🎨 DALL-E: Did picture-generating AI just make artists obsolete?

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of globalization and the China trade shock

In This Issue

The Essay: DALL-E: Did picture-generating AI just make artists obsolete?

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of the China trade shock

Micro Reads: space tourism, the 10,000-year clock, carbon removal, and more …

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Quote of the Issue

“It is the work of capital, labor, and natural resources, driven by the creative individual mind, which undergird the achievements of our civilization.” - Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

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The Essay

🎨 DALL-E: Did picture-generating AI just make artists obsolete?

DALL-E is a new AI neural-network tool that, as described by creator OpenAI, can “create and edit images from natural language instructions.” (The name is a call-out to WALL-E, the 2008 Pixar film about a self-aware robot, and to surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. And, technically this is DALL-E 2, by all accounts a massive improvement over the 2021 original.) A simple prompting phrase from a human to DALL-E can generate some stunning results. The New York Times has a lengthy and detailed piece on the technology:

A half decade ago, the world’s leading A.I. labs built systems that could identify objects in digital images and even generate images on their own, including flowers, dogs, cars and faces. A few years later, they built systems that could do much the same with written language, summarizing articles, answering questions, generating tweets and even writing blog posts. ... Now, researchers are combining those technologies to create new forms of A.I. DALL-E is a notable step forward because it juggles both language and images and, in some cases, grasps the relationship between the two.

But neither that NYT explainer nor the spare description from OpenAI, a lab backed by a billion dollars in funding from Microsoft, really captures the Wow Factor here. You really do have to see it to believe it. For example: “Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s.”

Or: “A rabbit detective sitting on a park bench and reading a newspaper in a victorian setting”:

Both of the above DALL-E creations come from OpenAI’s founder and CEO Sam Altman, who has been on Twitter taking requests for image prompts. He’s pretty stoked by the results and what might come next: