Introducing Dall-E, The Uncomfortable Robo-Painter

It’s happened — the folks working in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have decided it would be a good idea to put a paintbrush in the hand of a machine to see what would happen. The idea being that in an evolving artistic landscape, technology will play a huge role in the next wave of masterpieces. The hope is that AI will be able to take over for the painstaking grunt work of individual cell shading and clumsy greenscreen for movies, and much more.

Currently the application has been limited to a few websites that are in beta mode (essentially a testing phase), a few invitations sent out to curious users who are sharing their findings with the rest of the internet.

The results have been a mix of curious, terrifying, and hilarious. Already, a new wave of memes has surged through social media, pictures of clowns on the moon, beloved television shows overrun by dinosaurs, and celebrities eating cheese.

Dall-E (cleverly named for Salvador Dalí, the surrealist painter, and WALL-E, the adorable robot) is basically a few lines of extremely complex code running on a server that has been learning from the users that try it out. Sound complicated? Let us simplify that for you: These ‘robot-like’ tools allow users to submit text — any text you would want — as an input and spit out images in any style, almost immediately. As a result, it’s been evolving and improving as time goes on.

However, the story doesn’t stop there, with the concept of sentience being in the news lately; that is, the concept that AI-based robots such as Dall-E possibly learning human nuance and therefore over-riding or preventing certain user-guided direction.

While the trend of AI isn’t exactly exclusive to younger people, it’s interesting to see how the early phases of machine learning are catching on with Gen-Z and the adjacent generations. AI is in its infancy, and the programs are only going to get more sophisticated as time goes on.

What could this mean for aspiring young artists? Will there even be competition in the field anymore if actual art jobs are being outsourced to machines?

There’s a huge opportunity for any young people interested in embracing this change and entering the field of Artificial Intelligence. The potential for such software is beyond our wildest dreams — we could soon see entire movies made by AI that are indistinguishable from human-made counterparts.

Or maybe people will just use them to keep making memes about pizza.

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