Member-only story
Generative AI and the tetrad color harmony
Amazing unanimous consensus among three chatbots.
In this writing, I explore how Generative AI (GenAI) systems handle the request to suggest a tetrad color harmony that passes color deficiency tests. There was unanimous consensus, among three chatbots, regarding specifying a set of four hues that addressed this criterion. However, there were slight differences in the color hex codes each GenAI tool noted. Let’s get started by reviewing the tetrad color harmony, color deficiencies and text-based GenAI systems.
The Tetrad Color Harmony:
Color harmony is the process of choosing colors on a color wheel that work well together in the composition of an image. Like concepts in music, these harmonies are based around color combinations on the color wheel that help to provide common guidelines for how color hues will work together. Isaac Newton is credited with creating the color wheel concept when he closed the linear color spectrum into a color circle in the early 1700s. An illustration of his concept is shown below. Artists and color scientists evolved and amplified his concept to include color harmonies.
Two color spaces frequently used to form the basis for color wheels are the traditional Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) color space used by painters for centuries and the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) color space used for desktop and mobile display devices. The color spaces yield slightly different color harmony results when colorizing a data visualization. Four colors that form a rectangle on the color wheel define a tetrad color harmony. Below, I show a comparison of the two differing color spaces with a tetrad color harmony.
In a previous writing, I showed that Generative AI systems default to defining color harmonies in terms of the RYB color space but when prompted will specify color harmonies in RGB color space.
