was foreground, Adam. There we go. Now it’s gonna cut out, so we say ready. Let me just make sure it’s done it properly. Yes. OK, ready. We’ll hit the go button. Hopefully what it’s gonna do is it’s gonna keep Julia Roberts there, and it’s gonna remove the park, and it’s…

David Read:
If there’s anything you’d like to see, folks, submit ’em to the mods. That’s the Moon?

Adam Cahill:
Kind of.

David Read:
That’s Southern California.

Adam Cahill:
Kind of.

David Read:
Julia Roberts suffocating on desolate moon.

Adam Cahill:
Good grief. No, I don’t think anyone wants to see that.

David Read:
No?

Adam Cahill:
This is only at 7.5. Let’s bump this up to… I normally like to go 10 for these kinds of things.

David Read:
She wouldn’t be smiling on the moon.

Adam Cahill:
Let’s bump up this. There we go.

David Read:
That’s more like it.

Adam Cahill:
Needed a little adjustment of the stakes. You could be convinced that’s the Moon.

David Read:
Seriously, change smiling to suffocating. Let’s see what happens.

Adam Cahill:
Oh, God. I don’t think it’s gonna learn how to do it, though.

David Read:
You don’t?

Adam Cahill:
Oops. Yes? Is that how you spell that?

David Read:
That’s correct. You got it.

Adam Cahill:
I’ve never had to murder a person before, so I don’t know.

David Read:
We’re not murdering her. We’re in the process of murdering her. Since she was so happy, I’m curious to see what happens if we give it a negative… Hey, there you go. Now she’s in a suit.

Adam Cahill:
Oh you know why, I only done the foreground. If we just… I do not want to clear it entirely… Fine will just start afresh.

David Read:
Yah lets see what happens.

Adam Cahill:
She’s wearing an astronaut suit now.

David Read:
I could believe that. She has no headpiece on, so she’s suffocating. There we go. That’s great.

Adam Cahill:
Apparently the Moon has an atmosphere

David Read:
Because her hair is… There would not be any dust at her feet.

Adam Cahill:
Someone said, “Burns as Goa’uld.” I wanna see if I can get that.

David Read:
Burns as Goa’uld.

Adam Cahill:
Won’t know what a Goa’uld is, but maybe we can do…

David Read:
As serpent?

Adam Cahill:
No. Let’s give him… Let’s see if we can do glowing eyes.

David Read:
I’ll probably give you that. Ray Wood. Thank you, Ray. Highly detailed, not The Simpsons.

Adam Cahill:
Maybe highly detailed is not the right prompt. I’m just trying to get the negative prompts in here as well. Let me dump all of that in there, put that up to 10. Let’s leave it as… Let’s do that. 50 steps is fine. Highly detailed.

David Read:
I don’t know if the quality of what it sees…

Adam Cahill:
What else goes with a cartoon?

David Read:
Flat colors. Not dynamic. But with The Simpsons aesthetic.

Adam Cahill:
We’ll do that. See if it–

David Read:
Let’s see what happens.

Adam Cahill:
We’ll do that and we’ll see what happens. I wonder if we can get glowing eyes.

David Read:
Dan Ben, then, wants to see Mr. Burns as an Egyptian god, after this.

Adam Cahill:
We’ll do one more. ‘Cause the next one I’ve gotta show you requires a little bit of set-up, but the results are significant.

David Read:
We’re playing at this… we need to…

Adam Cahill:
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

David Read:
I’m thinking him or death, death or him. Interesting. Mr. Burns as the original form of Ra in the feature film.

Adam Cahill:
We saved it. What are we doing for Mr. Burns again? Sorry, hang on.

David Read:
As an Egyptian god. Let’s see what happens.

Adam Cahill:
We can’t apply any weights, which is really annoying. It was a bit Futurama style. It’s nonsense.

David Read:
I don’t know.

Adam Cahill:
If it was close to what you wanted you could take the seed and we could go and change the grand scale and shape.

