AI-Generated Art for a Scooter Rally Sticker

For the 2023 Heinkelfest one of the attendees added a twist: bring a sticker from your hometown to trade with the other attendees. It’s a familiar tradition in other parts of the world but not common in Beverly. Beverly isn’t a tourist mecca worthy of stickers (except for a seal named Shoebert that spent time in the local factory pond and eventually turned himself into the local police, a true story you can read about here). Salem, however is a world-famous tourist magnet with many more but equally unimaginative stickers. I decided to make my own Salem scooter-themed sticker using an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) image generator.

An image generator is to pictures what Chat GPT is to text. These systems have ingested huge quantities of information from various sources (including this blog) and use it to answer questions posed to it. Whereas Chat GPT gives an answer in text, an AI image generator will give you a picture or illustration. I used the Bing AI Image Creator. If you have a Microsoft 365 account you can use it for free.

Generating the image is an iterative process. You prompt the image generator with a query and it produces a picture. It will take you several attempts to get exactly what you want, since the images it produces tend to be mainstream and typical of the kind of answer you’d get if you asked an eight year old to draw a picture for you. A drawback of the image generator is that you can’t build on an existing idea, you always have to incorporate the texts that gave you the last set of acceptable results and add on to them. I wished you could save the queries, but it’s a free-to-use program so I can’t complain.

These are the queries I asked in order to generate the image I wanted:

Original Query: A picture of a witch riding a scooter. The image generator gave me a cartoon-like drawing of a happy witch on a razor scooter. It was not what I wanted.

2nd Query: A picture of a witch riding a vintage metal scooter: This time it got the scooter right (more or less) but the witch was still happy and looked like she was standing still.

3rd Query: A picture of a witch riding a vintage metal scooter against an orange background with a black scooter: This gave me a solid color background and a black scooter, with more or less the same picture.

4th Query: A picture of a witch riding a black metal scooter with an orange background going fast: This time it angled the scooter and added lines to suggest rapid forward movement. The witch was still a “good” witch, not what I had in mind.

5th Query: A picture of a witch riding a black metal scooter going fast, with a “badass” attitude: This query did the trick! I took the image, pasted it into Powerpoint, and added the lettering.

After that I uploaded the image to Sticker Mule and paid less than $20 for 50 labels. Way better than $4.00 Shoebert stickers!