What's up with those 9 box A.I. images all over social media feeds?

Jun 17

A.I. won't take our jobs, but it will continue to change them.

The latest A.I. trending topic is DALL-E 2, an Open A.I. technology that generates realistic images and art from a description you assign it. Some of the results are incredibly creative, unique, and often hard to distinguish between a human or computer creator.

There is ongoing research into this technology's opportunity, biases, abuse, and implications, but it's clear even in the early days that A.I. is going to affect content in our digital-first world sooner than any of us predicted. And it’s really exciting!!

Casey Newton summarized the social signals I’m picking up around this tool really well:

I remember the first time I Shazam’d a song, summoned an Uber, and streamed myself live using Meerkat. What makes these moments stand out, I think, is the sense that some unpredictable set of new possibilities had been unlocked. What would the web become when you could easily add video clips to it? When you could summon any file to your phone from the cloud? When you could broadcast yourself to the world?
It’s been a few years since I saw the sort of nascent technology that made me call my friends and say: you’ve got to see this. But this week I did, because I have a new one to add to the list. It’s an image generation tool called DALL-E, and while I have very little idea of how it will eventually be used, it’s one of the most compelling new products I’ve seen since I started writing this newsletter.

And of course, not only is it exciting technology, but it’s also unsurprisingly already being used to create deepfake scenarios that show how damaging and negatively impactful this tech could be (e.g., Obama secretly starting forest fires by tossing cigarette butts into dry grass). Lots to consider here.

Beyond the larger DALLE-2 research tool, there’s a also self-serve tool called DALLE-E Mini that anyone can use today to try some low-effort, low-quality results featuring 9 examples. When screenshotted and shared in social media, they can be GOLDEN.

Here’s a Twitter thread of almost 50 I’ve made so far, and I’ll include a few here…

Greg Swan @gregswan

The dude from the big Lebowski in a delorean on mars, synthwave, digital art #dallemini

Greg Swan @gregswan

Shrek in the Oval Office #dallemini

Greg Swan @gregswan

a lumberjack sitting at an office desk working on a computer while drinking coffee #dallemini

Although A.I. for copywriting has gotten quite detailed and user-friendly, this is quite a shift for images. We’re already seeing this technology spread to pop culture via memes, which is the fastest way to spread awareness of a new creative tool in our current era. Also, you’ll note the tool is janky AF. It consistently times out, the outputs are terrible, and–just like any other tool–you have to really learn how to give it good inputs to get better outputs.

But this is an important signal and a new technology worth paying attention to, experimenting with, and thinking about short and long-term implications. It’s not going away, so this is a good time to jump in and get your hands dirty to learn something new. Click here and get to making!