The results would require a lot of difficult manual editing afterward. When I have something very specific I want to make, DALL-E 2 often can’t do it. Using DALL-E 2, you’ll also discover surprising correlations, like the way everything becomes old-timey when you use an old painter, filmmaker or photographer’s style. It’s also important to know about its potential harms, such as its reliance on stereotypes, and potential uses for disinformation. Working with DALL-E 2, or any of the new text-to-image systems, means learning its quirks and developing strategies for avoiding common pitfalls. It’s easy to see that she has put a lot of thought into it, and has worked at the craft, because the output is more visually appealing and interesting, and follows her style in a continuous way.” “When I look at most stuff from Midjourney“–another popular text-to-image system–”a lot of it will be interesting or fun,” Murdoch told me in an interview. I sent the picture to an architect colleague, Manuel Ladron de Guevara, who is from Córdoba, and we began riffing on other architectural ideas together.
After trying a few unsatisfactory locations, I hit on the idea of placing it in La Mezquita, a former mosque and church in Córdoba, Spain. At one point, while making images based on contemporary artists’ work, I wanted to generate an image of site-specific installation art in the style of the contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
Ideas for these images and series came from all around, often linked by a set of stepping stones. I began to see my experiments as a set of series, each a consistent dive into a single theme, rather than a set of independent wacky images. Different artists will follow different processes and end up with different results that reflect their own approaches, skills and obsessions. I would argue that the art, in using a system like DALL-E 2, comes not just from the final text prompt, but in the entire creative process that led to that prompt.
And, sometimes, the unexpected results are the best. But, even with the need to sift through many outputs or try different text prompts, there’s no other existing way to pump out so many great results so quickly–not even by hiring an artist. Not all of the images will look pleasing to the eye, nor do they necessarily reflect what you had in mind. Each set of images takes less than a minute to generate.
It’s staggering that an algorithm can do this. If you want prehistoric cave paintings of Shrek, it’ll generate six pictures of Shrek as if they’d been drawn by a prehistoric artist. If you want images that look like actual photographs, it’ll produce six life-like images. It can also mimic specific styles with remarkable accuracy. The most recent text-to-image systems often produce dreamy, fantastical imagery that can be delightful but rarely looks real.ĭALL-E 2 offers a significant leap in the quality and realism of the images. Many of these artworks have distinctive qualities that almost look like real images, but with odd distortions of space – a sort of cyberpunk Cubism. Over the past few years, a small community of artists have been using neural network algorithms to produce art. They gathered some of the images online and licensed others. OpenAI researchers built DALL-E 2 from an enormous collection of images with captions. It also raises questions about what it means to be creative when DALL-E 2 seems to automate so much of the creative process itself. It raises immediate questions about how these technologies will change how art is made and consumed. After hours of experimentation, it’s clear that DALL-E–while not without shortcomings–is leaps and bounds ahead of existing image generation technology. But a small and growing number of people–myself included–have been given access to experiment with it.Īs a researcher studying the nexus of technology and art, I was keen to see how well the program worked. The program, which was announced by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI in April 2022, hasn’t been released to the public. DALL-E 2 is a new neural network algorithm that creates a picture from a short phrase or sentence that you provide.