Introducing Dreamwalker

First alpha release

I’ve been playing around with generative image models a lot since last year and one major thing that stuck out was that using them in general seemed to really de-emphasize “playfulness”. The tools then (and now) were really geared towards the idea of putting together “the perfect prompt” instead of just experimenting. Chat interfaces, prompt construction, etc. all seem ill-suited for the work of “finding the image you’re looking for”.

I’d had an idea in my head for a while around trying to make this experience better, and when the first AIxUX was announced in NYC I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring and hack on something to see what could come of it. And I did it! Here’s my presentation from that event (timestamped):

I called it “Dreamwalker” — a way to explore latent space. I also got the domain. The idea was to make working with image generations more like developing, or even tending to something like a moodboard. Have it be this corpus of exploration that sees you searching for ideas and pruning branches and trying to hone in on what you’re thinking.

The idea is that Dreamwalker gets you from that blank page feeling and maybe does help you find a good prompt, but helps you mostly just get started. The images it generates can be starting points, helpful to find that next step.

After the presentation, Dreamwalker sat on my harddrive for a bit. I thought about what I wanted to do with it and all the dreams I had for things it could do, but instead of trying to do all of it I have just (ROUGHLY) buttoned up the core features of the tool and am happy to finally release it to the world today to see what people think. Here’s a video demonstrating the core functionality of the tool:

I think in part, seeing what OpenAI is doing with DALL-E chat prompt work makes me want to also get a stake in the ground for the way I think things should go. I want people to be able to think outside the chat prompt for image model interaction, and hopefully I can inspire some other people to also create non-traditional AI tools.

You can download Dreamwalker via the link below, and also find some instructions on how to use it:

The link is a forum link, so if you have thoughts or ideas or comments, feel free to leave them there! I’d love to know what people think and what they find useful/features they would like to see.

Thanks for reading!