Be afraid, 'AI selfies' are here

We've been talking a lot about text-to-image AI art generators in recent months. And now the controversial creative tech is already moving into the mainstream. Despite DALL-E 2 opening access to all, text-to-image AI has remained a niche interest among developers and creatives and hardly something used as an everyday tool by the general public. A new generation of more accessible apps is taking the text-to-image concept from art to selfies, which means we could now see it everywhere (to learn more about how it works, see our piece on how to use DALL-E 2. Selfies used to be pretty'real'. Phones haven't tended to focus on their front cameras as much as the back ones, and even today, the quality of selfies tends to be lower than anything taken with a phone's main camera. That weakness has been made up for with all manner of filters and skin-smoothing and slimming tools offering digital cosmetic surgery that can leave people unrecognisable.