New machine learning models make AI artists even better

Video game designer Jason Allen made headlines this year with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, his submission to the Colorado State Fair's digital arts competition. Judges awarded him first place and $300 prize, but the artwork also received a sudden flurry of global attention when it was discovered Allen had used AI-powered image generator Midjourney to create the work of art. Midjourney, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 have brought a wealth of weird and wonderful images to the world as users type in natural language descriptions and share the dream-like results. DALL-E 2 uses a "diffusion model", which attempts to take the input text in its entirety and generate an image from that. But the output becomes less accurate as that text becomes more complex; the existing model appears to struggle to understand composition of concepts, and confuses attributes and relations between different objects.