Dall-E is a new advancement in artificial intelligence

Technology is moving at a rapid and somewhat frightening pace, and the advancements in artificial intelligence are a testament to that. In the past, it was a thing of sci-fi dreams to have an AI that can help you book movie tickets, tell you a joke, or add stuff to your grocery list—all things that Siri, Alexa, or your Google Assistant can now easily do. But now we also have an AI like Dall-E, which does something a little more complicated than what your virtual assistant does. 

Dall-E’s name is a combination of renowned artist Salvador Dali and the titular robot from Pixar’s Wall-E. Its function is straightforward: it generates an image from a text prompt. For example, you can write “A red clock on top of books” or “A painting of a pigeon perched on a pink tree”, and it will come up with a picture based on what you wrote. It seems simple enough, but the fact that Dall-E has the ability to generate original images based on 12 billion parameters and a vast text-image pair dataset is a feat nothing short of amazing.

However, Open AI, the developers of Dall-E, didn’t stop there. This year, they released Dall-E 2, which is more accurate and generates better resolution images. The AI is also able to take into account what style you want the image to be in, so you can have “an astronaut riding a horse” either as a pencil drawing or in the style of Andy Warhol. Dall-E 2 is also able to make edits to existing images and take reflections and shadows into account. Say you want a flamingo on the pool or by the pool—Dall-E can place that flamingo and have light bounce and shadows cast appropriately. 

If you want to get your hands on the AI to play around with it yourself, you’ll have to get in line. You can sign up for a waitlist, but other than that, the developers have not made the tech widely available as of yet.

An image generated from a text prompt might not be too mindblowing, but the fact that this is done by an AI with great accuracy and photorealism is a big leap in AI tech. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen, but we’ve all watched Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and (ironically) Wall-E, right?

Learn more about Dall-E 2 here.