David Read:
But it’s got the grinning aesthetic with the overextended upper lip, and the bulging eyes, and it’s got the aesthetics right. There’s two of them. Ish.

Adam Cahill:
It understands what the Simpsons are.

David Read:
That’s crazy. Well done. All right, let’s move along.

Adam Cahill:
So, the next one is not on this thing, it’s over here. Not what I want. What’s my button again? There we go. Midjourney.

David Read:
OK. Hello, that’s noisy.

Adam Cahill:
This one’s called Midjourney. You gotta join, it says, “Join the beta.” It’s not a beta. It’s fully fledged now. You join, what it’s gonna do is that it operates in Discord. So if anyone’s familiar with Discord, that’s how it operates. So, it’s gonna get you to work and operate in Discord. But, effectively, if I’ve set this up right… So you can see, I’ve tried to do Amanda Tapping here myself. But the aesthetics are very nice, but you can’t do… If you wanted to do something ugly you couldn’t. If, for whatever reason, you wanted a closeup of someone’s face and maybe that’s a bit dirty and grimy, it doesn’t quite do it.

David Read:
It’s always dreamlike. It’s not realistic.

Adam Cahill:
It’s very… not always dreamlike. You can reference H.R. Giger if you want friggin’ monsters.

David Read:
Giger.

Adam Cahill:
Giger. And it’ll do dark mysterious stuff. It’ll do all that. But I think it does one thing and it does it really, really well. So if we take… Now you gotta get on, learn some commands to get this thing to work. But you gotta do a forward slash and then you gotta ask to imagine, and then we put in our prompts. So, if we do Mr. Burns as an Egyptian god. It requires very little prompting and should come up with… I didn’t ask for The Simpsons. Hopefully it understands–

David Read:
It’s all right. It should understand Mr. Burns. He’s pretty well-known, I would think. I’m interested to see what happens without the prompt. It knows.

Adam Cahill:
So, we can see it, this one will do step-by-step stuff, so we can slowly start seeing it come to life.

David Read:
Wow. Can you enlarge?

Adam Cahill:
No, not yet. You gotta wait for it to finish, but you can see here it’s up at 62%.

David Read:
Why is he green?

Adam Cahill:
I don’t know.

David Read:
But that’s really good. Look at that top right one.

Adam Cahill:
And then let’s do… So this is a little code to tell it I want… AR means aspect ratio, and then we’re gonna do two, three to do it tall. We can zoom in on this one now. I don’t know what’s happening there. But it’s got Simpsons, Futurama aesthetics going on. This one’s pretty good. I like that, that’s kinda cool.

David Read:
Mummified.

Adam Cahill:
It’s not quite a god necessarily, but it looks like a mummy. Even there.

David Read:
It has The Simpsons aesthetic without you prompting it for Simpsons.

Adam Cahill:
Here we go.

David Read:
Look at this.

Adam Cahill:
Now that we’ve asked for The Simpsons it’s gonna go… So you can see, with very little prompting Midjourney will do some really cool stuff. And I generally tend to use it and then drag it into Stable Diffusion, which I can edit and do a lot more with.

David Read:
Can we see that one?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, it’s almost done.

David Read:
There’s the percentage right there. OK. Wow. Zoom in a little bit for me.

Adam Cahill:
That’s as far as it’ll go.

David Read:
Control and wheel up.

Adam Cahill:
Not in Discord.

David Read:
OK. Understood. That’s really cool, man. One last one real quick here.

Adam Cahill:
I can open it.

David Read:
Stewie, Family Guy, and Stargate.

Adam Cahill:
One second. Stewie from Family Guy.

David Read:
And Stargate.

Adam Cahill:
Maybe we get him doing something. Let’s go… Stepping through.

David Read:
OK. That works.

Adam Cahill:
I’m not quite sure it understands what Stargate is, but we’ll–

David Read:
Let’s see.

Adam Cahill:
That’s always the issue whenever I’m doing these Stargate things, trying to get it as close as possible to Stargate.

David Read:
It always gives us a circle.

Adam Cahill:
It gives us that ’cause it sort of vaguely understands what’s happening.

