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Using AI to Create New Comic Strips without Writing Any Code
A tutorial on how to use GPT-3 and DALL-E to generate original content for the funny pages
I spent the last month exploring how to use OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator and their DALL-E image-to-text system to create new comic strips without writing any source code. Note that both systems are in beta, and after I used all of my free tokens, they started charging a nominal fee for use. But the results are pretty good! And OpenAI grants users the right to use their generated material for commercial purposes.
In this article, I’ll provide a little background on GPT-3 and DALL-E, explain how I used these systems to create comics, and show the results. Along the way, I’ll highlight the new text generation features in GPT-3 and explain how I coerced DALL-E to draw the same character with different views and poses.
Using GPT-3 to Create Titles, Characters, and Scenes
I previously wrote about how to use OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator to create funny captions for memes. With that project, AI-Memer, I learned that GPT-3 could be funny.
OpenAI trained their GPT-3 neural network with a massive amount of text from books and web pages, including comedic material. Here’s the breakdown of the training data from OpenAI’s paper:
According to OpenAI, a “token” is about 3/4 of a word. Using 500 words per page, that’s about 750 million pages of text.
In order to use GPT-3, you have to create an account here. After creating the account, OpenAI gives you US$18 worth of credits that you can use before they start charging you. You can then navigate to the Playground, enter a prompt, and it will generate new text.
New Comic #1 - Mark Madness
My first step in creating new comics was generating a title from a theme concept. It was easy to do using GPT-3 user interface. All I did was ask. I entered “Create wacky titles for a humorous comic strip about college sports” and hit…
