The picture quiz is now closed to new entries. Thank you to everyone who took part and I hope it was fun! We raised £88 for the reading agency between us, so that was a worthwhile contribution.
I manually checked all the entries and added some marks where the automated scoring had been too strict in a few cases (just spelling mistakes or minor typos) and a breakdown of the results for everyone is at the bottom of the page. But first the actual answers, which are as shown below with my comments on each one.
Most people got this right. The most creative wrong answer was "the sunken land begins to rise again" which I can definitely understand!
A nice easy one...
This prompt produced four very appealing images and I opted for this one. Another easy warm up question and everyone got it right.
The AI has obviously "seen" the recent BBC adaptation and therefore understood the title, generating a set of images that were heavily influenced by it. I allowed "Northern Lights" as an answer here as well which someone responded with.
Full marks all round for this one.
Not an image that is particularly related to the book but a good guessable one and everyone got it right.
Clearly the AI "understood" the film and generated a set of black and white images for me, very much in the same style. I liked this one best.
This proves the AI training set has been updated relatively recently. The four images that came out were all biased to the recent film.
Everyone identified this was Harry Potter, although one person got the wrong book. The AI was clearly leaning heavily into the film images and the "fire" was the main clue as to the specific book. I don't know what happened to the goblet! I didn't get an image that was more specific from this prompt.
Nearly everyone got this right, but it is one where the title alone won't help you unless you also know what the book is about, I think. The AI obviously "understands" the title based on images it has to work with from the film.
One where the title wasn't enough for the AI to latch on to an association with the actual book so it was going for more fanciful and varied interpretations. I enjoy these kind of images more to be honest and of the four intriguing visualisations it came up with, this was the one I felt most clearly mapped to the title. Three people got it right and there were some creative wrong answers I liked a lot, including "Big Stone Gap" and "Lord of the Rings".
Three people got this right and three other people had exactly the same wrong answer, "David Copperfield", which is certainly a very plausible and interesting option that didn't occur to me when I selected this image!
This prompt produced some great images and none of you had any problems getting it right.
Full marks for everyone here...
For this prompt, Midjourney spat out a set of four images of fanciful animals and birds, all with wildly implausible and vivid colouring, and the chameleon here was my personal favourite. Where I think it failed, was that all of them were singular creatures, so it didn't pick up on pluraility in the title and show me more than one creature in the same image. Also is "bright" really the same thing as "colourful"? Kind of, I suppose. Three of you got this right anyway!
All the images I got from this prompt were drawing straight from the films. There was a fifty/fifty split in the answers. Half of you got it right and the other half said it was the Hobbit which I totally understand and I might have made it easier picking a different image. With this one, you might a well toss a coin between those two answers. I am going to accept some blame for this as a bad question, perhaps...
This is the first question that nobody got right and I can definitely understand why (I made it a 2 point question). I got four interesting images of isolation and decay from the prompt and I liked this one most with a ruined library overgrown by trees. In retrospect, picking a library type image where there were other titles that related to a library in the possible answers, made it a much harder question and I'd have been better picking one of the images that wasn't a library. It still would have been hard though, since none of them were obvious...
Got some nice images from this prompt and most of you worked out the correct answer.
Full marks here. I enjoyed the stylised images Midjourney generated based on the prompt. I really like the minimal use of colour in this one.
Not the easiest thing to represent visually, but I got four images of libraries of various kinds from Midjourney and liked this one the most. Three people made inspired guesses and got this right. "The Reading List" was a nice answer from someone even if it got no marks.
Back to images where Midjourney is drawing on films for this one which is an interesting mash up of elements of the book and film, I thought and in the style of the film. One where you have to know the book (and the film really) as the title didn't filter into any of the output. Three of you got it right.
This was a fun prompt which generated four wildly different images, any one of which would have worked but I picked this one in the end.
Two people made inspired guesses and connected the title to the image.
Everyone got this question right. I guess the French flag is a massive clue here.
I thought this picture might not be totally easy but apparently it is, since you all got it right.
On the other hand, I expected at least some people to get this one, which I didn't think was super difficult but no one did. So my great expectations were thwarted. I reckon the problem is that there are too many "classic" novels and not enough that's distinctive about this image. "Brideshead Revisited" was the choice of three people. I can't see the connection myself but if three of you can, I'm missing something...
Nobody got this right and I'm not surprised. I think it is possibly the most difficult question in the quiz. Here the AI, being notoriously bad at counting, didn't seem to hone in on either the number or the idea of postcards, except that each of its images might possibly (at a stretch) have been individual postcards. They were all pretty little hallucinations but I couldn't connect any of them to the title. Having made a promise not to cheat I just picked the one I found most interesting and wondered if there was a hidden connection I was missing. Much as I like this picture, it does not say fifteen postcards to me!
Guesses included "The Woman in White", "Goodnight Mr. Tom", "The House on the Cerulean Sea", "What you can see from here" and "Cloud Cuckoo Land". I think you can make a good case for any of these! I'm waiting for the mash up book to come out which combines them all :-)
Full marks scored on this question...
This was the most fun of the images I generated with this prompt and most of you got it right.
