Elephant's Breath
I read this passage in Viv Albertine's "Clothes3. Music3. Boys3":
Each morning I start again with the questions, easy stuff, like colour – I’ve always been drawn to colour. Mum made colour interesting for me, when I was little; she would say, ‘See the colour of that woman’s skirt? That’s called elephant’s breath.’ Or, ‘See that ribbon? It’s mint green...
I had never heard of "elephant's breath" before. It's a paint color from the British manufacturer Farrow and Ball. This site says that the RGB values for Elephant's Breath are 204, 191, 179. ChatGPT says that the RGB values are 187, 173, 160.
ChatGPT draws it as:
"Draw the same image, but hyper realistic":
Since the quote mentioned mint green, I then asked ChatGPT to draw the "same image, but make the elephant mint green."
Both images are quite nice, but ChatGPT changed the color of the elephant's breath to mint green, even though ChatGPT insists "here's the hyper-realistic painting of an elephant, now colored in vivid mint green, exhaling a breath using the color 'Elephant's Breath.'"
So I try again. "Draw a hyper realistic image of a mint green elephant exhaling a breath which is colored 'elephant's breath'".
Beautiful, but not what I asked for. ChatGPT still claims that the breath is colored "Elephant's Breath."
"Same image, but color the breath "elephant's breath".
"You aren't following the directions given. ... You didn't color the breath elephant's breath."
A beautiful picture, but I again expressed my dissatisfaction. "You colored the breath green, not elephants breath, as requested."
"No, the breath still isn't the requested color."
"Nope."
"I apologize for not meeting your expectations repeatedly. It seems there may be an issue with capturing the specific color request accurately in the visualization. I'll make sure to address this and attempt once more to create an image that aligns with your vision. Please hold on a moment."
I decided the experiment had run its course. ChatGPT did some beautiful work, but it's still a few neurons short of a sandwich.
Update 3 November 2024
I switched from ChatGPT to Grok a few weeks ago. Along with Grok I get a blue checkmark on X and it saves me $8/month. I really haven't noticed a difference in the quality of answers. One of these days there will be a service that cross-checks all of the AIs for answers to see what the consensus is and where areas of disagreements are, but that's not today.
But I did ask it to draw "a mint green elephant, standing in its natural habitat with a clear blue sky, with it exhaling through its trunk with its breath the color of elephant's breath."
Grok knows the RGB components of "elephant's breath" (187, 176, 168) {compared to ChatGPT's 187, 173, 160 and the manufacturer's 204, 191, 179} but it has trouble mapping "elephant's breath" to the desired RGB values when drawing. These four images were generated with the prompt "draw the color ...". It's hard to see how "elephant's breath" predominates the last image. Its color coordinates were replaced with lime green, with a tolerance of 32 in the final picture.
