Tech's New Frontier Raises a “Buffet of Unwanted Questions”
I feel very weird about DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s new text-to-image artificial-intelligence engine. If you are unfamiliar, it’s a system that takes written prompts and then can produce at-times stunning high-resolution images in an array of artistic styles.
One reason I feel weird is because I don’t really understand the technology as well as I’d like. I think that I get the broad strokes. I understand that DALL-E 2 was supposedly trained on roughly 650 million image-text pairs that were scraped from the internet. And that it uses that data set to make connections between images and the words that described them. I also know that DALL-E 2 uses a process called diffusion to generate images from text. In a great article for IEEE Spectrum, Eliza Strickland described diffusion as a process “which begins with a random pattern of dots and slowly alters the pattern to create an image.”
All of that makes sense to me in the simplest sense. But go a step further, and I’m lost. Which is probably why the images that DALL-E 2 generates feel to me like magic. Intellectually, I understand that the pictures the engine returns when you type “full body photo of a horse in a space suit” are just the result of a number of assumptions of a machine that has processed a lot of images and can make connections, as well as replace one or more elements of an image with another. I know that DALL-E 2 a bit like magic. And because DALL-E 2 spits out colorful, detailed, high-resolution images, it’s an especially evocative use case of artificial intelligence, and its effects feel very profound. Other AI learning engines like GPT-3, which generates human-sounding text, are also powerful pieces of technology, but there’s something about DALL-E 2’s visual nature that elicits a particularly potent response. Typing anything you can imagine into a little box and having it render in front of your eyes in seconds feels like something cribbed from science fiction—like some kind of digital witchcraft.
