What Does the Chaos Parameter Do in AI Tools Like Midjourney?
Because who wouldn’t want to add some - - chaos to that AI image of a quokka with a cup of coffee cartoon?
When you hear someone say that so and so’s life is chaos, it’s generally a bad thing. It suggests that their daily life is characterized by disorder, confusion, or instability. They can’t really be trusted. They are unstable. Chaos happens in personal relationships, work, finances, or general organization. It often indicates that the person is struggling to find control or predictability in their environment. It’s happened to me. I’ll bet it’s happened to you. It isn’t pretty.
However, lately using AI tools I’ve noticed that “chaos” is offered as a setting and feature. Because who wouldn’t want to add some chaos to that AI image of a quokka with cup of coffee cartoon? For a while, I continued to avoid chaos, but then I started to wonder if maybe it had something to offer.
So, I did some digging. What actually is chaos? In scientific terms, chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on systems that exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, a phenomenon popularly referred to as the “butterfly effect.” So, basically, the parking spot you decided to take at the gym this morning? Well, that changed the entire trajectory of not only your life, but of human existence. It’s totally and quite literally all your fault, but luckily, everyone is interjecting their own chaos into the world and that mixes with your chaos endlessly and infinitesimally and here we are, back to living somewhere between “nothing you do matters” and “everything matters.”
Philosophers and belly button gazers take it to a very dark place and interpret chaos as a primal emptiness or void from which all things are thought to have originated and to which we will all return. Happy trees, folks. Let’s paint some happy trees.
Anyway, each definition of chaos shapes the fuzzy edges of this amorphous mass of what chaos is and what chaos does.
In the context of AI technology, “chaos” often relates to “chaotic systems” or “chaotic dynamics,” which are specific mathematical phenomena studied in chaos theory. So basically, chaos in AI is more in line with the butterfly effect definition I mentioned in mathematics. It refers to situations where systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions and can behave unpredictably. So, your prompt actually does need to be 500 words long, just kidding, but tiny changes can lead to vastly different outcomes.
Here’s a simple experiment I did to find out what “chaos” does in a generative AI tool. When you submit an image generation prompt to Midjourney, it returns a grid of 4 images. The subject matter was a cat playing with toilet paper and tangled up in it because, why not? In the first set of images, there was no chaos and the images are all pretty similar, predictable, so if I put in the same prompt, I’d probably get similar results. The next set of 4 images were produced with higher chaos — chaos 50. Here, the variation is much greater between the images and there is nothing really usable here…nothing that really makes sense. The highest chaos is — chaos 100 which again yields some nonsensical results like the cat caught in the act of climbing a toilet paper cake. However, the second image is kind of cool; a creative logo for a toilet paper I would be excited to bring home!
So, if you want formulaic predictable results, stay away from chaos, but if you want a new idea, chaos is your best friend. I think of chaos as the grinning Cheshire Cat of AI. While not overtly friendly in a traditional nurturing or protective way, chaos engages us in thought-provoking conversation, challenging our perceptions and encouraging us to think more deeply about our surroundings and the situations we encounter. I’ve got nothing more to say on this except to give chaos a try. I think the million-dollar cat toilet paper logo alone drives home my point that managed chaos can be productive and yield amazing results and if you don’t believe me, fine.
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