This AI Makes Mind-Bending Art, and You Can Give It a Try
You don’t have to search far on the internet to find nightmare fuel. If your dreams have gotten a little too rosy lately, you can spend some time browsing the weird, funny and occasionally disturbing images created by an artificial intelligence tool called Dall-E Mini.
Batman surfing.
Erin Carson/Dall-E Mini
Dall-E Mini lets you type a short prompt describing an image, one that theoretically only exists in the deep recesses of your soul, and within a few seconds, the algorithm will manifest it onto your screen. Odds are, you’ve seen some popping up on your social media feeds as people think of the wildest prompts they can – perhaps it’s Jon Hamm eating ham, or Yoda robbing a convenience store.
This isn’t the first time art and artificial intelligence have captured the internet’s attention. There’s a certain appeal to seeing how an algorithm tackles something as subjective as art. In 2016, for example, actor Thomas Middleditch made a short film based on a script written by an algorithm.
Google’s produced more than a few tools tying art and AI together. In 2018, its Arts & Culture app let users find their doppelgangers in famous paintings. Or Google’s AutoDraw will figure out what you’re trying to doodle, and fix it up for you.
There are even other text-to-image systems, like OpenAi’s Dall-E 2 and Google Imagen, which aren’t available to the masses yet. Here’s what you need to know about Dall-E Mini and its AI-generated art.
What is it?
Dall-E Mini is an AI model that creates images based on the prompts you give it. In an interview with the publication I, programmer Boris Dayma said he initially built the program in July 2021 as part of a competition held by Google and an AI community called Hugging Face.
Dayma didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
How does it work?
Anyone can type in a prompt and hit the “run” button (though you’re likely to get an error message about traffic to the tool and have to try again). Dall-E Mini will spit out its results in the form of a 3×3 grid containing 9 images. A note about the tool on its website says it was trained on “unfiltered data from the internet.”
How good is the AI?
Unsurprisingly, Dall-E Mini is a little hit or miss.
In the interview with I News, Dayma said the AI is better with abstract painting, less so with faces. A landscape of a desert is quite pretty. A pencil sketch of Dolly Parton looks like it might steal your soul.
Paul McCartney eating kale will take years off your life.
Here’s a cat made of lasers.
Erin Carson/Dall-E Mini
Dayma did say, though, that the model is training (that ability to learn is one of the things people love – and fear – about AI), which means it can improve over time. And with the viral popularity of Dall-E Mini, the point is to stumble upon the most bizarre image you can think of, not necessarily to get a perfect impressionist rendering of a Waffle House. The fun is more about dreaming up with most outlandish images that don’t exist – that perhaps shouldn’t exist – and bringing them into cursed existence.
Dall-E also has a note saying that image generation could have a less fun side and could be used to “reinforce or exacerbate societal biases.”
Is Dall-E Mini related to Dall-E 2?
No, they’re not associated. Dall-E 2 is also a tool for generating AI images that was launched as a research project this year.
It was created by the AI research and deployment company OpenAI and is not widely available.
What kinds of images are people creating?
On social media, you can find no shortage of strange Dall-E Mini creations, from Thanos in a Walmart looking for his mother, to Jar Jar Binks winning the Great British Bake Off.
Here are some other highlights.
