Reimagining The Little Prince with AI
How AI can reimagine the little prince’s characters from their descriptions
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) is a short story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that has become one of the most influential works of the 20th century today (505 translations into different languages and dialects). Because of its simplicity and at the same time powerful imagery, the book has accompanied generations of children and adults. Precisely because of the imaginative beauty that goes beyond its words, I wondered how artificial intelligence could have rendered it in images.
It all began with a plane crashing
Everyone (or at least I think) knows the story of the little prince, the narrator who crashes in the Sahara desert and while he is thinking about how to repair his plane, a child asks him, “Will you draw me a sheep?”
The book’s publishing history also begins with an accident. In 1944, at the height of World War II, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is on a reconnaissance flight between Corsica and Sardinia. July 31 is his fifth mission, but he does not return.
The mystery of the disappearance was not solved until 64 years later when a former German pilot admitted to shooting down the reconnaissance flight. His novel would be published in French in 1945 by the publisher Gallimard and was instant fame (becoming the second most translated book behind only the Bible). It will be adapted in numerous forms: audiobooks, radio plays, film, television, ballet, and so on.
The tale, though a children’s book, is a metaphor for love and friendship. The book tells with delicacy and wonders how the little prince is amazed at the strangeness of the grown-ups. The book is thus populated with characteristic characters who come alive in the author’s own watercolors.
How artificial intelligence gives images to words
In recent months, the Internet has become populated with images produced by artificial intelligence. A few months ago OpenAI DALL-E came out, but it was only the first of mind-blowing models. In fact, soon after, several other models (Imagen, parti, stable diffusion) came out and some of them were made available to the public. The principle is that the model that has been trained using millions of images and connected captions is capable of generating images.
In order to generate the images, we need to provide text descriptions that allow the model to understand what we want to create.
“little blonde prince with a long coat and walking stick, space is colorful, artstation trending, 8k render, dramatic lightning, beautiful sky colors, vivid, luminescent, biometal”The prince says that baobab seeds must be prevented from coming to germinate and growing on the planet because otherwise, they would take up all the space.
“It is a question of discipline,” the little prince said to me later on. “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care. You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth. It is very tedious work,” the little prince added, “but very easy.”
“little blonde prince with a shovel on a mini planet, space is colorful, artstation trending, 8k render, dramatic lightning, beautiful sky colors, vivid, luminescent, biometal”
In fact, the little prince told of a planet that was inhabited by a man who was lazy and let baobabs grow until they covered the entire planet.
“ large growing baobabs growin on a floating mini planet highly detailed, digital painting, trending artstation, concept art, illustration, cinematic lighting, vibrant colors, epic nature, octane render”
The little one meets the rose that grows on his small planet and requires constant attention.
“I should never have listened to her,” he confided to me one day, “One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance.”
“ a rose bush growing on a mini planet, the planet float in space, by peter mohrbacher, by alex andreev, by jacek yerka, by alan lee, by vincent di fate, super detailed, digital art, trending on artstation”
The prince departs from his small planet and has several encounters among them a king who claims to rule over all planets. The king likes to give orders to his subjects even though he is the only inhabitant. Eventually, he gives an order to the little prince as well:
“Then you shall judge yourself,” the king answered. “That is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.
“ A king sitting a mini planet, the mini planet float in space, sitted on an intricate metal throne, smooth pale skin, ethereal skin, ominous, eldritch. oil painting by nuri iyem, james gurney, james jean, greg rutkowski, highly detailed, soft lighting, chiaroscuro”
The little prince will also have other encounters, but I leave the reader to the book and his own imagination.
In this article, I had fun testing different combinations of text prompts. Sometimes the results are not exactly what you hoped for and you have to try different combinations, change styles, or choose other variations. In general, however stable diffusion (the template used here) is a very powerful algorithm that allows you to test various options with high-quality output.
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Other resources
- about the little prince: quotes from the book, the book pdf, the fortune of the book
- about AI art: introduction about, Time’s article about it, ethic questions about it,
