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DALL·E 2 Will Disrupt Art Deeper Than Photography Did
The end of art or a new beginning?
The following is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational newsletter about the AI that matters to your life. Its purpose is to help you understand the impact AI has in our world and develop the tools to better navigate the future.
Are we going to soon witness the creative genius of a virtual Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci?
We could be on the way with the latest trend in the AI field: visual generative models. While systems like GPT-3 create text from text, others like DALL·E 2 — a wordplay between Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s cute robot WALL·E — can create visual art from words. As you can see from the cover image of this article, this tech gives a new meaning to the idiom “an image is worth a thousand words.”
OpenAI, the company behind DALL·E 2, announced the model in April. In just a couple of months, it has sounded all the alarms that AI is getting too close to human-level visual creativity. It can create anything you can imagine — and anything you can’t — from a single sentence.
And OpenAI isn’t alone. A month ago Google Brain announced Imagen, a similar — and even slightly better — model. And just yesterday, another team from Google Brain released yet another model called Parti.
And that’s without mentioning all the projects coming from low-budget research groups that don’t count on the resources of the Googles and OpenAIs of the world. Some examples are brand new research labs like Midjourney, free apps like Dream, open-source alternatives like Hugging Face’s DALL·E mini (now called Craiyon), or the collab notebooks (e.g. disco diffusion) that originate from the work of a few independent researchers like Katherine Crowson and Ryan Murdock, who started the movement among digital artists.
Now that the tech is proven and the uncertainty removed, the whole AI community is in a race to build the next best text-to-image model. And they aren’t stopping anytime soon. This will have important consequences. Today, I’ll focus on how this technology will disrupt the visual arts. DALL·E 2, the main star of today’s issue, will accompany us on this journey.
