I am waiting for when I could provide these a scene snippet from "Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy" (or any book) and it could draw that for me. The gold planets, the waking up on the beach, total perspective vortex etc.
I like the book, but there are quite a few scenes which are quite hard to visualize and make sense. An image generator that can follow that language and detail will be amazing. Even more awesome will be if it remains consistent in follow ups.
Have you tried? It works well for other books, e.g. here's a scene from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" which is conveniently in the public domain.
While it’s not 100% perfect (no horn from the forehead of his helmet) I’d say this is far beyond 90%. I can imagine reading books from project Gutenberg on a future reader app that automatically makes pictures of each scene which are consistent with each other and faithful to the text, on the fly as you read.
I've seen stuff that echoes this sentiment before, and I have to say I don't understand this desire at all. Why would I need a computer to show me what something in a book looks like? I already have an imagination for that!
Books are fundamentally a collaborative artform between the author and the reader. The author provides the blueprint, but it's up to the reader to construct the scene in their own head. And every reader is going to have slightly different interpretations based on how they imagine the events of a book. This act of imagination and re-interpertation is one of the things I love about reading books.
Having a computer do the visualization for you completely destroys what makes books engaging and interesting. If you don't want to visualize the book yourself, I have to wonder why the hell you're reading a book in the first place.
If you need that visual component, just watch a movie or read a comic book or something. This isn't a slight against movies or comics! They're fantastic mediums and are able to utilize their visual element to communicate ideas in ways that books can struggle with. And these visuals will form a much more cohesive artistic vision then whatever an AI outputs, since they're an integrated and intentional part of the work.
You make it sound like an unfair wish, which I would say is unfair itself. I like the book, I like visualising it in my head, and I fantasise what a scene would look like. AI won't generate a true visual. It's all fantasy anyway and AI can actually do it the way I have it in my head. It will solidify that thought.
For this book in particular, I read the comic version and I didn't like the visuals very much. I have a different idea of babel fish. Vogons look different. I would love to see the visual that's in my head on paper.
I love the idea, but I feel like I have to say that I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what the total perspective vortex would look like for someone being subjected to it. When I first read the books I immediately had a visual and that has never changed when I’ve read them again (and again…).
I’m not sure what that says about either of us, but I would say that your definitive “quite hard to visualise” statement is very much subjective.
Vortex may be not so much but there are other hard to visualize things. I am on the third book, and I have no idea what Beeblebrox's two heads look like. Second head is often mentioned in passing. Sometimes its mentioned as its always there, other times it feels like its just pops out of somewhere, otherwise, it's like it doesn't exist.
There is the scene when they see themselves on the beach on first rescue by the ship. That was hard to grasp. Or the insides of the ship itself, the bridge, the panels etc. Also that black ship they stole.
But may be its just me having a hard time with these concepts.
It's not just about scene being difficult to visualize, even if I can see them in my head, I want to see them on paper too because those thing excite me.
We have alt text for images, you want alt images for text.
You can see other people's interpretation of Zaphod's two heads by watching the BBC HHGTTG show (Mark Wing-Davey) or the movie (Sam Rockwell), among other renditions, which offer completely different interpretations, none of them canonical (not the least of which is because there was no canonical version of HHGTTG according to DA). I'm sure there are multitudes of fan art for HHGTTG on deviantart. Having AI generate an image doesn't offer any more "official" visualization.
Zaphod's second head is mentioned just as much is warranted. If a character has a limp or a crazy haircut it is not mentioned every time, because it has nothing to do with what is going on. And the book mentions that one head is often distracted/asleep, so it sounds like you do have a good visual of what his two heads are like.
While I understand that people think differently and some people are more visual thinkers, a good portion of the concepts expressed through writing are meant to be mindfucks that are difficult to express visually. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the meat of writing is usually not the visual representation of its concepts. That's a great thing about writing: you can fill in the visuals yourself and it's fodder for fans to discuss.
(BTW, Hotblack Desiato's ship would just be black. Your eyes couldn't focus on it. Even the controls were black labels on a black background. There is nothing here to visualize other than, well, blackness).
I agree that people interpret things differently and visualise differently and that is my point. I want to see the concept from my head in a solid visual form. Some concepts that are not clear, like those that I mentioned having trouble with, I want to see any kind of visual representation at all. I will probably not like some of those, but there these tools can help generate a bunch of variations tailored specifically for me. I can choose one and carry on with that. I can come back and more details to that as I read further.
If someone can show me exactly what I am thinking of, won't that be amazing.
Again, I have to disagree - which I suppose reinforces the whole subjectivity angle. I was positive that Zaphod’s two heads were side-by-side to the extent that it pissed me off a fair bit in the most recent movie adaption (among, let’s face it, plenty of other candidates).
I don’t know if the “layout” of the heads is mentioned or not in the books - I’d have to go back and check - but it’s often quite jarring when a book becomes a movie and doesn’t match my inner vision (and how incredibly unthoughtful of them, to boot).
I like the book, but there are quite a few scenes which are quite hard to visualize and make sense. An image generator that can follow that language and detail will be amazing. Even more awesome will be if it remains consistent in follow ups.