Our friend Christian Cantrell (20-year Adobe vet, now VP of Product at Stability.ai) continues his invaluable world to plug the world of generative imaging directly into Photoshop. Check out the latest, available for free here:

Among the great pleasures of this year’s revolutions in AI imaging has been the chance to discover & connect with myriad amazing artists & technologists. I’ve admired the work of Nathan Shipley, so I was delighted to connect him with my self-described “grand-mentee” Joanne Jang, PM for DALL•E. Nathan & his team collaborated with the Dalí Museum & OpenAI to launch Dream Tapestry, a collaborative realtime art-making experience.

The Dream Tapestry allows visitors to create original, realistic Dream Paintings from a text description. Then, it stitches a visitor’s Dream Painting together with five other visitors’ paintings, filling in the spaces between them to generate one collective Dream Tapestry. The result is an ever-growing series of entirely original Dream Tapestries, exhibited on the walls of the museum.

Check it out:

I haven’t yet gotten to try this integration, but I’m excited to see it arrive.

Here’s another beautiful, DALL•E-infused collaboration between VFX whiz Paul Trillo & Shyama Golden:

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Whew—no more wheedling my “grand-mentee” Joanne on behalf of colleagues wanting access. 😅

Starting today, we are removing the waitlist for the DALL·E beta so users can sign up and start using it immediately. More than 1.5M users are now actively creating over 2M images a day with DALL·E—from artists and creative directors to authors and architects—with over 100K users sharing their creations and feedback in our Discord community.

You can sign up here. Also exciting:

We are currently testing a DALL·E API with several customers and are excited to soon offer it more broadly to developers and businesses so they can build apps on this powerful system.

It’s hard to overstate just how much this groundbreaking technology has rocked our whole industry—all since publicly debuting less than 6 months ago! Congrats to the whole team. I can’t wait to see what they’re cooking up next.

Let the canvases extend in every direction! The thoughtfully designed new tiling UI makes it easy to synthesize adjacent chunks in sequence, partly overcoming current resolution limits in generative imaging:

Here’s a nice little demo from our designer Davis Brown, who takes his dad Russell’s surreal desert explorations to totally new levels:

Amazing work from the always clever Karen X. Cheng, collaborating with Paul Trillo & others:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Speaking of Paul here’s a fun new little VFX creation made using DALL•E:

AI is going to change VFX. This is a silly little experiment but it shows how powerful dall-e 2 is in generating elements into a pre existing video. These tools will become easier to use so when spectacle becomes cheap, ideas will prevail#aiart #dalle #ufo @openaidalle #dalle2 pic.twitter.com/XGHy9uY09H

— Paul Trillo (@paultrillo) August 30, 2022

Ever since DALL•E hit the scene, I’ve been wanting to know what words its model for language-image pairing would use to describe images:

Now the somewhat scarily named CLIP Interrogator promises exactly that kind of insight:

What do the different OpenAI CLIP models see in an image? What might be a good text prompt to create similar images using CLIP guided diffusion or another text to image model? The CLIP Interrogator is here to get you answers!

Here’s hoping it helps us get some interesting image -> text -> image flywheels spinning.

It’s cool & commendable to see OpenAI making improvements in the tricky area of increasing representation & diversity among the humans it depicts. From email they sent today:

DALL·E now generates images of people that more accurately reflect the diversity of the world’s population. Thank you to everyone who has marked results as biased in our product; your feedback helped inform and evaluate this new mitigation, which we plan on refining as we gather more data and feedback.

People have been noticing & sharing examples, e.g. via this Reddit thread.

[Update: See their blog post for more details & examples.]

On Friday I had a ball chatting with Brian McCullough and Chris Messina on the arrival of DALL•E & other generative-imaging tech on the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. The section intro begins at 31:30, with me chiming in at 35:45 & riffing for about 45 minutes. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy talking (i.e. one heck of a lot 😅), and I’d love to know what you think.

