Outsourcing my letter to Santa with ChatGPT and DALL·E 2

We all like to make things more efficient, why should writing my annual list to Santa be any different?

I am a keen mountain biker, I will have ChatGPT generate a list of ideas of presents Santa could bring me? While we are at it, let's get it to write our letter to Santa....

Bonus points to level-up my letter game, generate some nice pictures we could attach attach at the back of our letter to get Santa into the mood a bit better around selecting the perfect gift.

Time to dive into the world of OpenAI with ChatGPT and DALL·E 2

ChatGPT

So this is where we will be generating our list and the letter. For those who don't know ChatGPT was release a couple of weeks ago - and very quickly had millions of active users.

It is currently free and this piece of technology is seriously powerful, feels like a generational shift that only comes along every so often in tech.

You can try it for yourself/register here, openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

You start by entering in prompts asking it what you want, it interprets these prompts and gives you back the answer. You can keep iterating on this by asking it to refine or change based on what you get back and what you desire.

Example above of the user interface above and where I will be generating the below.

List generation

For this I want to just ask for a list of mountain bike related gift ideas.

Prompt
I am into mountain biking, generate 5 christmas gift ideas

Answer:
Sure! Here are some image captions for each of the mountain biking gift ideas:

1. "A mountain biker riding their brand new mountain bike on a dirt trail"
2. "A mountain biker wearing protective gear such as a helmet and gloves"
3. "A mountain biker using bike maintenance tools to fix their bike"
4. "A mountain biker wearing specialized mountain biking clothing and accessories"
5. "A mountain biker using a GPS bike computer or smartwatch to track their ride"

Ok... that's pretty good. I will leave it like that - I would be happy to receive anything from those broad categories but it nailed the different TYPES of presents a mountain biker may want. You could refine by asking it something like "generate 5 gifts to fix a mountain bike" if you wanted to double down on building out that home workshop for example.

Now the all important letter. Just write a prompt as if you were instructing a human... plus get it to include that list of gift ideas it already generated for you...

Prompt:
Now can you write a letter to Santa from a 10 year old boy asking for this list of mountain biking gifts. Let him know I have been practicing really hard this year and I will leave him out a nice cold beer to enjoy when he is here. And tell him a dad joke.

Answer:
Hey Santa,

I hope you're doing good and getting ready for your trip on Christmas Eve! I've been trying to be good this year and I've been thinking about what I'd like for Christmas. As you know, I love mountain biking and I have a few ideas for presents that would be perfect for me:

1. A new mountain bike: I've been wanting to upgrade to a better mountain bike for a while now, and it would be so cool to have one under the tree this year.
2. Protective gear: Mountain biking can be rough on the trails, so it would be great to have some new protective gear to keep me safe.
3. Bike maintenance tools and supplies: I always want to make sure my mountain bike is in top condition, and a good set of tools and supplies will help me do that.
4. Mountain biking clothes and accessories: There are so many cool clothes and accessories specifically designed for mountain biking, and I'd love to add some new pieces to my collection.
5. A GPS bike computer or smartwatch: I've been wanting one of these for a while now, and it would be such a helpful tool for tracking my rides, monitoring my performance, and navigating new trails.

I hope you can bring me at least a few of these mountain biking gifts. I promise to leave you a nice cold beer to enjoy when you visit, and I'll even tell you a dad joke: "Why couldn't the bicycle stand up by itself? Because it was two-tired!"

Thanks for everything you do, Santa. I can't wait to see what you bring me on Christmas morning!

[Your Name]

Haha, pretty neat, even did a bike related Dad joke.

Right, we have the list of ideas and a letter. Now we need to give some examples of some of our gifts. We could Google Image search I suppose... but that takes time and is sooooooooo 2021.

Why now have this AI generate a list of the image generation prompts/captions for us? Just ask away.

Prompt:
With that list can you generate me an image caption for each?

Answer:
Sure! Here are some image captions for each of the mountain biking gift ideas:

1. "A mountain biker riding their brand new mountain bike on a dirt trail"
2. "A mountain biker wearing protective gear such as a helmet and gloves"
3. "A mountain biker using bike maintenance tools to fix their bike"
4. "A mountain biker wearing specialized mountain biking clothing and accessories"
5. "A mountain biker using a GPS bike computer or smartwatch to track their ride"

Now the fun part.. image generation with DALL·E 2 - onto the next section.

DALL·E 2

We are going to take the captions above and generate these using the web interface, again you can try this out over at openai.com/dall-e-2/

With a bit of programming you could automate this.. perhaps next year I will write an app to automate all of this end to end.

Like with ChatGPT we give this AI prompts, it will generate out an image - you can ask for certain styles or colours to refine the generated images.

I will be adding the image style at the end of the caption to give you an idea of the different styles you can give it.

You can see it throws a few options out for you to review and download, I will embed the generations and also my favourite from them.

A new mountain bike

Prompt:
A mountain biker riding their brand new mountain bike on a dirt trail, watercolor over pencil

Protective gear

Prompt:
A mountain biker wearing protective gear such as a helmet and gloves, digital art

Bike maintenance tools and supplies

Prompt:
A mountain biker using bike maintenance tools to fix their bike, modern painting

Mountain biking clothes and accessories

Prompt:
A mountain biker wearing specialized mountain biking clothing and accessories, painting by vermeer

Let's hope Santa doesn't take this one too literally... 😂

A GPS bike computer or smartwatch

Prompt:
A mountain biker using a GPS bike computer or smartwatch to track their ride, pixel art

Summary

There you go. Outsourcing Christmas.. and having some fun along the way.

As you can see these are very powerful tools which are only getting better - the more you refine and work with the prompts especially the more accurate results you will get - this is certainly the case with the image generation side of things.

When it comes to the text generation what you see above is really only scratching the surface.. this thing can already do some very advanced things such as generate code... watch this space, they are doing mind blowing things.

This will certainly not be the last bit of content I produce around these topics.