I’m on the waiting list for the real deal, but in the meantime, I’m still playing around with DALL·E Mini; the free-for-all (literally) adaptation of the powerful AI tool, DALL·E 2.
Type in a prompt, and tap the ‘Run’ button. After a minute or so, DALL·E Mini will manifest whatever your little heart desires. Want to see Gandalf reading a newspaper? How about Teletubbies caught on a trail cam? Or a robot uprising? DALL·E Mini does it all.
It’s all very funny and goofy (and, wow, do we need that right now) but DALL·E and its relations are so good at what they do, they’re making waves in the art world (DALL·E was the subject of a recent profile in The Guardian).
Last week, Brandon Taylor shared his results on Twitter, proving the app can conjure much more than memes and mashups. As fan fiction did for earlier generations of The Extremely Online, DALL·E can give form to our most-cherished Alternate Universes.
For all its powers, some of DALL·E’s results read like an approximation—a whisper of a fragment of a suggestion. Others materialize with unnerving specificity.
Take, for instance, these images in the style of Mark Rothko. Here, DALL·E Mini said, “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
I love Rothko, but these don’t move me.
In a culture obsessed with replication, an iterative impulse lies at the heart of our memes, TikTok challenges, throwbacks, and reboots. But, as it turns out, making something artful—delightful, even—requires more than straight reproduction.
Which brings me to another of my favourite painters, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Now revered as a visionary, Turner endured significant criticism within his own lifetime. Some joked about his eyesight, while others went further, questioning the artist’s sanity.
In 1840, Carlo Pepoli, a professor at University College London, described Turner’s work as “horrid, detestable absurdities”. An artist must be endowed with a sense of poetry, wrote Pepoli, as well as “mental vigor”. (Haha, tell that to, like, every artist, ever.)
Pepoli held nothing back, dismissing Turner’s work as deficient in design, form, and “truth of colouring”. It was, he wrote, “a chaos!”.
Unlike its waitlisted namesake, DALL·E Mini churns out low-resolution imagery. Small, pixely pictures that feel like they’ll ruin your eyesight if you’re not careful. This is by design; both to keep the app cheap and cheerful, and to stop unscrupulous users from generating deepfakes.
This is why we can’t have nice things, but in this case, these limitations work with the subject matter. It’s Victorian Glitch Art—at least, that’s what I tell myself as I type yet another prompt and hit ‘Run’.
Here, DALL·E has digested Turner’s hallmarks into a supernatural mélange of sun, sea, and sky. There’s a hint of Tatooine in this rendering, at left, with the twin suns, and an elliptical moon thrown in for good measure. In the foreground, a cluster of indistinct figures rise from the sandy beach, mimicking the real deal, above right.
DALL·E Mini evokes Turner’s sense of movement, too; that wobbly vortex found at the heart of his stormiest works. But is that an artifact or a feature? So many of DALL·E Mini’s renderings dissolve into an indistinct whorl, especially when the app is asked to depict a human face (again, that is by design).
In 1840, the critic Pepoli took great pains to describe just how much he hated Turner’s use of colour and form. “Never did there exist…such monstrous creations, or rather caricatures, with such false, stupid, capricious patches of colour thrown on apparently at hap-hazard,” he wrote, moodily.
So, what would Pepoli have made of these sun-washed groves?
Or these powder-coated views of the Thames?
Or… these?
Never did there exist such monstrous creations, or rather caricatures, with such false, stupid, capricious patches of colour thrown on apparently at hap-hazard.
And we can’t get enough.
"My five-year-old could paint that."
I love this mixup of two abstracts, AI may destroy us someday but for now we can look in wonder!