Dall-E 2

Every art school graduate knows the famous line: “From today, painting is dead.” said in 1841 by Paul Delaroche when he saw the game-changing potential of photography. Whilst nothing about art was the same after the birth of photography, painting certainly didn’t die. The 20th Century saw the greatest expansion of creative expression in painting the world had ever known. Just look at how many of the most expensive paintings ever sold were painted after the invention of photography.

I’ve had many people say to me recently “Have you seen that new AI thing that makes images, you’ll be out of a job soon!“.

Yes, the ever-encroaching automation of everyone’s jobs seems to be finally knocking at my door. First, it was the call centres, then they came for the supermarket checkouts and now the bell tolls for the creative industry. So in my panic, I hastily signed up to Open AI’s Dall-E 2 waiting list hoping to be approved so I could test out my soon-to-be replacement.

Perhaps this is just deserts for always describing my job as “I pick colours for a living“. Maybe we are one step further to a fully automated luxury communism Twitter Tankies can only dream of. Deep down we all know our day jobs are replaceable by some form of artificial intelligence, but to challenge the very essence of human ingenuity is quite ballsy.

Creativity is as finite as it is infinite. We can only create to the limits of our own imagination and ability. We only have so much time in the day, so perhaps there is a need to embrace a technology that could infinitely create variations of your own ideas.

What can it be used for right now?

Honestly, not much. But I think it might be helpful when I need to create some quick-and-dirty, royalty-free imagery for a blog or social posts. The main problem AI suffers from is a concept called the Uncanny Valley. This is essentially a built-in human cautiousness with things closely resembling human-like attributes. Their ability to generate stock photography is absolutely cursed. Each image I’ve generated has some type of threatening aura within it, whether it be slightly misplaced fingers or a wonky-eyed gaze. However, companies like Nvidia have already perfected a face generator that is indistinguishable from a real human’s, so we’re getting there.

Dall-E 2 excels at 3D and stylised illustrations. I think this is partly because we are less cautious of stylised imagery and it is easier to accept that these are expressions of an idea rather than something trying to imitate life.

One very exciting tool that is currently in public Beta is Outpainting. It’s pretty amazing that you can input a pre-existing image and the AI uses that baseline information to extend the image. It has always been a pet peeve of mine when I want to make a banner-style image from a square image or pattern. I can definitely see myself using this for background images and things that do not require such a close inspection or focus.