From 'Barbies scissoring' to 'contorted emotion': the artists using AI

You type in words – however nonsensical or disjointed – and the algorithm creates a unique image based on your search. This is Dall-E 2, a startlingly advanced, image-generating AI trained on 250 million images, named after the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar's Wall-E. While use of Dall-E 2 is currently limited to a narrow pool of people, Dall-E mini (or Craiyon) is a free, unrelated version that is open to the public. Drawing on 15m images, Dall-E mini's algorithm offers a smorgasbord of surreal images, complete with absurd compositions and blurred human forms. Already, trends have emerged: nuclear explosions, dumpster fires, toilets and giant eyeballs abound. On a dedicated Reddit thread, people delight in the images generated by the free, low-resolution version, which range from amusing (Kim Jong-un lego) to dark (The Last Supper by Salvador Dali), hellish (synchronized swimming in lava) and deeply disturbing (Steve Jobs introducing a guillotine). Like other machine-learning networks, this AI model seems biased in its images of people – who appear, perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly white and mostly male.