It has been a fascinating few weeks delving into the promise, implications and risks of AI.
So many people have asked me how Dall-E and other rendering programs work, I decided to ask BING to explain Dall-E to a high school student, and this is what it had to say.
"Imagine you could draw anything you want just by writing a few words. Sounds amazing, right? Well, that's what a program like Dall-e can do. Dall-e is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to create images from text. It works by learning from a huge collection of text and images on the internet, and then using that knowledge to generate new images that match the text you give it. For example, if you write "a cat wearing a hat", Dall-e will try to create an image of a cat wearing a hat. It might not look exactly like a real cat or a real hat, but it will be close enough to recognize.
How does Dall-e do this? It uses a special type of neural network, which is a mathematical model that mimics how the human brain works. A neural network consists of many layers of units called neurons, which can process information and pass it on to other neurons. Each neuron has a weight and a bias, which determine how much it influences the output of the network. By adjusting these weights and biases, the network can learn to perform different tasks.
Dall-e has two main parts: an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes the text input and converts it into a numerical representation called a latent code. The latent code captures the meaning and the style of the text. The decoder takes the latent code and converts it back into an image output. The decoder tries to make the image as realistic and as consistent with the text as possible.
Dall-e is not perfect, though. Sometimes it can produce images that are weird or nonsensical, or that don't match the text at all. This is because Dall-e is limited by the data it was trained on, and by the complexity of the task. Creating images from text is very hard, because there are many ways to interpret the same words, and many details that need to be filled in. Dall-e can only do its best based on what it knows.
But Dall-e is still very impressive and fun to use. It shows us how powerful artificial intelligence can be, and how creative it can get. It also challenges us to think about what we can express with words and images, and what we can imagine with our minds."
As a fun experiment, I asked DALL-E to render a "labrador retriever sleeping by a roaring fire as painted by ..." and I gave it a few different painters to try ... Mondrian, Picasso, a generic impressionist ... here is one of its renderings ... try to guess which artist?
