A Tool to Supercharge Your Imagination
What if The Atlantic owned a train car? I wondered. Amtrak, I had just learned on the internet, allows owners of private railcars to lash onto runs along the Northeast Corridor, among other routes. “We should have a train car,” I slacked an editor. Moments later, it appeared on my screen, bright red with our magazine’s logo emblazoned in white, just like I’d ordered. It’s an old logo, and misspelled, but the effect was the same: A momentary notion—one unworthy of relating to someone in private, let alone executing—had been realized, thanks to DALL-E 3, an artificial-intelligence image generator now built into Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator website.
This is now a habit. My colleagues and I have been asking Bing to produce magazine covers on ridiculous topics, such as “The Burger Doctrine” and “What Cheeseburgers Want,” absurdist riffs on our political reporting. The AI has obliged (but couldn’t). Another of our generated cover stories, “The Case for the Cincinnati Bengals,” earned a luxurious teal cover with a rendition of the White House flanked by patterns of orange tigers in Art Deco symmetry.
