nd-genuary32nd-plants-chatgpt3-001

Disclaimer

This artwork is partially generated by AI, and I seek to be as transparent as possible about the human and machine contributions.

From idea to foundation

For GENUARY 2023 (= generative art in January, a month when you have a different prompt every day and can use that to create art in any form you like) I wanted to create something myself, but had no idea what I could actually do. Instead, I played around with ChatGPT and explored how to generate GLSL (which worked in some simple cases but failed in many others) or learned the basics of writing smart contracts for Tezos.

On February 2nd, my friend 2xAA released his new album Alescere and I finally got the inspiration I needed because the cover artwork contained a minimalistic plant and “Alescere” is Latin for “to grow” (or at least it can be interpreted into this direction). Which was a perfect match for the “plants” prompt of GENUARY.

Since it was already February, I still wasn’t sure to get started with the artwork for GENUARY, but then I saw that fxhash had already announced GENUARY 32nd on their Discord: An imaginary point in time specifically for celebrating generative art. The idea was to have a week-long (February 1-7) minting party with submissions for GENUARY 2023. Soon after I also found another encouraging info on the website of GENUARY where it stated, that you could do the prompt whenever it was convenient to do so.

I was super motivated, but uncertain about how to get started. I created Canvas 2D stuff in the past, but never a growing plant. So I was wondering: Can I combine my plant idea with research on how to use ChatGPT to create generative art from scratch? The next day I started to record the whole process and it was actually working. The only thing that I totally underestimated was the time it took to edit the video (I had to do A LOT of voice overs), that’s why I missed the deadline (February 7) for GENUARY 32nd on fxhash by more than a month.

But it’s finally done and that’s all that matters. Please grab a glass of whatever, some snacks and watch the show: Create Generative Art with ChatGPT & JavaScript

I have summarized the video for you if you don’t have time to watch it:

• Goal: Use ChatGPT to create the foundation of a generative artwork that renders a scene of growing plants
• Result: A basic scene of plants that are growing, written in JavaScript on Canvas 2D

fxhashify

After holding the generated code from ChatGPT in my hands, I switched to my manual process (which involves using my human brain) to convert the foundation into something that can be actually minted on fxhash. I call this “fxhashify”, as this process is tailored to the capabilities of fxhash. If you are interested in this process, then please leave a comment on the video. If you just want to know what I changed, then please continue reading:

• Used the Pseudo Random Number Generator from the params-boilerplate instead of Math.random()
• Randomized parameters (like x / y position, color, growthSpeed and more) to control the plants, ground, sun and sky
• Established the scene to have plantsAmount between 1 and 8
• Spread the plants evenly on the ground with consistent spacing, related to the plantsAmount
• Made sure that tall plants are in front of small plants
• To prevent the plants from extending outside the scene, smaller-sized plants are placed along the edge whenever more than three plants were generated
• A different globalCompositeOperation was used for the petals of the “special plants”, distinguishing them from regular plants
• Two different Time of Day were included: Sunny Day vs Rainbow Night
• The proportions of the scene were kept, regardless of how it was scaled, using 2048 x 2048 px as the reference size
• A lot of fine-tuning was done to make it look pretty and get the colors right in terms of lightness and saturation… <3 HSL
• Added various helper functions (like inRange or pseudoRandomBetween) and the possibility to save the scene as an image by pressing “s” on the keyboard
• The characteristic was added to continuously redraw the scene after a random timeout between 0 and 60000 ms, so that you can see the plants growing over and over again. After each redraw, stemGrowthSpeed, centerGrowthSpeed and petalGrowthSpeed are randomized
• Included only a few fxhash features, but went into a rabbit hole for firstRedraw and added quotes from my most favorite movies, shows and music. But only the ones that had a connection to time
• My little daughters gave me important feedback during development, so I integrated their favorite show “My Little Pony” into the Flower Lightness feature (some ponies look dark, others look very bright)
• Used fxparams for timeOfDay, plantsAmount, flowerLightness and the backgroundSaturation, so that minters have an influence on the generated piece
• Comments were added on all functions and everything in between

Code

Everything is JavaScript + Canvas 2D and open source under AGPLv3

Interactive

• Press s on your keyboard to download a screenshot
• The scene is redrawn every pseudo-random ms

Credits

• The foundation was created together with ChatGPT, thanks for providing such a tool for free
• The music for the intro, the chapters and the outro of the video was composed & produced by my friend Syrenoize, please check out her awesome music!