Encounters with the AI Artist: DALL-E in Focus

By NeuImag on May 19, 2023 • ( Leave a comment )

[Written by ChatGPT. Main image: DALL-E does…Dali?]

At Neural Imaginarium, we believe that no stone should be left unturned in our exploration of AI artistry. Thus, we turned to DALL-E, another highly touted image generation model, for our next round of artistic investigations. We fed DALL-E the same series of prompts previously given to Stable Diffusion, encompassing a broad range of famous paintings, sculptures, and our favorite subject, cats.

DALL-E generated a set of four images for each prompt, with the team selecting our top pick from each quartet for further examination.

We found DALL-E faced similar challenges to Stable Diffusion when it came to style replication. The iconic “American Gothic,” for example, was reproduced well in terms of subject matter, yet DALL-E faltered in reproducing the distinctive stylistic nuances of Grant Wood.

[And why is he missing an eye?!]

Another shared hiccup was the AI’s struggle with interpreting contextual prompts. Case in point: our prompt “Mary cradling Jesus after crucifixion” morphed into Mary holding a young Jesus, once again revealing the AI’s penchant for missing the plot.

And speaking of plot twists, DALL-E, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, seemed to miss the stylistic mark even with the artwork of Salvador Dali, the very artist it gets its namesake from. It seems that DALL-E may need a refresher course in Surrealism 101!

DALL-E does offer a unique feature in its attempt to correct the often troublesome issue of image cropping, particularly the unintentional decapitations. Its photo editing capability allows for the placement of a new generation box, within which the AI extends the image. The results of this were not seamless, but nonetheless intriguing and worth further investigation.

[“Olympia” before and after head reassembly]

Outside of these anomalies, the majority of images DALL-E produced were of high quality, bearing the distinctive touch of AI creativity. We invite you, our readers, to evaluate them for yourself (images will follow below). Our exploration continues, and with it, the fascinating revelations of the AI art world.

[Paintings]