You can plan your Halloween decor with AI. Here’s how

Do you dream of Halloween decor that will delight professional decorators? For those poor, unfortunate souls who dream big but struggle to come up with a coherent aesthetic, it can be a nightmare. Forced to watch helplessly as friends and neighbors or worse, strangers online, they demonstrate their mastery of the dark art of Halloween, decorating summons in some of the most diabolical of all monsters: envy.

You don’t have to tackle the spooky challenge of creating a powerful Halloween decor moment alone. I’m using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool that uses text prompts and commands to create custom images on the fly, to give me some visual ideas.

I also enlist the help of ChatGPT, an AI tool that uses learning large language models and chat to generate conversational answers to complex questions, to come up with concepts for organizing my workspace. The monster with the green eyes is hereby warned.

Here’s how to plan your Halloween decor using AI.

Score some scary goals

Let the AI ​​tool know the atmosphere. Since my decor will be in the office, it can’t be too scary, but I’d still like some fun, interactive elements that might elicit a few beeps. Include details in your clues, such as the setting of the decorations, so you can define the line between gory and fun.

The images below are the result of my first attempt at a prompt in Midjourney for a ‘cubicle decorated with creepy dolls’, and they are indeed not safe for work, meaning your coworkers will no longer feel safe with you if you decorate your desk in this way. way.

ChatGPT gave me some great office-safe options for decor concepts. These G-rated interactions took the cell into account.

In addition to the haunted house, witch’s lair and spider invasion ideas, ChatGPT also suggested themes of the zombie apocalypse (barricading the entrance to your cubicle with caution tape and scattering body parts around your desk); spooky carnival (make a circus tent over your booth and throw in some clowns); pumpkin patch (decorate with lots of pumpkins and gourds); and “time-traveling grave” (a theme from ancient Egypt).

Some of these are office friendly, others not so much. I identified closely with the concept of the witch’s den because retreating deep into the woods and living in a house made of candy plays an important role in my retirement plans.

The devil is in the details

Midjourney isn’t an AI image generator tool, so make sure you give it all the information it needs to build the heart-pounding set scheme of your evil dreams. I used some details from my ChatGPT results to define the vibe of different options for my working witch cabin.

Midjourney offered the decor option below, which added a really fun detail that I hadn’t thought of, in the form of wrapping the cabinet drawers in colored paper that could easily translate to kitchen drawers if you wanted to do this at home.

Take a before photo

Take a photo of the space you want to decorate so the AI ​​tool has a canvas for you to paint on. Midjourney has a prompt that allows images to be merged or “blended” so you can combine your starting point with what you want your final decor to look like.

You may need to massage this a bit, as Midjourney will really blend the images together, resulting in a middle ground between the two rather than simply layering elements of one image over the other.

I tried combining the original image of my box with the box generated by Midjourney and the result was a bit bland, although much easier to implement practically.

Give yourself lots of options

There are only a limited number of creepy clown, spider and zombie decorations that are also suitable for an office environment. (Doubtful, but I’m not going to die on that hill in the HR office. Not again.)

Browse through a number of themes and schemes to find the right tone and use descriptors that are appropriate for the potential audience. If you’re using AI to come up with ideas to decorate your home, and you live in an area where children are severely tricked or treated, adding the phrase “childproof” can be a good addition to your prompts.