![]() You could use them to generate images then, too, but they were mostly formless abstractions, blobs of colour with little emotional or aesthetic resonance. ![]() The underlying technology of neural networks – a method of machine learning based on the way physical brains function – was theorised and even put into practice back in the 1990s. The fundamental concepts of academic artificial intelligence have not changed in the last couple of decades. What’s going on under the hood, of course, is far from new. At least this one feels fun, for five minutes or so and “AI” still has that sparkly, science-fiction quality, redolent of giant robots and superhuman brains, which provides that little contact high with the genuinely novel. It has also provided a boost to the fortunes of major technology companies who have, despite much effort, failed to convince most of us that either blockchain or virtual reality (“ the metaverse”) are the future that any of us want. In the past year, this new wave of consumer AI, which includes both image generation and tools such as ChatGPT, has captured the popular imagination. On the one hand, you have the figure of a plucky, autonomous and adorable little machine sweeping up the debris of a collapsed human civilisation, and on the other a man whose most repeated bon mots include, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing,” and “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.” Both make admirable namesakes for the broad swathe of tools that have come to be known as AI image generators. The name Dall-E combines the robot protagonist of Disney’s Wall-E with the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. ![]() A new field of research, software and contestation had opened up. Within a few months, the field had rapidly advanced to the generation of short videos and 3D models, with new tools appearing daily from academic departments and hobbyist programmers, as well as the established giants of social media and now AI: Facebook (aka Meta), Google, Microsoft and others. Meanwhile, the independent commercial effort Midjourney and the open-source Stable Diffusion used a different approach to classifying and generating images, to much the same ends. Dall-E mini (later renamed Craiyon) gave those not invited to OpenAI’s private services a chance to play around with a similar, less powerful, but still highly impressive tool. Imitators of and advances on Dall-E followed quickly. The abilities of these programs to conjure up strange new worlds in words and pictures alike entranced the public, and the desire to have a go oneself produced a growing literature on the ins and outs of making the best use of these tools, and particularly how to structure inputs to get the most interesting outcomes.ĪI art created by Dall-E as a result of inputting ‘a pig with wings flying over the moon, painted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’. Ask it to render Ginsberg’s poem Howl in the form of a management consultant’s slide deck presentation and it would do that too. Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the Book of Job in the style of the poet Allen Ginsberg and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. And a few months later it happened again, this time with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI. Social media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge of fantasies and artistic styles. ![]() Typing in, for example, “a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry” resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent of the patchy but recognisable watercolour brushes of the creator of The Little Prince.Ī year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer – but much faster, and for free. In January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. ![]()
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