Using AI to pick a new car wrap color for silver bird

If you followed my post from January of 2023, you’ll know I traded in my 2011 Subaru WRX for a 2017 Lexus IS 350 F Sport in Atomic silver. This is actually the second silver car I’ve owned, the first was an Acura 1.7 EL which I nick-named “silver bird”. The Lexus IS now bears the same moniker

While I love the color, I’ve recently been tempted by the idea of a bolder color choice. I’m not a fan of the exterior styling of most American cars, but they often come with colors I find appealing, classic Ford GTs or Chevy Corvettes being two examples:

In mid-August of this year, I attempted to use a few online “car paint” simulators to figure out what silver bird would look like in another color, none of the online sites were any good

Random google searches for Lexus IS 350 F Sport “baby blue” were ok, but still left something lacking.

Enter MIDJOURNEY ! By now, you’ve heard of about AI in one form or another, a lot of current AI tech is pretty esoteric, as a lot of new tech is. However, MIDJOURNEY (MJ for the rest of the article) is actually quite user friendly, with no coding or hours long tutorials to trawl through on YouTube/Reddit/etc! It’s an AI-driven bot that you interact with via discord. I’ve been using discord on and off for years, but never had much use for it, as most of the channels/content I follow on discord are similar or the same on Slack. However, that changed this week!

I was at a tech work event in Ontario this week, and happened to be sat next to a guy who was a car enthusiast. While talking about cars, he mentioned his use of MJ to create interesting images for friends and family. He showed me a bunch of cool examples, dogs in clown outfits, interesting water-cooled computer case designs, all generated on-the-fly by typing in a few lines of text into a discord conversation. The “hello world” moment for me was as follows:

Logged on to Discord with my existing account
Created a new channel just to interact with the MIDJOURNEY BOT
Followed these instructions to add the MJ bot to my new channel
Into the chat window, I typed in:
/imagine Lexus IS 350 F Sport Neon sky blue wrap
Presto!

Of course, with such instant success, I then spent the next hour or so trying out TONS of other variations, such as the below:

Some of them are pretty wild! Adding stuff like “Lexus IS 350 F Sport Arizona desert” produced this, for instance:

In the end, I ended up with the following “top 3”, which I then saved the images to my OneDrive, and used them to request quotes from a few Montreal car wrap specialists

Request a quote – Thanks – Wrap Mtl
WrapShop Inc. | Contact

Visiting Wrap MTL on Aug 19, 2023 with my neighbor, I had the sales dude show me the below set of swatches, lots of interesting colors. However, based on attempting to match the left-most (#1) metallic light blue color above, I’m thinking the winner is “matte metallic frosty blue” from Avery

Owen