From Trump Nevermind babies to deep fakes: DALL-E and the ethics of AI art

Want to see a picture of Jesus Christ laughing at a meme on his phone, Donald Trump as the Nevermind baby, or Karl Marx being slimed at the Nikelodeon Kid's Choice awards? If you've been on Twitter or Instagram in the past couple of weeks, it's been hard to miss odd-looking formulations of these kinds of scenarios in the form of AI art. DALL-E (and DALL-E mini), the creator of these artworks, is a neural network that can take a text phrase and transform it an image. It was trained by looking at millions of images on the internet along with accompanying text and it learned to create pictures of things you'd never expect to be combined, such as an avocado armchair. Text to image technology is proceeding at a rapid pace, and the full DALL-E model is able to produce scarily clear images based on the input you provide, while the mini version is still clunky enough to capture the weird internet style that makes them instantly meme-able.