By @Alvy — April 28, 2022
The result is "quite amazing", in the words of DanielBLN himself, who walks that he will not have tried variants. The most interesting thing is that with the resulting image you can ask for the same thing over and over again, moving the camera further and further away, which already produces a quite amazing recurring effect, halfway between an escheresque visual game and an Escher effect -ception (as in the movie Inception).
After enjoying these examples that I came across through a tweet by Juan Alonso, it occurred to us that it would be interesting to see what Dall•E 2 did with Las meninas, by Velázquez, when trying to “move the camera backwards”. So Juan himself asked DanielBLN on the forum, who fed the beast with the high-definition version of the painting. It is known that the singularity of this work is that since the painter himself appears in the painting, it is not entirely clear if the scene is framed from the point of view of a mirror or if it is a larger room and a montage with models. … not to mention what mysteries some characters hold. There are even books and documentaries about it, and also about the possible use of a camera obscura as a basis for its creation, as Vermeer probably did too.
The result is extremely curious, because Dall•E 2 – evidently following the data it has been fed during its learning, that is, material available on the Web – takes the scene to a larger room, which is probably correct, according to Royal Palace plans. Although, on the other hand, the mirror is not visible anywhere, and the lower dark area certainly does not look like a mirror frame.
In addition to that, new details and somewhat peculiar characters appear: a table, what looks like a painter drawing another painting (??!), some objects thrown on the floor and a couple of women sitting on the left and right, with long dresses blue, one of them with a paint palette in her hand. They remind me of the women in Vermeer's paintings. And given that many of the theories about Las Meninas deal with the techniques of both painters, and there are hundreds of images on the web, perhaps this confused Dall•E 2 during his apprenticeship. Or at least enough to hatch another theory about Las Meninas.