I’ve gathered links to some of the topics we discussed:

• Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work. Seriously. But knowing just where to draw the line between objectively wasteful crap (e.g. tedious file format conversion) and possibly welcome labor (e.g. laborious but meditative etching) isn’t always easy. What happens when you skip the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice required to master a craft? What happens when everyone in the gym is now using a mech suit that lifts 10,000 lbs.?
• “Vemödalen: The Fear That Everything Has Already Been Done,” is demonstrated with painful hilarity via accounts like Insta Repeat. (And to make it meta, there’s my repetition of the term.) “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…” Or as Marshawn Lynch might describe running through one’s face, “Over & over, and over & over & over…”
• As Louis CK deftly noted, “Everything is amazing & nobody’s happy.”
• The disruption always makes me think of The Onion’s classic “Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs“: “Holy f*ck, that’s it for us monkeys.” My new friend August replied with the armed dolphin below. 💪👀
• A group of thoughtful creators recently mused on “What AI art means for human artists.” Like me, many of them likened this revolution to the arrival of photography in the 19th century. It immediately devalued much of what artists had labored for years to master—yet in doing so it freed them up to interpret the world more freely (think Impressionism, Cubism, etc.).
• Content-Aware Fill was born from the amazing PatchMatch technology (see video). We got it into Photoshop by stripping it down to just one piece (inpainting), and I foresee similar streamlined applications of the many things DALL•E-type tech can do (layout creation, style transfer, and more).
• StyleCLIP is my team’s effort to edit faces via text by combining OpenAI’s CLIP (part of DALL•E’s magic sauce) with NVIDIA’s StyleGAN. You can try it out here.
• Longtime generative artist Mario Klingemann used GPT-3 to coin a name for Promptomancy. I wonder how long these incantations & koans will remain central, and how quickly we’ll supplement or even supplant them with visual affordances (presets, sliders, grids, etc.).
• O.C.-actor-turned-author Ben McKenzie wrote a book on crypto that promises to be sharp & entertaining, based on the interviews with him I’ve heard.
• Check out the DALL•E-made 3D Lego Teslas that, at a glance, fooled longtime Pixar vet Guido Quaroni. I also love these gibberish-filled ZZ Top concert posters.
• My grand-mentee (!) Joanne is the PM for DALL•E.
• Bill Atkinson created MacPaint, blowing my 1984 mind with breakthroughs like flood fill. The arrival of DALL•E feels so similar.

“I promised myself that I’d try not to flip out, but… holy mother of papers, look at that!” Take ‘er away, doc:

Here’s a great illustration of its text-handling chops:

Amidst my current obsession with AI-generated images, I’ve been particularly charmed by DALL•E’s penchant for rendering some delightfully whacked-out text, as in these concert posters:

This reminded me of an old Italian novelty song meant to show non-native English speakers what the language sounds like to non-speakers. Enjoy. 😛

Inpainting FTW! Check out a whole gallery of experiments, wherein the regions surrounding the original artwork are hallucinated via AI.

I’m having a ball asking the system to create illustrations, after which I can select regions and generate new variations. Click/tap if needed to play the animation below:

It’s a lot of fun for photorealistic work, too. Here I erased everything but Russell Brown’s face, then let DALL•E synthesize the rest:

And check out what it did with a pic of my wife & our friend (“two women surrounded by numerous sugar skulls and imagery from día de los muertos, in the style of salvador dalí, digital art”). 💃🏻💀👀

Obviously I’m almost criminally obsessed with DALL•E et al. (sorry if you wanted to see my normal filler here 😌). Here’s an accessible overview of how we got here & how it all works:

The vid below gathers a lot of emerging thoughts from sharp folks like my teammate Ryan Murdock & my friend Mario Klingemann. “Maybe the currency is ideas [vs. execution]. This is a future where everyone is an art director,” says Rob Sheridan. Check it out:

[Via Dave Dobish]

This may be the most accessible overall intro & discussion I’ve seen, and it’s chock full of fun example output.

Even the system’s frequent text “fails” are often charmingly bizarre—like a snapshot of a dream that makes sense only while dreaming. Some faves from the vid above:

Heh—I got a kick out of seeing how AI would go about hallucinating its idea of what my flamed-out ’84 Volvo wagon looked like. See below for a comparison. And in retrospect, how did I not adorn mine with a tail light made from a traffic cone (or is it giant candy corn?) and “VOOFO NACK”? 😅

Not yet having access to this system [taps mic impatiently], I’m just checking out its simple but effective interface from afar. Here’s how artists can designate specific regions in order to repopulate them:

[Via Cameron Smith]

I really enjoyed this conversation—touching, as it does, on my latest fascination (AI-generated art via DALL•E) and myriad other topics. In fact, I plan to listen to it again—hopefully this time near a surface through which to jot down & share some of the most resonant observations. Meanwhile, I think you’ll find it thoughtful & stimulating.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Schmidt about the ways artificial intelligence is shifting the foundations of human knowledge and posing questions of existential risk.

I really enjoyed this highly accessible overview from one of the creators of this game-changing engine, Aditya Ramesh: