Middlebury Assignment – Putting my Favorite Dog on the Moon

The Middlebury college AI assignment was an interesting read and activity. As an introduction of the assignment, there was an in-depth discussion about the regulation of AI, and how the development of free and accessible online tools has created issues for original creators and artists. The widespread recognition of Stable Diffusion is something I’ve come across in my time on the internet as well. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the difference between real art and AI generated ones, especially for already animated content. If I were an artist (which I am most definitely not), I wouldn’t be happy with the direction of the industry and I would frankly be worried about how this changes my creative direction for the future. I’d assume that many artists are stuck at a crossroads between pursuing a type of art they’re truly excited about versus adhering to the AI buzz and losing some originality in the process.

For the actual image generation portion of the assignment, I decided to create an image of a dachshund on the moon, and I formatted the prompt to where the dog would resemble an astronaut, akin to Neil Armstrong during the first moon landing. I decided to use both Stable Diffusion and Craiyon to generate these images.

This first one from Stable Diffusion was amazing, 10/10 in my book. The image feels very realistic yet still with an artistic flair. The generator even stayed true to the prompt and added an American flag on the left arm sleeve. The only criticism I’d have would be the weird lighting coming from what I’d assume is the sun? Doesn’t seem very realistic for there to be beaming sun on the moon. Otherwise, it kind of scares me how good this image was.

This one from the Craiyon generator is something that I expected a little more. The image is very low quality and doesn’t adhere to the guidelines I set in the prompt. It’s almost comically bad, the moon completely overtakes the subject of the photo which was supposed to be the dog.

I didn’t get any submission result back after sending in my results on the website, but I will update here if there is anything else that pops up from this adventure.