Of late, I’ve come to use AI generated imagery in lieu of my own work or open-source and licensed works as a source for digital storytelling.  My friend, blogger Doug Austin (perhaps the hardest working man in e-discovery) has been illustrating his daily blog posts with AI-generated art for quite some time and I kid him now-and-then about the abundance of robots in his illustrations.  I feel besieged by robot imagery.

Last week in San Antonio, I co-presented on AI evidence at a huge annual conclave of family law practitioners.  I’ve been using ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney for image generation, but preparing the new presentation, I kicked the tires of several tools I’d not used before.  One of them impressed me so I thought I’d post to share it.  I think it blows the doors off ChatGPT’s images.  It’s called PlaygroundAI  It lets users create up to 50 images per day at no charge, and up to 1,000 images a day on its Pro plan ($15/month paid monthly, cancel any time).

Just to give you an idea of the difference between the cartoonish output I see from ChatGPT compared with PlaygroundAI, I gave each the following prompt: “Draw an image depicting Craig Ball (Texas attorney) besieged by robots.”  Here’s what I got back from ChatGPT (Omni):

I haven’t looked that young at any time this century, and it’s been far longer since I wore three-piece suits or carried a briefcase; but what emerged was what I’ve come to expect from ChatGPT.  Not bad, just…meh.  Yet, it may be to your taste.

Now, here’s what the same prompt generated from PlaygroundAI:

Clearly, it’s not me (I’ve never looked that good), but the attire, neck, wrinkles, hair and other hallmarks of relentless maturation are on point, and though clearly not a photo, it’s more photorealistic.

Same prompt, different version and aspect ratio:

I went back to ChatGPT and tried (and failed) to get something more lifelike and age appropriate:

If you’ve wanted to get your hands on AI drawing tools or tried some and been daunted by the complexity, give PlaygroundAI a try.  I promise you’ll have some fun, and you might even improve the quality of your visual persuasion.