How DALL-E could power a creative revolution
Open in browser Paid subscribers have known about my DALL-E access for a week now, since we’ve been talking about it in our Sidechannel Discord server. Upgrade your subscription today and you can request me to make the DALL-E image of your choice in Discord. I’ll get to as many as I can, content policies permitting! 👉 How DALL-E could power a creative revolutionThoughts on my first week with OpenAI's amazing text-to-image AI toolProgramming note Also: all images in this post were generated using artificial intelligence I. Every few years, a technology comes along that splits the world neatly into before and after. I remember the first time I saw a YouTube video embedded on a web page; the first time I synced Evernote files between devices; the first time I scanned tweets from people nearby to see what they were saying about a concert I was attending. I remember the first time I Shazam’d a song, summoned an Uber, and streamed myself live using Meerkat. What makes these moments stand out, I think, is the sense that some unpredictable set of new possibilities had been unlocked. What would the web become when you could easily add video clips to it? When you could summon any file to your phone from the cloud? When you could broadcast yourself to the world? II. DALL-E also prevents a lot of potential image creation by adding keywords (“shooting,” for example) to a block list. You’re also not allowed to use it to create images intended to deceive — no deepfakes allowed. And while there’s no prohibition against trying to make images based on public figures, you can’t upload photos of people without their permission, and the technology seems to slightly blur most faces slightly to make it clear that the images have been manipulated. Once you’ve agreed to that, you’re presented with DALL-E’s delightfully simple interface: a text box inviting you to create whatever you can think of, content policy permitting. Imagine using the Google search bar like it was Photoshop — that’s DALL-E. Borrowing some inspiration from the search engine, DALL-E includes a “surprise me” button that pre-populates the text with a suggested query, based on past successes. I’ve often used this to get ideas for trying artistic styles I might never have considered otherwise — a “macro 35mm photograph,” for example, or pixel art. For each of my initial queries, DALL-E would take around 15 seconds to generate 10 images. (Earlier this week, the number of images was reduced to six, to allow more people access.) Nearly every time, I would find myself cursing out loud and laughing at how good the results were. For example, here’s a result from “a shiba inu dog dressed as a firefighter." And here’s one from “a bulldog dressed as a wizard, digital art." I love these fake AI dogs so much. I want to adopt them and then write children’s books about them. If the metaverse ever exists, I want them to join me there. You know who else can come? “Frog wearing a hat, digital art." Why is he literally perfect? Take, for example, two examples shared in my Discord by another reader with DALL-E access. First, look at the set of results for “A bear economist in front of a stock chart crashing, digital art.” And second, “A bull economist in front of a graph of a surging stock market with up line, synthwave, digital art.” It’s striking the degree to which DALL-E captures emotion here: the fright and exasperation of the bear, and the aggression of the bull. It seems wrong to describe any of this as “creative” — what we’re looking at here are nothing more than probabilistic guesses — and yet they have on me the same effect that looking at something truly creative would. Another compelling aspect of DALL-E is the way it will attempt to solve a single problem in a variety of ways. For example, when I asked it to show me “a delicious cinnamon bun with googly eyes,” it had to figure out how to depict the eyes. That was one of the times I cursed out loud and started laughing. III. What becomes of a technology like this? OpenAI told me that it hasn’t yet made any decisions about whether and how DALL-E might someday become available more generally. The point of the current research beta is to how people use this technology, adapting both the tool and content policies as necessary. I’ll stick with the one I’ve got. But if I were an illustrator, I might appreciate the alternate suggestions, if only for the inspiration. It’s also worth considering what creative potential these tools might open up for people who would never think (or could afford) to hire an illustrator. As a kid I wrote my own comic books, but my illustration skills never progressed very far. What if I could have instructed DALL-E to draw all my superheroes for me instead? On one hand, this doesn’t seem like the sort of tool that most people would use every day. And yet I imagine that in the coming months and years we’ll find ever-more creative applications of tech like this: in e-commerce, in social apps, in the home and at work. For artists, it looks like it could be one of the most powerful tools for remixing culture that we’ve ever seen — assuming the copyright issues get sorted out. (It’s not entirely clear whether using AI to generate images of protected works is considered fair use or not, I’m told. If you want to see DALL-E’s take on “Batman eating a sandwich,” DM me.) It’s often the case that, when a new technology emerges, we focus on its happier and more whimsical uses, only to ignore how it might be misused in the future. As thrilled as I have been to use DALL-E, I’m also quite anxious about what similar tools could do in the hands of less scrupulous companies. It’s also worth thinking about what even positive uses of this technology could do at scale. When most images we encounter online are created by AI, what does that do to our sense of reality? How will we know what anything we are seeing is real? For now, DALL-E feels like a breakthrough in the history of consumer tech. The question is whether in a few years we’ll think of it as the start of a creative revolution, or something more worrisome. The future is already here, and it’s adding 1,000 users a week. The time to discuss its implications is now, before the rest of the world gets its hands on it. Have a DALL-E image request for me Governing
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