David Read:
No, Stewie! Look at that! Is that Brian there too? Let me see.

Adam Cahill:
Might be.

David Read:
Wow. Isn’t that interesting?

Adam Cahill:
That’s not bad. You can see there’s a little dog there of some description. His head’s not quite as football-like.

David Read:
But it’s him.

Adam Cahill:
Midjourney’s very good for this. And then from here, you can upscale it to make it a bigger image. So you choose from one to four. So one, two, three and four, or you can ask for variations. Which one do we all like the best?

David Read:
The top right one is really…

Adam Cahill:
This one?

David Read:
That top right.

Adam Cahill:
Top right?

David Read:
I think that really invokes him. Hello Fatman. “Hi, Stewie, how are you?”

Adam Cahill:
That’s not bad. That’s not a bad Griffin.

David Read:
Thank you.

Adam Cahill:
That’s a better Griffin. So, if we ask for a variation, then it’ll generate four more in that sort of same style. How do we train one so we can use David in the prompts?

David Read:
I don’t know about that.

Adam Cahill:
You need photos of David, firstly.

David Read:
Wow. Look at the eyes. That’s great. The Michelin Stargate. I love that.

Adam Cahill:
With more information, ’cause all we’ve given it is this. If we said maybe football head, if we added sci-fi, maybe Portal. Something along those lines. Even if you reference the art, like Seth.

David Read:
This is all to move towards this Stargate contest that we have.

Adam Cahill:
Correct. It doesn’t necessarily require AI, but these are tools that can help.

David Read:
Exactly. Do you wanna play with it a little bit more or do you want us to talk about the contest a little bit more?

Adam Cahill:
The last one I was gonna show is the one that I run locally on my computer. This one’s very complex. Look, I’m not an expert on computer tech in any way, shape, or form. I don’t know how to code or anything like that. I’m just really, really good at following instructions.

David Read:
You’ve just spent your time with this and got to know it.

Adam Cahill:
So, if you follow instructions, you can get it to run on your computer if you’ve got the right GPU.

David Read:
How much did this cost?

Adam Cahill:
This cost nothing. This is completely free to run. The only thing it costs is the electricity to run your GPU.

David Read:
What is this?

Adam Cahill:
I guess a GPU. This is still Stable Diffusion. This is running the same one that we played with on MageSpace, so requires a lot more prompt editing and all that sort of stuff.

David Read:
You’ll find the details for this in the description as well.

Adam Cahill:
That’s all down there. I said I had something already ready to go, so we’ll dump that in here. Has that grabbed everything? No, it hasn’t, you little bastard. This is gonna look very complex. I obviously don’t expect everyone to understand, but you can have different sampling methods, which are basically various different ways that the AI can interpret the art. This one runs the fastest and will work at the lowest amount of steps. I’m gonna do that. What the steps are doing is just that denoising, asking it to start from all that noise, and in 30 steps we wanna see an image. Boom. This better reproduces the thing really well.

David Read:
This better do it, man. You do your magic. I’m gonna continue to make fart noises with my desk here. I’m sorry, everyone. Just realizing how loud that is.

Adam Cahill:
I think we had it at a height of that, but do you think I actually bothered to write that down? No. 704. I did write it down.

David Read:
Beautiful pencil sketch of Amanda Tapping, Sam Carter, in Air Force uniforms, standing and saluting.

Adam Cahill:
We want EMA only. Hang on. There we go. Give that two seconds to load in. Sam Carter is what’s called an embedding. I’ve gone to a separate program that will train it.

David Read:
You fed it images of Amanda, right?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, I think I gave it about 12 stills off Stargate of her at that time period. The problem being is that if you want photos of Sam, they do come out in that kind of low-quality photos that were of the ’90s and early 2000s.

David Read:
They’re gonna be fuzzier.

Adam Cahill:
They’re gonna be a little fuzzier. EMA only. Yes. OK. Hopefully… this should run. Let’s restore faces. I can’t see if it’s clipped. My bloody camera’s in the way. We’ll hit generate. This is now gonna run solely on my computer, and I’ve already vetted it to be a good picture so it shouldn’t come out mangled and disformed.

