I asked https://beta.openai.com/playground to, “Make a demo for DALL-E2” and this is what it wrote for me. (DALL-E2 is a simple, easy-to-use 2D drawing and animation software. It is perfect for creating simple drawings, illustrations, and animations. With Dall-E2 you can quickly create your own unique characters and worlds.) I did have to touch up the grammar a bit, but it’s still pretty impressive. I use Word Hero, another AI writing tool to help develop ideas and format.
What the Heck is Dall-E2?
DALL-E2 preceded by DALL E1 released a year later, “generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x the resolution”. It can create images and art from text descriptions. It can alter existing images by changing orientations, or adding material. It can reimage existing photos using “in painting”, which will drastically change the number of contributors to r/photoshopbattles once widely available.
On https://openai.com/dall-e-2/#demos there are many examples of the capabilities. It shows examples of three phrase instructions, where the impressive AI draws a bowl of soup, as a planet in the universe, as digital art. It shows a pool, that you can add a flamingo to and it realistically draws in the reflection. Another you can add a corgi to or you can move a couch and different furniture around in a living space. In another example, it takes original art and makes its own art inspired by the original.
DALL E2 recognizes images, the relationship between images, and the text used to describe them. The video on the demo page gives examples like a koala dunking a basketball and a polar bear playing a bass.
How OpenAI is Mitigating Misuse
OpenAI doesn’t have it available on their API (App Programming Interface) at this time and only a select number of trusted partners currently have full access. They have limited the ability of DALL E2 to generate violent, hateful, or adult images by removing the explicit content from the training data. They have also implemented techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of a real person’s face.
They have a strict content policy to curb individuals from misusing the technology, which doesn’t allow violent, adult, or political content to be generated. They use automated monitoring as well as human monitoring. They won’t generate images that violate their policies based on text prompts or image uploads.
Doing a phased deployment as they study the limitations and capabilities of DALL E2 will help them research, but also keep most bad actors at bay until all mitigations are thoroughly tested and they iteratively improve their safety system.
COSMO Experiments with AI Designer
Cosmopolitan Let the DALL-E2 design the cover of their magazine.
It looks amazing and is amazing that artificial intelligence designed this, though the cover lines were made and placed by Mallory Roynon because DALL-E2 is designed to prioritize art and images over language, the headlines it used were jumbled mess. OpenAI has a program GPT-3 massive language generator that is better with words and language.
Gloria Liu a freelance journalist, takes us on Cosmo’s journey in this article on Cosmopolitan’s website. It looks like they had fun with it, making suggestions of a woman holding a cocktail and spinoffs of that narrative, but decided it looked too much like clip art. They tried a close-up of a fashionable woman in the 1960s in encyclopedia-style illustrations. And it generated six unique cartoonish pictures.
In the end, Cosmo’s team came up with the image seen above, of course with the help of DALL-E2.
Does AI Need to be Regulated?
They are using these neural networks to develop general AI or AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, that could learn to do any task and not just the task given to it. Essentially DALL-E2 is an iteration on giving the end AGI vision and GPT-3 is giving it language. As interesting as it is, AGI is also a bit scary. As technology progresses faster than the law does it certainly paves the ground for misuse, but OpenAI is committed to the responsible deployment of its tools.
H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is as much a time travel book as it is a warning about certain technologies being easy to abuse. We have even heard Elon Musk talk about the need for AI regulations, but at this point, it’s unclear what to regulate.
One great fear is of course weaponizing it, which most experts strongly urge against using AGI in that manner. Depicting imagery of a dystopian Terminator-Esque future, where we are being irradicated by sentient robots. Though it seems most think we are not near reaching general AI it will be something we need to think about more as it gets more advanced, in the meantime these AI will change the world, hopefully for the better.
Will DALL-E2 Replace Graphic Designers
The short answer is, probably not. Not anytime soon anyway. I do think it will become a powerful tool in a designer’s bag to help them transform their ideas. In the near future, we will see a number of companies and designers using these tools to increase efficiency as well as generate interesting concepts.
The modern graphic designer, should not fear the power of AI, but rather should embrace it and use it as a tool as it was intended. Designers have long used computers to aid in the creation of graphics, but with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), they can now rely on machines to do a lot of the heavy lifting. While AI has caused some concern among designers that their jobs might be taken over by machines, this is not likely to happen. In fact, AI can actually be a valuable tool for designers, helping them to create better and more innovative graphics.
Designers should not be afraid of the power of AI but should embrace it and use it as a tool as it was intended. AI can help them to create better graphics faster and more efficiently. It can also help them to experiment with different design concepts and to find new ways to express their ideas.
Conclusion
DALL-E2 will change the world along with other AI like it. It’s going to be an interesting future, for art and language as the technology continues to improve. I for one am excited.
Thanks Chris C