Naughty Leaves

SFW, more or less

Alakazam!

What’s this? After almost three years, a second post in the Bridge, Out Ahead section! Why the long gap? Because, it turns out that when you announce a separate blog for a niche topic, all of your writing on that topic naturally goes into that blog, and only an egotistical maniac would use his main blog to constantly alert his non-bridge-playing (and possibly completely non-caring-about-bridge) readers to things appearing over yonder—especially because, if they wanted to see that stuff, they could just subscribe to the other blog and then they would be tuned into the delightful river of posts not just about bridge, but about software development!

I hereby resolve to never pander to you in such a desperate, self-serving manner.

I’m only mentioning the other blog now because, while working on a new feature, I fell into another ChatGPT/DALL-E image-generating session that you might find interesting.

I was fresh off the development of a wonderful new feature in my bridge program called The Variegator. I thought it would be cool to introduce a little pizazz into the bridge deal proceedings, so I nicknamed the feature “The ‘Gator” and I used DALL-E to create some super-cool gator images that I then turned into icons to go on a button on my program’s user interface. For once, DALL-E just gave me exactly what I asked for, resulting in these three images, all of which are now used in my program:

That was so much fun that I decided to create cartoon icons for another feature I was working on—one that involved interleaving deals from multiple files into one combined file. All I needed was a better name than “The Interleaver,” and a cartoon character that would evoke the name of the feature. Obviously, “The Leaf” came to mind. So, I asked DALL-E to draw a leaf standing in a very strong, confident pose.

Hmmm. Notice anything…hanging down?

I have spent countless hours outdoors, in close proximity to trees and leaves. I have spent hours raking leaves into piles and then leaping into said piles. Heck, I can turn my head from where I sit at my desk and see many thousands of leaves. Not once in all my looking at or wallowing in leaves in the wild did I ever find anything about them even vaguely phallic. Why, then, does the stem of this leaf look to me like a dangling dong?

It’s a rhetorical question—I know the answer already: it’s because, by requesting that my leaf be given Human characteristics like arms and legs and a face, I have anthropomorphized the whole thing so that any other…protuberance…will naturally appear to be the thing whose location it occupies. For instance, if the stem was at the top, you might think, “awesome cowlick, Leaf Man,” and not, “OMG, he’s got a dong emerging from his head.” But put the stem between the legs and it ineluctably suggests dongitude.

I also didn’t care for the very smooth quality of that leaf, so I asked DALL-E to give it a more spiky appearance and to eliminate the stem.

Two things about DALL-E when you ask for a change to a drawing: 1) it usually only gives you, at most, half of what you ask for; and 2) it brags about it, and in the process it lies. After it draws something for you, it basically repeats back your request as though it had complied with it 100%, not 49.88%. So for this one it said something like, “Here’s your leaf with a more spiky appearance and with no stem. Let me know if you need any other changes. Cheerio!”

No, DALL-E, you did not leave off the stem!

I then decided to do as they do on television, and obscure the offending part of the picture. I asked DALL-E to place a dark rectangle in front of the middle-front of the leaf.

I read a lot about how AI programs are being trained to understand ever-more-complex language. I sure will be glad when they teach it to understand that mind-blowing concept we call, “In front of.”

I then repeated the request, with emphasis on the dark rectangle covering the front of the leaf.

Which, naturally, resulted in two dongy leaves. Note the green stripes slyly reaching in from the right. If they kept going leftward, they would obscure the waist and the knees of the main leaf, but not his…stem.

The “thumbs up” was by this time also starting to piss me off. Of course, I asked for it in the original specification, but now it looks like DALL-E is giving me the thumbs-up to say, “Mission accomplished.”

No, DALL-E, mission not accomplished. That stem is still in my face.

I next asked for my leaf to be wearing pants, thinking that that would naturally keep the stem out of view.

Mission…not accomplished. Yes, there is no stem. But, contrary to DALL-E’s bragging upon completing this drawing, I don’t really see pants. Given all the veins in evidence on the torso, this is still a nude leaf—one now with a tantalizingly (to some) smooth crotchal zone. It brings to mind the odd tradition of having a full-grown, stem-free woman portray that eternal boy, Peter Pan.

Maybe not the whole time you’re watching such shows, but perhaps from time to time during lulls in the action, you can’t help but think something along the lines of, “Peter has no…stem.” So, you see, the smooth groin does not accomplish the mission of banishing stem thoughts from the viewers’ minds.

I next embarked on more attempts to hide the stem. I asked for my leaf to be waist-deep in murky swamp water. I specified dirty water because I just knew that if I only said, “waist-deep in water,” then DALL-E would probably put him in a crystal-clear swimming pool where the parallax effect of the water would magnify the stem. This swamp water was going to make my bridge program’s button icon somewhat hard to interpret, but decency demanded it.

That water doesn’t even cover his feet, much lest his waist. Oh, and I didn’t ask for shoes, but look how obvious they are. Why couldn’t the pants be so obviously pants?

Deeper swamp water, I demanded. Up to his chest!

Deeeeeper! Up to his neck!

Water wasn’t cutting it. How about putting him behind a fence, so only his face and arms show?

Lost the legs, but never fear: stem is here.

In tall grass, with only his face showing.

That’s gonna tickle.

Maybe bring in another character to stand in front of the leaf? More confusion on the button icon, but well worth it. I asked for my old pal, the slobbering giraffe, who usually makes everything better.

Not this time. Not only is the giraffe not positioned so as to hide the stem from view, but he appears to be staring lustily at that green member. I re-emphasized that I wanted the giraffe to be front and center, with only the leaf’s face and arms visible behind him.

Which DALL-E, of course, interpreted as, “Forget the giraffe. Make the leaf look like a perv.” I foolishly asked it to restore the leaf’s confident expression and to put the slobbery giraffe front and center as I had requested before.

We’re getting into 1960’s album-cover territory here, but sadly, that’s not my goal. I just want a modestly clothed leaf for my program button. Please?

Water was a bust, but how about having him standing in quicksand, about to go under?

No! I want him practically buried in that stuff!

Or, you know, poking himself into it.

The wooden fence had failed, but a brick wall—so solid. Would it work?

Kool-Aid called—they want their add campaign back. This guy will simply not stop waving his stem around.

I went back to the idea of pants, only this time I specified coveralls.

Great, except for the dong trap-door.

How about a business suit?

So close, but this one fails due to poor execution. So much of the leaf appears outside of the suit, it’s not clear how this fellow is constructed. It is the only one, however, that does not have the stem (or absence of stem) drawing one’s eyes directly to the groin. But no, this will not suit for my button icon.

That ended the session. A day later, I decided to start over from scratch, this time by engaging ChatGPT in a discussion of stemless leaves to establish the topic, then asking it to draw one. I mean, if the AI itself posited the existence of a stemless leaf, wouldn’t it stand to reason that, when drawing such a leaf, it would not add a stem?

The conversation:

And the result:

I see five (5) stems.

By this time, I had decided not to develop the interleaving feature of my bridge deal generator, so fortunately I was able to walk away from the leaf-drawing project before it could drive me mad (or to use Photoshop).

Boing!