AI Outtakes, Vol. 15
Jim Wrubel
CEO, Orchestra AI · December 19, 2023
Generative AI often struggles with accurately depicting lighting in images, resulting in unrealistic and chaotic backgrounds with excessive lighting. That can be funny, right?
If there's one thing generative AI often gets wrong, it's fingers. And hands. And limbs in general. Oh and sometimes faces. And counting.
Okay, there are actually a lot of things it gets wrong, but one that rarely seems to come up is lighting. Generative AI is actually really good at raytracing - creating realistic light on objects based on the location of lights. It's just that it has no idea how lights actually work.
Let's look at a basic image I created at one point for a customer project:
a photo of a female software engineering manager, signing up on a website
Photo's not bad! Face is a little odd, but overall this is pretty reasonable, at least in the foreground.
But what on earth is going on with the background?! It's got more lights than there were air fresheners in the slotherhouse from the movie Se7en!
As I look back, there are a lot of images that look fine but the lighting's a mess. Let's see if we can have some fun with that.
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, open floorplan, weird lighting
Hmm, these lights are bent and don't really cover the room properly, but weird? We can do better.
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, open floorplan, mood lighting
It's like AI is toying with me here. Time to bring out the big prompts.
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, open floorplan, disco ball
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, open floorplan, lit by lava lamps
a photo of group of office workers looking at their phone, in a dark meeting room, open floorplan, lights turned off
a photo of group of office workers, in a pitch black meeting room
Maybe the problem is the people, not the lights. What if the meeting was just a group of lights?
a photo of several lights, having a business meeting, open floorplan
We've gotten some interesting results but not the mess that I was hoping for. Let's try some different angles.
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, red green and blue lighting
Okay, AI seems to like going overboard with color. Let's try another gaudy combination.
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, purple and orange lighting
Generative AI can definitely do color (and seems to enjoy it!). What other kind of lights can we get it to use?
a photo of group of office workers, in a meeting room, (campfire on the table:1.4)
Okay, that's pretty weird. How about flashlights?
a photo of group of office workers holding flashlights, in a meeting room
What about glowsticks?
a photo of group of office workers wearing glow sticks, in a meeting room
Maybe it doesn't know what glowsticks are?
a photo of group of office workers wearing glow in the dark necklaces, in a meeting room
More like radioactive pearls. Let's try again.
a photo of group of office workers wearing different colored glow in the dark necklaces
Well, I think we learned that while generative AI doesn't seem to like turning the lights down, it does love being colorful! Until next week:
a photo of group of office workers wearing glow in the dark necklaces, waving goodbye
