I was recently reminded of the bin chicken.
Its real name is the Australian white ibis, but Australians call them bin chickens because they're commonly found scavenging through garbage bins in cities across the country. I didn’t know about them until I first traveled there on vacation and saw just how widespread and aggressive they were.
They're regarded as pests, like an Aussie equivalent to NYC's rats. I thought it'd be funny to create a portrait of myself posing with a bin chicken, to subvert the negative perception of them and portray them as majestic.
I started with this simple prompt and attached the person model I previously made of myself. I knew that the term “bin chicken” probably wouldn’t be recognized, but I wanted to try it out of curiosity.
For my first few attempts, I used the risograph style preset chip.
Just as I suspected.
I updated the prompt, and hoped that using the real species name would give me correct-looking birds.
Unfortunately, the AI didn't seem to know too much about how this specific type of ibis looked, and depicted more generic-looking ibises with white bodies and orange beaks.
To fix this, it was clear that I had to give a more detailed physical description of the bird.
Maybe a bit closer? Not really...
So, I made the physical description way more detailed. I used parentheses to place higher weight on the description of the beak, since I kept on getting beaks that looked not quite right.
This worked better! However, I got some images where I wasn't shown, or where it combined me and the bird in strange ways.
I realized that the way I worded the physical description in my prompts might have been confusing, since I didn't clarify who the feathers and beak belonged to. It's also possible that the AI just extrapolated incorrectly when generating the pixels in the image. I tried to make the distinction between me and the bird extra clear.
I also remembered at this point that the 1930s Travel Poster would be really great for this scenario, so I focused in on the goal of creating a retro travel postcard-style image.
These were my favorites.
For the last two, I used the 3:2 aspect chip to mimic a postcard aspect ratio.
This was definitely an exercise in prompting since I wanted to get the look of the ibis just right, while not making the prompt too long and confusing for the AI to interpret. I'm happy with what I landed on at the end, though, and I think it does the tenacious bird justice.