Gemini creates an E. L. Moore diorama

A diorama created by Gemini using photos of actual E. L. Moore building models

A couple of years ago I shot this photo of an E. L. Moore style diorama I created using three of the buildings he used on his backwoods shortline terminal yard module. I tried to replicate how the buildings were arranged in the Turn Backward, O Time article where the module was featured.

I thought I'd do a little experiment where I gave Gemini a single photo of each of the three models I used in my diorama and ask it to create its own diorama. Here are the photos I gave it:

Dilly's:

McGee's:

Central Warehouse:

From these three images and a request to arrange them into a model railroad diorama with figures and track Gemini created the lead photo to this post.

I then asked Gemini to remove the water tower (I speculate that it added the water tower as those structures might be thought of as stereotypical features of a model railroad, so one was included for 'authenticity'). In the process it also removed the smoke from the locomotive's smoke stack so I asked Gemini to restore it. This image was produced:

A variation on the original diorama made by Gemini

Both images are quite acceptable even though they could still use considerable refining. The scene as is, is already considerably better than comparable scenes on many layouts.

One glaring problem though is Gemini didn't translate the Central Warehouse properly to the image's perspective. The side shed is missing. Gemini noted in its commentary to this post that these types of perspective translation errors are common to AIs. I suspect there are very sophisticated graphics-oriented AIs out there that don't have this problem. Fascinating results nevertheless.