DALL·E is an AI system developed by OpenAI that can create original, realistic images and art from a short text description.

It can make realistic and context-aware edits, including inserting, removing, or retouching specific sections of an image from a natural language description. It can also take an image and make novel and creative variations of it inspired by the original.

This month I finally got access to DALL·E beta and I immediately wanted to see it in action by creating all the background images for this website.

For the first month, OpenAI gives 50 free credits which is a fair amount, indeed it was more than enough to generate the images I wanted.

I love blue, shades of blue, tints of blue…well you got it. I am fascinated by the life and works of Vincent van Gogh (as a side note I strongly suggest to watch this movie starring the great Willem Dafoe), so let’s see if DALL·E is able to blend together these two elements. Some of the resulting images are shown below along with their caption which I entered as input to DALL·E (from a single text prompt multiple images are generated by the system).

Shades of blue and teal brush strokes, van gogh.

Shades and tints of blue brush strokes, van gogh.

Shades of light-blue horizontal brush strokes, van gogh.

Shades of light-blue horizontal brush strokes, van gogh.

Shades of blue long and tight horizontal brush strokes, van gogh.

I am no art critic, so my opinions are worth nothing, but one thing is for sure: DALL·E knows how to hold a brush way better than I do.

Such a powerful tool raises several questions among which how DALL·E is going to affect the work of artists: is it going to enhance their creativity or to reduce their job opportunities? This post is an example of the latter. Another interesting debate is whether DALL·E’s creations can actually be considered as art.

If you want to dive deep into the inner workings of DALL·E take a look at this paper, while, for a more relaxing introduction, I suggest to watch this video.

---