David Read:
Looks like she’s thawing in Atlantis. Interesting.

Adam Cahill:
‘Cause not every seed’s gonna be a good one.

David Read:
This thing loves to invoke SS. I don’t know why, but it does. You really get that proto Third Reich-ish kind of look to it.

Adam Cahill:
OK, my settings obviously aren’t quite exact, but that’s what I had.

David Read:
It’s Amanda.

Adam Cahill:
It’s Amanda. Look, the eyes aren’t right. But it’s not a pencil sketch for me. That’s not what I wanted. These are our negative prompts. I don’t wanna see color. Ooh. Now, how do we spell color? Let’s do it that way to start with. We’ll generate that again, and we’ll see what it comes up with. It better be what I have here on my other screen.

David Read:
So, you’ve already got one?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, I vetted all these. There we go. It’s black and white. I don’t know if you’d call that pencil sketch, and she’s definitely not saluting. But we’re getting there.

David Read:
That’s not a pencil sketch.

Adam Cahill:
It’s more black and white.

David Read:
It’s out of a movie. It’s beautiful.

Adam Cahill:
The other difference is how much something can change when you just add a letter.

David Read:
Like non-standard spellings? Yeah.

Adam Cahill:
I’m gonna add a U. We all remember what that looks like.

David Read:
You have the code to reproduce that if you needed to.

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, I’ve just saved it, so we can do that. It’s definitely different to what we had. All we changed was one letter. But that’s closer.

David Read:
That’s more her than the other one was.

Adam Cahill:
I like that. Actually, let’s keep that, and it’s not a pencil sketch, so what we can do here is if we put this in brackets–

David Read:
Drawing it?

Adam Cahill:
I can apply some weight to it.

David Read:
I really want this. This is what is really amazing. He weights the different aspects of the image. So that it’ll focus on more.

Adam Cahill:
I want more pencil sketch. Take away that and let’s get it to do two different images.

David Read:
More sultry.

Adam Cahill:
OK, it’s now generating different forms of Sam. Stable Diffusion is more of a wild beast, but if you know how to tame it, you can get really manipulative with what you want it to do. There we go. There’s two pictures of what look like Sam to me. What if we take that out? Let’s go from here. You can send it to the next tab, which is image to image. We’re asking it to look at this image, and we’re gonna ask it to do it again. But maybe what we’ll do is instead of a pencil sketch, we’ll… You know what? Let’s add some more weight to my thing to really get Sam Carter in there. But let’s not do a pencil sketch anymore. I want it in this kinda art style. And these guys do a lot of digital art. But I want it to be photorealistic and the other things I’ve referenced are ArtStation and a place called Deviant Art where a lot of art gets thrown in, and Unreal Engine, which is a gaming engine, but it puts out nice, sort of 3D-looking renders. Crossing my fingers that this is gonna come out well. We’ll do one… Is that Euler? I can’t see. No, it’s not. Oh, the freaking camera’s in the way.

David Read:
Real quick, Alexi wants to know if any of these can animate? That’s a fair question.

Adam Cahill:
Yes. Yes and no. Not well, but it can. You can add some scripts, which I think, is it prompt matrix or seed travel? Seed travel does something similar, I think. But effectively what you do is you give it one prompt where you want it to start. You give it a second prompt where you want it to end. And you can put stuff in between, and then you tell it, “Maybe let’s do 30 frames and do a certain amount of steps.” And then it will start generating one image, and then it will slowly start morphing and transforming it, and then it will spit out an MP4 or video format that you can watch. And it might be 10 seconds long, but–

David Read:
Is that similar to that software that they’ve got now, where you have the $1 bill, George Washington singing to a song, and he’s moving his face…

Adam Cahill:
Similar.

David Read:
Some of these are wacky.

