Dall-E 2 Is Not An Artist
No real artist cannot transgress
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence “research and deployment” company, backed by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman and Khosla Ventures and governed by a non-profit. It seeks to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” One of its projects is Dall-E, which has just advanced to its second iteration. Dall-E is an AI that can take written and visual instructions to create visual images that its creators are calling art. The idea that Dall-E can “outperform humans” at the work of art is deeply provocative and troubling.
Based on what OpenAI has released so far, practiced human artists and even unskilled hobbyists need not worry. While it’s cool that the AI can recognize and execute a request for an astronaut riding a horse, the result is like something you’d see in a mall poster store in the early 1990s:
Dall-E can also imitate artists like Jeff Koons, MC Escher, Gustav Klimt or Andy Warhol, but these are hardly deep fakes. None evoke the emotions of original creations. Also, The Middlebrow reminds, people can imitate famous artists as well, and bring some soul to the practice.
Is this “soul” talk just blather? Well, in a way it is a kind of blather that shows up frequently in Science Fiction, particularly Star Trek, which is set in a future where humanity has developed the technology to rearrange matter to fit any specifications. If you can ask a computer to make you a bottle of 2000 Lafite Rothschild Pauillac and the computer does so with subatomic precision, on what basis can the drinker claim to be able to discern between a perfect replica and “the real thing?” A perfect replica of something is that thing.
But in art, The Scholar Wife has taught me, context always matters. There is a difference between a Warhol silkscreen created at The Factory, while Warhol was alive, in his scene, collaborating with his community, and a silkscreen that just looks like a Warhol. The original facilitates a connection to the human past that transcends the senses and the copy does not. Similarly, the replicated wine would be indistinguishable to the palate and would certainly be equivalent to the original in a blind taste test. But an informed consumer would have a different experience drinking a true bottle than a replicated one. The drinker of the true bottle could forge an emotional connection to the year 2000, to France, to the winemaking culture, to the workers and the soil. The drinker of the replicated wine would connect to a computer on a spaceship, perhaps to its programmers or the developers of the technology that makes such wonders possible. A connection to a French farmhouse differs from a connection to a sleep starship.
It’s interesting that the simulation only passes if the consumer is not informed. Computers can replicate human achievements, but our experiences with the output will be altered unless the origins are concealed.
Another reason that Dall-E cannot be a real artist is that it cannot transgress. Dall-E’s developers, for very good reason, have put constraints on the technology so that online users will not twist its skills for nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, the internet is a place where, no matter what nice thing you put on it, somebody will try to make porn or fascism from it. So Dall-E’s creators have set some sensible rules. In the name of “Preventing Harmful Generations,” the programmers have:
“...limited the ability for DALL·E 2 to generate violent, hate, or adult images. By removing the most explicit content from the training data, we minimized DALL·E 2’s exposure to these concepts. We also used advanced techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of real individuals’ faces, including those of public figures.”
It’s ironic that they chose to name their program after Salvador Dalí, who was not constrained by any rules but his own. He certainly did not avoid adult images, either in his experiences or his work. His willingness to transgress cultural norms is what made Dalí an artist.
Artists have patrons and handlers and a marketplace disciplining them but, in the end, no artist is bound by rules the way Dall-E is. Dall-E’s inability to transgress makes it not an artist. Dall-E is a tool, one that Spencer Gifts might find exciting.