Our Personal goal
At the end of this project, we aim to gain a better understanding of how AI text prompts and image generative software work. Before we reach that stage, we started by using various data collection methods such as conducting google surveys and browsing online forums to collect peoples most prominent dreams and nightmares.
Our respondants range from age 18 - 30. This is done specifically so because people going through this developmental stage (be it physical, mental or emotional) have the highest amount of stress, uncertainty and also carefree happiness in their life. Because of what they are going through, it comes out in their dreams producing a wide variety of different dreams and nightmares.
Survey Conducted
From our survey, we've collected over 40 unique dreams and nightmares and then brought them over to Dalle-2. Realizing that Dalle-2 will not recognise big chunks of text, we had to learn to pick out keywords from each dream and cut out parts that are irrelevant.
One challenge faced here was that some words are not recognisable by Dalle-2, and they will not generate images with words that are agaisnt their guidelines. For example, words like "sexy" or "poop" and even images of children's faces are agaisnt their guidelines, and we had to compromise by finding words with a similar meaning so that we can preserve as much of the original dream as we can.
Another problem we faced was making the images look "dream-like". But what does dream-like mean? How a dream looks like can be interpreted differently by different people, so for this project it is based off our own perception of what we think a dream looks like.
To us, a dream-like images meant having pastel colours, pink and purple undertones, a hazy atmosphere or even sunbeams glimmering through the window.
To guide us through the selection of art styles in Dalle-2, we downloaded a Google Chrome extention that shows an array of various different art styles ranging from pencil strokes to even simpson-fying an image. This Chrome extension helped in us narrowing our selections down to 6 different art styles which we tested out on one of our respondants dream and decided to settle on both the pastel and twilight art styles.