Adam Cahill:
Similar. If you really wanted to get into the nitty-gritty, you could find your start image, go through all the different noise seeds, find one that looked really good, and then find the end one that you want, go through all the seeds, find the one that you really liked, and then get them to… Basically, get the AI to travel images between those two things. You could probably come up with something really cool. But a lot of it’s very… I don’t know. It can be done. It’s not quite there yet, but it can be. This will go into Blender and your 3D art stuff, and it will do textures and shapes that you can wrap around on 3D objects and all that kind of stuff. The really good thing about Stable Diffusion is that it’s open source. This is completely free, and everyone who is making these extensions to run with Blender or do animations are releasing their code for free and making it super simple and easy to connect to Blender or Photoshop. I’ve got one that connects straight to Photoshop and I can play with it in there with all my brushes and stuff and then go to the AI bit and go, “Do this.” And it will do that. I don’t even need to come to this thing anymore, really, if I wanted to. I probably need to turn that up a little bit more. Maybe not that high. There we go. It’s getting Sam-like. Might turn up… What I’m doing here, this denoising strength is if I put that at one, I’m asking for 100% noise. If you put that really low, basically it sort of puts a little bit of noise and static over the top of the image, and then it will try and get to the prompt that you’re asking for. If it’s really low, it’s not gonna get there very far. If I really bump this up, it’s gonna have the vaguest sense of what this is, but there’s gonna be a lot of noise over the top of it and should hopefully spit out something pretty cool. There we go. It’s Sam-esque. It’s a rough approximation of her. You could be convinced that that’s Sam. Unfortunately, it took three hours to train the AI on this, on not the greatest quality images, and to get a really good facial replication, you need many different angles and different lighting, and to draw for a much, much longer period of time. I trained it for two to three hours and I was like, “Yeah, that’s close enough.” ‘Cause it does cost a bit of money. I’m not talking a lot. It probably cost me 50 cents, but if you really wanted to do it and train on a lot of different stuff, if you wanted to do the entire Stargate library, that could run you a little bit. You could technically train an entire Stargate, like these. These are all different. This is how I woolitize everything. Let’s try and woolitize Amanda Tapping. And maybe let’s get it to do four of these really quick.

David Read:
I wanna start winding this down here.

Adam Cahill:
Yeah, of course. I wanna see if it’ll do it.

David Read:
Some of these morphs are bizarre.

Adam Cahill:
There you go. There’s a woolitized Amanda. That’s me lifting the curtain on the cars.

David Read:
Woolitized? Is that the input?

Adam Cahill:
Yeah. That’s the code, not code, but the specific word you’ve gotta use to get it to generate in this particular style.

David Read:
That’s crazy. Look at those. We’ll show them again, they come by again in a minute. We’ll pull them all up.

Adam Cahill:
Don’t they look great? Again, it’s a vague representation of the image that I’ve got here.

David Read:
In wool.

Adam Cahill:
Basically, in wool.

David Read:
In whatever medium you want. You could make it aluminum.

Adam Cahill:
Exactly. You could do it–

David Read:
We’ve done portraits but we’ve also shown earlier in this episode how you can do landscapes and really any kind of Stargate image that you want. Look at that. That is so, wow.

Adam Cahill:
It’s got the fuzzies.

David Read:
That is so creepy. It’s got the fuzzies. It knows little fuzzies.

Adam Cahill:
That came out way better. That was off script. I had a script over here. That came up great.

David Read:
That’s nuts, man. All right. So, you could just go in and explore, figure things out for yourself, have a good time. You may discover that you may access a hidden part of your artistic being that you didn’t know was there, or maybe reawaken something in yourself by working with prompts. And one of the things that he didn’t show is you can go into sections of images and have it work on specific areas and tell it what you want to do in specific spots. But that’s all. You can go on YouTube and look at all this stuff. It’s really something.

Adam Cahill:
Let’s see if I can get it to do it. So, that’s a bit blurry. So, let’s ask it to do it again. It’s gonna look at this little area that was a bit messed up, as you can see.

David Read:
I see. It’s gonna try to improve that.

