Introduction

DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language, combining concepts, attributes, and styles.

It was announced to the general public in January 2022, and is the successor to the first version, released one year earlier. Developed by the company OpenAI, which is a San Francisco-based research laboratory founded by Elon Musk and others in 2015.

Controversy

According to their website, OpenAI have limited the ability for DALL·E 2 to generate violent, hate, or adult images, by removing the most explicit content from the training data.

The creative potential of this technology is fascinating, but I can’t help being concerned about its ultimate misuse, such as deep-fake videos spreading propaganda. Hopefully a mechanism to determine provenance will develop alongside.

How does it work?

DALL·E 2 uses the language prediction model GPT-3. It has been developed further with 12 billion parameters that “swaps text for pixels”, trained on text-image pairs from the Internet.

It uses zero-shot learning to generate output from a description and cue without further training.

Much more…

DALL·E 2 can do so much more than the examples demonstrated above.

• It can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption.
• It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.
• It can take an image and create different variations of it inspired by the original.

For many more examples jump over to their website here.