Give this AI a few words of description and it produces a stunning image – but is it art?

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but thanks to an artificial intelligence program called DALL-E 2, you can have a professional-looking image with far fewer. DALL-E 2 is a new neural network algorithm that creates a picture from a short phrase or sentence that you provide. The program, which was announced by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI in April 2022, hasn't been released to the public. But a small and growing number of people – myself included – have been given access to experiment with it. As a researcher studying the nexus of technology and art, I was keen to see how well the program worked.