What DALL-E reveals about human creativity

The often delightful and arresting images created by the latest generation of text-to-image generators, exemplified by DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have stirred up lots of buzz in both the arts and the AI worlds. The images, generated from simple text prompts (e.g., a baboon sailing a colorful dinghy), look very much like the products of intelligent human creativity. To explore just how creative these models really are and what they can teach us about the nature of our own innovative propensities, we asked four authorities on artificial intelligence, the brain, and creativity (and we also asked GPT-3, a language-generating model that's a close cousin to DALL-E) to explain what they think of DALL-E's capabilities and artistic potential. DALL-E starts by taking billions of bits of text from the internet and translating them into an abstraction, which it stores in a location in "latent," or logical, space. In the universe of describable things, for example, "baboon" will be "located" by strong associations near to other primates, probably not far from "Africa," "savanna," or "zoo."