Photo Credit: Too Lost
Music distributor Too Lost has added AI album cover art generation to its suite of tools. Here’s how it works.
Too Lost partnered with OpenAI to make use of its DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence art generation tool. It’s available to everyone in the new uploader tool. DALL-E 2 can generate cover art from existing images, or it can generate an entirely new image based on a text prompt.
DALL-E 2 was first launched in April 2022, with access initially available via waiting list only. The tool is still in beta, but it’s now available for the general public to use—so you don’t need Too Lost distribution to test it out yourself. Signing up on the OpenAI website will allows you to purchase credits, with $15 giving you 115 image credits to use.
AI album art generation remains controversial among artists, especially due to its potential for misuse. It could also impact creative jobs, since bands and music acts can now buy credits for the art they want, rather than commissioning someone who creates in the style they want to see. Curious to see how the technology works yourself before you pass judgement? Here’s a quick guide to getting started with DALL-E 2 yourself.
Head to the OpenAI website and create an account if you don’t have one already. OpenAI has disabled free credits due to misuse and overloading servers—so you’ll have to buy credits to use the image generation. Once you have credits, now all you need to do is think of a text prompt. For example, if I wanted to generate an album cover for a death metal band, I might try:
- ‘black roses growing in a cemetery with lots of old headstones, there is a raven sitting on one of the gravestones.’
That prompt will create four 1024px images representing the essence of the text prompt. From there, you can refine your prompt and choose which image you’d like to create variations of to get the effect you’re after.