Actually, it’s “sheep”:
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice.
It said: “If you please, draw me a sheep!”
“What!”
“Draw me a sheep!”
I jumped to my feet, completely thunderstruck. I blinked my eyes hard. I looked carefully all around me. And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness. Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him. But my drawing is certainly very much less charming than its model.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince. Harcourt, 2000. Translated from French by Richard Howard.
Anyway, I wrote elsewhere that a multi-modal large language model will draw you a lamb if you tell it to draw you a lamb. But I was also expecting DALL-E 3, the AI in question, to recognize the literary connection. It obviously didn’t, so I started again with this prompt:
Draw me a lamb in Saint-Exupéry’s style.
Then it caught on, and wrote a lot of text in response, then gave me four images. I will only quote the first paragraph from the response:
Sure, I’ll create images of a lamb in a style reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry, who is best known for his book “The Little Prince”. Here we go!
But the rest is interesting, too. From my laconic prompt, it created four new ones, so what I wrote was more like a “meta-prompt” and not something the image generator would directly work from. Let’s just take the first one:
Illustration: A delicate and whimsical sketch of a lamb, standing on a small planet with a few sparse patches of grass. The lamb gazes up curiously at the star-filled sky, reminiscent of the simple, yet profound drawings from “The Little Prince”.
Here are three of the four images I got. The description above belongs to the first one. It’s an “almost” — can you spot how it is not at all like the illustrations sketched by Saint-Exupéry himself?
The reason I am not giving you the fourth image is that it is very bad. I mean, technically it is “picture-perfect” but it is also fully contrary to my taste. I can’t have any of you believe that I approve of that style.
thirdtower.ai 