Face to Face With Dall-E, The AI Artist That Might Change The World

Dall-E can illustrate just about anything using a short text prompt. Should it?

Dall-E’s power becomes evident within the first minute of seeing it. The AI program creates intricate, original images when you feed it short text prompts. Its only limit is your imagination. On Wednesday, I watched live as an employee of OpenAI — which created it — asked Dall-E to draw a “Rabbit prison warden, digital art,” and, within twenty seconds, it produced ten new illustrations. All were professional grade.

At first, Dall-E inspires awe, then reverence kicks in. Still in research mode, the program is expanding fast. OpenAI is granting access to up to 1,000 new users each week, and Dall-E’s drawn 3 million images since April. In our modern, visual culture, there’s little doubt this technology — or some variation — will go mainstream. And soon, every internet user will likely have the capacity to share ideas, or shape perceptions, in profound new ways by using it. We’re just starting to grasp the implications.

“Dall-E 2 right now is in a research preview mode,” Lama Ahmad, a policy researcher at OpenAI, told me. “To understand — What are the use cases? What kind of interest is there? What kind of beneficial use cases are there? And then, at…