Using Poetry for AI Prompts

 

As I'm always in search of new ideas for AI imaging prompts, it recently occurred to me to simply enter random lines of poetry and then wait to see what a particular AI model would make of them.  Rather than work from masterpieces of literature, I instead focused on poetry that contained the most vivid imagery.  Accordingly, the two images shown here were generated by Clipdrop Stable Diffusion XL from the opening lines of the 1912 poem Medusa by Clark Ashton Smith, always one of my favorite Weird Tales authors of whom no one less than H.P. Lovecraft once wrote: "In sheer demonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled."  And on that score who would know better than Lovecraft?

Medusa itself is contained in The Star-Treader and other Poems, available as a free download from Project Gutenberg, and the lines in question read as follows:

"As drear and barren as the glooms of Death,

It lies, a windless land of livid dawns,

Nude to a desolate firmament, with hills

That seem the fleshless earth's outjutting ribs,

And plains whose face is crossed and rivelled deep

With gullies twisting like a serpent's track.

The leprous touch of Death is on its stones,

Where for his token visible, the Head

Is throned upon a heap of monstrous rocks,

Grotesque in everlasting ugliness,

Within a hill-ravine, that splits athwart

Like some old, hideous and unhealing scar."

Pretty strong stuff, isn't it?  And perfect for the use to which I put it.

My college degree was in English lit; and so I have, even many years later, a wide familiarity with world poetry from which to draw future inspiration.  It will be interesting, to me at least, to see what I can come up with.