- Good grief!
The two images below look like professional quality photographs, but no camera made them. No person or object posed for them. Nor did a human artist paint or draw them.
Well, not exactly.
Humans produced them. One set of humans, software developers, made the tool, called DALL-E2. One other, tech columnist Kevin Roose, used it to “create” them, for the New York Times.
”Create” feels like the most appropriate term here, because Roose’s procedure reads as if it were lifted right from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis:
Roose said, “‘Let there be . . . ‘
— And there WAS — a hyper-realistic image of a complete fantasy.
Let Roose describe it:
For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with DALL-E 2, an app developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI that turns text descriptions into hyper-realistic images.
OpenAI invited me to test DALL-E 2 (the name is a play on Pixar’s WALL-E and the artist Salvador Dalí) during its beta period, and I quickly got obsessed.
I spent hours thinking up weird, funny and abstract prompts to feed the A.I. — “a 3-D rendering of a suburban home shaped like a croissant,” “an 1850s daguerreotype portrait of Kermit the Frog,” “a charcoal sketch of two penguins drinking wine in a Parisian bistro.”
Within seconds, DALL-E 2 would spit out a handful of images depicting my request — often with jaw-dropping realism.
Here, for example, is one of the images DALL-E 2 produced when I typed in “black-and-white vintage photograph of a 1920s mobster taking a selfie.” And how it rendered my request for a high-quality photograph of “a sailboat knitted out of blue yarn.”
Voilá!
If I had DALL-E2, I’d be saying, “Show me with my mind boggled,” and the image would be what I saw in the mirror a few minutes ago, something like this:
Roose: DALL-E 2 got a lot of attention when it was announced this year, and rightfully so. It’s an impressive piece of technology with big implications for anyone who makes a living working with images — illustrators, graphic designers, photographers and so on. It also raises important questions about what all of this A.I.-generated art will be used for, and whether we need to worry about a surge in synthetic propaganda, hyper-realistic deepfakes or even nonconsensual pornography.
“Big implications.” An understatement:
Roose:
Only a few years ago, A.I. chatbots struggled even with rudimentary conversations — to say nothing of more difficult language-based tasks.
But now, large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being used to write screenplays, compose marketing emails and develop video games. (I even used GPT-3 to write a book review for this paper last year — and, had I not clued in my editors beforehand, I doubt they would have suspected anything.)
Note that he didn’t include writing blog posts on this list. But is it just my paranoia, or will the next version — let’s call it DALL-E3 — soon be sending pre-breakfast emails advising me that:
“Attached you’ll find three posts, one each on Ukraine, the newest blossoms in your yard, and the former president, plus a pair of recycled Quaker jokes. Click on the link to upload them, and then go back to bed.”
Is this ridiculous? Maybe. But maybe not for long:
Roose:
“An A.I. breakthrough at Google or OpenAI today doesn’t mean that your Roomba will be able to write novels tomorrow —“
[I don’t have a Roomba; whatever.]
“But the best A.I. systems are now so capable — and improving at such fast rates — that the conversation in Silicon Valley is starting to shift. Fewer experts are confidently predicting that we have years or even decades to prepare for a wave of world-changing A.I.; many now believe that major changes are right around the corner, for better or worse.”
Did Roose really write that? Or is DALL-E2 now finishing his column, and not just illustrating it?
At least, I can still supply my own cliche: Stay tuned.
Hi Dilly,
I need a message for Sunday that gets comfortable middle-class Quakers to wake up to the reality that their comfortable life creates blinders to doing what is required for Quakers to bring the message of “we all, not just Quakers, unite in Spirit (however named and described) or our country slides into Autocracy” to our country.
TIA,
Hank
(“Dilly” is “one dilly of a Dall-E”)