Adam Cahill:
It can then try and improve that and it’ll try and fix that up. Hopefully. Actually. I want latent noise. I don’t want original. Now it should fix it up. And there’s an entire model dedicated to inpainting. So, there’s an entire model that you can select called Inpainting, and it will do really, really well at doing this kind of stuff. So, once you’ve got your image that you really like, you chuck on the Inpainting one, and it contextually sees what’s around it better than any of the other models. And just “Mwah.” You can see on the side here that it’s sort of …

David Read:
It’s trying.

Adam Cahill:
I haven’t given it any more information. I haven’t told it to try and fix that area necessarily, but you can see it’s sort of trying to do something different.

David Read:
OK. So, if you want to submit for this contest, we’re gonna show you how to do … That’s … That’s interesting. So, you have to fiddle.

Adam Cahill:
That’s a bit better.

David Read:
You gotta fiddle.

Adam Cahill:
That’s a bit better. I would then probably take that and do a little bit again and so on and so forth.

David Read:
An artist’s work is never done.

Adam Cahill:
If I had more time, obviously we’d go in and change the prompt a little.

David Read:
So, if you wanna make your own Stargate art submissions, you can go to dialthegate.com. Adam, if you wanna come back to us here.

Adam Cahill:
Come back to you?

David Read:
Yes. No, stop sharing. Start sharing you again. Sorry.

Adam Cahill:
I’m not … You want me to stop sharing?

David Read:
There we go. Perfect.

Adam Cahill:
You want me to do that. I see.

David Read:
Perfect. OK. So, I can wrap this up with my my correct screens. I don’t know why it’s … There we go. OK. Come on back. There it is. That’s good enough for me. The contest is gonna start today. And let me go ahead and pull this up. So, this is on dialthegate.com. So, you can go to dialthegate.com/contest or art contests. There’s gonna be more in 2023. We need to adjust this, but you click on this, and it pulls up the form here. You’re gonna need to put in … You can submit any of your own original creations from now through February the 10th at 12 noon Pacific Time. Then we will submit these to the fan base for you to start voting. And then the top three will get $50 US, $30 US, or $20 US, and you just have to agree to the terms. So, all I do is put in my name, [email protected]. You have to have a PayPal or a Venmo account for us to submit payment to you if you win. Dial the Gate logo is what I’m submitting, the logo of Dial the Gate, for instance. Photoshop is our medium, and then you can drag and drop your image. So, you go there, and there’s the image. It’s already added it. Submit. You go ahead and read through the terms, and it sends it on its way to us. So, you can use any digital tool you can think of for this particular contest. I think I’m gonna have a costume contest later in this year. So, there are other things coming. But for this one, it’s digital art. We encourage you to use these computer AI tools to make this possible. Come up with something clever and cool. Talk with your friends about it, bounce ideas off them and see if you can create something. And then after February the 10th, we’re gonna load all of the images from the contest onto dialthegate.com and Frederick Marcoux over at Concepts Web is gonna make it possible so you can vote on your top three. And then the ones with the most number of votes will get first, second, and third place. We may have a few honorable mentions, depending on how big the pool is and how many submit. So, Adam, is there anything else you wanna add? Adam’s gonna help me go through them, by the way.

Adam Cahill:
Look, if anyone wants to use one of the AI or/and wants help either setting things up or has questions about settings or prompt crafting, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram. Just send me a message and I’ll help you out and explain what something does. And if I don’t, I can probably point you in the right direction.

David Read:
Robot elbows. It looks like the bad robot logo a little bit. So, put in–

Adam Cahill:
It was definitely MS Paint. I’ll say that.

David Read:
Really? It’s cool. So, I appreciate you making this possible by introducing us to the idea. Don’t you have one more Stargate AI image to show us?

Adam Cahill:
Did I?

David Read:
You made one for “The Broca Divide”

Adam Cahill:
OK, we did that.

David Read:
I’d like to see that real quick.

Adam Cahill:
OK. All right.

David Read:
He blew me away with this. He’s tinkering through images and he went ahead and did one for “The Broca Divide” for SG1.