I think the "classic" novel questions are tricky because they can seem a bit interchangeable and so you need to make the right guess from within the set of possible answers. This, one, it appears, captured something that makes the book stand out since four out of six people got it right.
I like this personification of the four winds even if it has nothing to do with the book. Nobody made the connection the AI made, the closest guess perhaps being "Gone With The Wind".
"The Maidens", "The Manningtree Witches", "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Magician" were all suggested answers that I can definitely understand.
Another image that provoked a scattering of good answers but this time one person did get it right.
I put this down as being worth two marks because I thought it was difficult but three of you got it right. For once, AI did count properly since we have seven people in this somewhat whimsical image that has nothing to do with the book at all.
This is about as simple as a hybrid between the personification of Death and Justice can be and I was pretty confident it would be a fairly easy question. Five out of six people were on the right wavelength and got it correct.
Five out of six people got this one right.
This image had some good C.S. Lewis vibes in my opinion and everyone agreed since you all got it right.
I liked the period feel of the images that came out of this prompt and I thought this one would be relatively easy. Five out of six people got it right.
This is now my personal favourite. I struggled to make a connection with the images the AI came up with for this title, but picked this one just because it was the most striking and decided to award it two points. I was astonished when two people got it right and I had to ask the first one to explain it to me. "Alice" is like the town because they are both wearing orange. As simple as that, and it does make a weird kind of sense. Very impressed anyone got this at all, let alone two of you!
It does have that brooding sense of melodrama I suppose but I still thought this was difficult. Four people got it right.
A really fun prompt that produced four completely different and interesting images, but this one was the one I enjoyed most. I decided to award it two points because it is a fairly abstract idea, but it obviously wasn't as hard as I thought, because four of you got it right.
This one didn't pose any problems for anyone as you all got it right.
Not sure where the "seeking" is in this image, unless it is the shell's doing the seeking maybe? :-) The book is actually about a fictional painting called the shell seekers which depicts children on a beach looking for shells. Midjourney didn't have the same thoughts and did its own thing, as ever. I like this anyway though and from the available titles it was not a very difficult guess which all of you got right.
A very hard question, equally as difficult as fifteen postcards, I think, and for the same reasons. I awarded two points for the right answer, but nobody got them, despite some imaginative responses that I could definitely go along with. This is one of those cases where the AI, not "knowing" the book and not having strong visual cues in the title, really does go off into its own little world of making up a story to fit the words and the results are pot luck. I liked this image the best of the four it generated, because it does have what might be a littering of paper lists on the floor and a character who could be Mabel Beaumont, but it really would have required a great stroke of luck for anyone to be thinking along the same lines as the AI, unless (as with A Town like Alice), there is some other hidden secret connection I am missing.
Nice and simple. Nothing to do with the book but everybody got it right.
Some understanding of the text in the images this prompt generated, I think. I liked these eyes of the Big Brother is Watching You kind. Half of you got it right.
This was a two point question because "weyward" is such an abstract concept (and not even a real word, the way it is spelt) I knew that even with my "best" choice here it was going to be very difficult. I liked this image because it does have a wayward feel (in the correct spelling) with the hair and the chaos of the grass, but that is not going to be anyone's first thought. As it turns out it wasn't anyone's last thought either, since no one got any points here. In the end four people all had the same idea to choose "Anne of Green Gables". It could well have been, but unfortunately it wasn't...
Two people got this right and I guess it kind of aligns with the book (which was why I picked it from the four choices the AI generated just from the name) but equally it could be many other books. Persuasion, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Rebecca were all suggested as well.
Five people wanted "Wuthering Heights" for this one. That actually makes a great deal of sense, but also (and the reason I picked this image) there is a strong rustic thread in "Far from the Madding Crowd" and some sheep that fall off a cliff, so it has heights in it as well. Well done to Cathy as the only person to get this right!
Full marks for everyone on this.
And full marks for this one too...
This was a hard question but two people got it right. The clue is the time period of the car and clothing and perhaps the photographic quality, suggesting the AI was "inspired" by film and photography and might have actually "understood" this word was a book. That's why I picked it from the images offered by Midjourney. I don't think it is as difficult as, "Emma" for example.
I thought this would be easy since it is pretty much how I envisage the house on the moor in Wuthering Heights and it looks like the buildings in Haworth if you've ever been to the Bronte museum. But it was apparently more difficult than I imagined and only one person (Cathy again) got it right. Two people wanted Bleak House (and it certainly is a bleak house) and Rebecca also popped up in two other answers, with Far from the Madding Crowd being the last suggestion.
A simple one to finish with and everybody got this right...
So here were the final scores:-
Mandie and Dave Longbottom 45 points
Clive Richardson 42 points
Karon Stretton 40 points
Sue Downing 35 points
Cathy Behne 33 points
Catherine Worton 27 points
Thanks again to everyone for taking part. Hope you had fun (which was the main thing) and of course there is a lot of luck in a quiz like this where you need a few inspired guesses to come out right! Congratulations to Mandie and Dave L. I'll pass on the prize (whatever it is!) when I have acquired it and when I next see you.
Dave Worton - 02/06/2024