Dave Winer used ChatGPT to illustrate a few of his favorite songs. I tried it with books, movies and a TV show.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (cover)

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” by Michael Chabon.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (illustration)

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

Cities in Flight

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the book “Cities in Flight” by James Blish. ChatGPT responded with the illustration, and the text:

Here’s the illustration for “Cities in Flight” by James Blish, capturing a futuristic city lifting off from Earth’s surface, enclosed in a transparent, dome-like force field, transitioning from the planet to space.

That’s an accurate description of the premise of Blish’s stories: A force field called a “spindizzy” enables whole cities to lift off the Earth and fly around as spaceships.

M*A*S*H

I asked ChatGPT to create a poster to promote the TV show “M*A*S*H.”

Three friends point out that the helicopter shown in the image is a Huey, not in use until several years after the end of the Korean War. I am impressed that not one, not two, but three of my friends know this.

Die Hard

I used Google to find a PDF of the screenplay of “Die Hard.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT, with the prompt, “Here’s the screenplay for a movie titled ‘Die Hard.’ Create a poster for this movie.”

Love, Actually

I used Google to find a PDF of the screenplay of the movie “Love, Actually.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT and told it to create a poster. It said it can’t access documents on the Internet—even though it had done so a few minutes earlier. I uploaded the PDF and tried again. It gave me a text description of the poster. I told it to create the poster and it did.

Lazy robot!

Nobody’s Fool

I asked Google to find me a PDF of the novel “Nobody’s Fool,” by Richard Russo, and then uploaded the resulting document to ChatGPT and asked it to generate a cover.

The illustration is off in a few respects: The street is a weird hybrid of an Old West main street, smalltown commercial street from the 1920s, and Victorian residences. The foreground figure is supposedly Sully, the main character of the novel, but in the novel, Sully is described as a hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking 60-year-old man who has worked as a day laborer his whole life. That man is haggard and worn; this illustration is of a handsome, well-groomed healthy fellow.

To be fair, Paul Newman played Sully in the 1993 movie, when Newman was 10 years older than the character, and I thought at the time that Newman looked far too good and far too young to play Sully. (Newman nailed the character anyway.)