Blog Post

August 18, 2022

Creating Art With DALL.E

It is quite challenging to predict how the future of art will look, given the nearly limitless artistic possibilities tied to social and technological developments. Similar to how the paintbrush gave rise to impressionism, the computer has dramatically expanded our creative options.

Currently, there are technologies that can translate natural language input into seemingly realistic images or works of art to represent precisely what you would have described. DALL.E 2 is one of such AI systems by a company called OpenAI which was cofounded by Elon Musk.

DALL.E 2 has been trained to understand the relationship between images and the words used to describe them rather than just creating a mosaic of images it has discovered online. The fact that it also knows what an attractive image would seem like is quite astounding.

Due to particular concerns and possibilities, DALL.E 2 hasn't been made public yet but is available in beta. They started by inviting 1 million people from their waitlist as of July 20, 2022, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the invitees. I've used a few AI art generators before, but DALL.E 2's output struck me with its sharpness and realism. Below is a collage of a few results that my descriptions generated.

This technology is undoubtedly remarkable, yet it is not without its limitations. DALL.E 2 references an enormous library of images, though, for obvious reasons, it prohibits the creating, uploading, or sharing of images that include explicit sexual content, violence, harassment, or any unlawful activities. Furthermore, not all inputs produced the visual I was hoping to see though they technically matched my request. For instance, I expected the camel in the image below to be natural. I believe this was the case because either the system lacked realistic photos to utilize as a reference point, or the text I entered wasn't entirely descriptive.

Even though DALL.E 2 can produce a reasonably decent picture in a matter of seconds, I'm not convinced that it poses a threat to artists. As of now, I think the system is useful for concept generation and brainstorming, but rest assured that the subsequent versions will be enhanced.

Numerous individuals can now create works of art due to technology, which is revolutionising every aspect of human endeavour. Artists can now utilise software systems like DALL.E to produce beautiful designs and paintings. For aspiring sculptors, new 3-dimension technology will soon present opportunities. And the future in art viewing is with AR and VR devices, which will be more interactive hence my optimism for the future of art.

Dall-E is a very useful assistant that amplifies what a person can normally do but it really is dependant on the creativity of the person using it. An artist or someone more creative can create some really interesting stuff.