Thinking I might be missing out on something good by using ChatGPT instead of Google Gemini, I got a Gemini account this morning. I needn't have worried. Gemini is a good year behind ChatGPT, if not more. Here's one of the tests I ran this morning, asking for an image.
Prompt: "an old southern man sitting on the floor while chihuahuas romp all over him."
Here are the results.
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| ChatGPT |
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| Gemini |
Without any effort at all, I can see a bunch of advantages for ChatGPT. The mood of the image is spot on as the old man is laughing and playing with the dogs. In the Gemini image, it looks like he's getting irritated that they haven't learned Latin yet. The proportions are fine in the ChatGPT image. Gemini zapped both the man and the dogs with a shrink ray. ChatGPT's chihuahuas are having a great time. Gemini's chihuahuas are struggling to conjugate the verb latrare.
I played around with Arthurian fiction as well. ChatGPT was feminist when I first started using it over a year ago and my stories all ended up with the damsels forming sustainable, organic tofu coops. I was eventually able to get them to come to their senses. Gemini was even worse and instantly judged Le Morte D'Arthur as iredeemably sexist. If the old ChatGPT drove my stories into the feminism ditch after ten or so interactions, Gemini floored the thing and shot over the ditch and into a ravine on the first try.
That wasn't the worst of it. The best way to describe Gemini is inartful. Whether that's the clumsy images it drew or the ghastly and unusable dialog it created, it simply isn't fit for purpose.
On The Plus Side
I've been having a lot of fun writing goofy alternate-history stories with ChatGPT lately and they're decent. Well, they're more like adult bedtime stories perfect for my sense of humor and taste, but they're at least passable.
For example, I have one where, in 1937, Hitler decides he's got the whole Aryan thing wrong and instead of persecuting the Jews in favor of the Aryans, he bends the entire might of the Reich into developing a master race of housecats. German Jews, being brainiac scientists, are freed and supported in their feline experimentation. The British, concerned about losing an animal arms race, go all in on budgies. The French, of course, turn to poodles and the ridiculous Italians choose the silliest animal of all, the hamster. Poor Stalin chooses one animal after another only to see his starving peasants devour them all.
ChatGPT kept the story light, fast-paced and madcap. It was a lot of fun to generate. Admittedly, I didn't go too far with Gemini, but what tests I ran gave me results that were worse than if I had started from scratch and written or drawn the things for myself.
2 comments:
I thought the Gemini looks a little more like "reality". The ChatGPT picture looks more like a painting.
What could ChatGPT do with your TNG story where they force a vegan lifestyle on a planet of sentient lions? You wrote that somewhere around 1987-88.
I agree with MN that the Gemini looks more photograph-like, in fact the little dogs almost look like cutouts inserted into the picture. Meanwhile the ChatGPT looks more like it was constructed as a whole.
I suspect that this is a result of Gemini being trained on all the photographs that Google can scrape from the Net, while ChatGPT is trained on human-made drawings of various types. For example, the ChatGPT eyes kind of remind me of Margaret Keane's "Big Eyes" paintings, which aren't at all photographic. (https://www.keane-eyes.com/category/paintings/)
There might also be a matter of approach. It is possible that Gemini is trying to address the whole issue of separating components of the image into individual entities. While the Gemini chihuahuas aren't as visually cute, they do appear to be more "distinct". I feel like they are working towards being able to specify to Gemini not just what elements you want in the image, but also where you want them positioned. While this results in a less appealing image at first, I think in the long run it is going to turn out to be the better choice.
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