Snails on rails to snails in space

My commute to work usually begins with a 20-minute walk to the tram (see the previous post). On rainy mornings, I sometimes see snails on the sidewalk. I might be weird but I find them fascinating creatures and often take close-up photos of them. And, of course, I began to wonder how DALL-E sees snails.

Important: No snails were harmed while creating these images and this post.

Anyway, on a rainy morning, I asked DALL-E to do this:

Me: Create a photo of the close-up of a snail inching ahead on a tram track. The tram track is in a narrow city street. The street is covered with cobblestones. The buildings resemble 1960s Paris. A tram is approaching in a distance. Keep the snail in a closeup.

This will be a longer post, where I show you how I increasingly added unreal elements to the scene. And here’s a huge disclaimer: there is absolutely no guarantee that DALL-E would give you the same images if you dropped the same prompts, copying from this post.

But first I was trying to get DALL-E to turn the snail so that it moves along the tracks, not across. To no avail: that only happened later down this road, in response to a differently worded prompt.

I then dropped four more prompts. DALL-E responded to all of them but I will first give you all the prompts, and then all the images:

Me: Can you make the snail bigger? Can you make its shell glow in blue?

Me: Please re-create the [second] image so that the scene is at night and the street lights are on.

Me: Let’s move closer to the snail and to the tracks, so that the snail is larger and viewed more from below.

And finally, me again: Can you turn the snail so that it faces the camera?

Note that the last prompt was the one that managed to turn the snail so that it moves along the tracks.

At this point, you might want to review these images and spot pecularities about the tram tracks. You will find that DALL-E will add enough unreal elements without us putting them in the prompt.

As a final steps, I let go of the tram tracks and put the snails into space:

Me: Create a photo of a squadron of snails flying through space towards a green moon. The light of a sun should come from the top right but the sun itself must not be visible on the image. Make the shells of the snails glow in bright red.

The next post will show more animals in space.