Adam Cahill:
There we go.

David Read:
Isn’t that cool?

Adam Cahill:
So, again, Midjourney got me most of the way. And then I’ve gone and I’ve added someone down here.

David Read:
The Earth logo and everything.

Adam Cahill:
Which took a while. Got the logo in there. Hands, man, the AI just does not know what hands are. So, once I got to there, I was like, “Yep, it’s good enough.” It’s like some sort of mangled …

David Read:
It doesn’t have to be exact.

Adam Cahill:
… mess. No, it’s definitely not exact. I think if you count his fingers there, they’re probably six, but–

David Read:
It’s all good, man.

Adam Cahill:
That’s the essence of “The Broca Divide.”

David Read:
That’s the land of the dark, for sure.

Adam Cahill:
Actually, I will say I’ve got a really good idea for Hathor. I wanted to do a pinup… tasteful… I’m not gonna do nothing too racy. But some sort of pinup of Hathor, Egyptian-themed, on a concrete wall of some Air Force guy’s bunk or something like that, I thought would’ve been cool to do maybe. And then for, I don’t know what the episode name is, but the one with the replicators where they come and crash on Earth, and they find them in that submarine. I wanted to do a little–

David Read:
“Small Victories.”

Adam Cahill:
It’s probably gonna have to be a metal spider, but wearing a little captain’s hat, standing on top of a submarine or something.

David Read:
I’m interested to see.

Adam Cahill:
That would be cool, I think.

David Read:
What kind of approach it has for replicators, for sure, ’cause they are unique in their own form. All right, man. I appreciate you coming on at 3:30 in the morning over there.

Adam Cahill:
That’s all right.

David Read:
… at least it’s Sunday.

Adam Cahill:
Exactly. I’m running on two Red Bulls and five hours of sleep.

David Read:
I hope you guys had fun with this. If you have any questions for me about the contest, go ahead and contact me through the Dial the Gate portal at dialthegate.com, or you can email me at [email protected]. This is open to anyone in the world, as long as you’re 18 or over. You need to read through the rules before you submit. No purchase necessary, void where prohibited. Have some fun in this. So, this is the first phase that will conclude on February the 10th with the submissions at 12 noon. Then we’ll go through a voting phase, and then we’ll have an episode where we share in your creations. So, please provide descriptions, give us things to talk about. We’ll show off your work. If we get a lot of submissions, I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to show off everyone’s. And we reserve the right, if anything is profane or inappropriate that YouTube would block us for anyway, to refuse posts, reviewing those on air. Adam, thank you, sir. I appreciate you very much for coming by.

Adam Cahill:
Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.

David Read:
Thank you. All right. We will see you soon. All right. That was Adam Cahill, and I really appreciate everything that he’s done for me and my team, making all this cool artwork possible. Absolutely incredible stuff, and I hope you have a better idea of what’s involved in creating some of this content as well. If you enjoyed the episode, click the Like button. Share it with your friends. Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free, and we do appreciate you watching. If you wanna support the show further, buy yourself some of our themed swag. We offer T-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, and hoodies for all ages, as well as cups and other accessories in a variety of sizes and colors at dialthegate.com/merch. And thanks so much for your support. My tremendous thanks to Frederick Marcoux for making the contest available for submission on dialthegate.com. We worked out all the programming language for that. It was a whole mess I just threw at him this week, and he’s like, “Ah, OK. I guess I’ll do this.” So thank you, Frederick. I appreciate it. Thanks to my producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, my moderating team, Sommer, Therese, Jeremy, Rhys, and Antony. You guys make this thing possible. I appreciate you tuning in. We have a pre-recorded episode with Debbie with her Stargate magazine covers. You wanna see something really cool, another fan-made creation, that’s half an hour, episode 162 with Debbie Bell. She designed the original Dial the Gate logo, using font and layout. And then Brice Ores went on and developed it from there, but she was key to part of the look of Dial the Gate. So, I appreciate her joining us finally for an episode. You’ll really enjoy that one. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you on the other side.