Dall-E Mini, the AI-powered text-to-image generator has taken over the internet. With its ability to render nearly anything your meme-loving heart desires, anyone can make their dreams come true.
DALL-E 2, a portmanteau of Salvador Dali, the surrealist and Wall-E, the Pixar robot, was created by OpenAI and is not widely available; it creates far cleaner imagery and was recently used to launch Cosmpolitan’s first AI-generated cover. The art world has been one of the first industries to truly embrace AI.
The open-sourced miniature version is what’s responsible for the memes. Programmer Boris Dayma wants to make AI more accessible; he built the Dall-E Mini program as part of a competition held by Google and an AI community called Hugging Face.
And with great technology, comes great memes. Typing a short phrase into Dall-E Mini will manifest 9 different amalgamations, theoretically shaping into reality the strange images you’ve conjured. Its popularity leads to too much traffic, often resulting in an error that can be fixed by refreshing the page or trying again later.
If you want to be a part of the creation of AI-powered engines, it all starts with code. CodeAcademy explains that Dall-E Mini is a seq2seq model, “typically used in natural language processing (NLP) for things like translation and conversational modeling.” CodeAcademy’s Text Generation course will teach you how to utilize seq2seq, but they also offer opportunities to learn 14+ coding languages at your own pace.
You can choose the Machine Learning Specialist career path if you want to become a Data Scientist who develops these types of programs, but you can also choose courses by language, subject (what is cybersecurity?) or even skill - build a website with HTML, CSS, and more.
CodeAcademy offers many classes for free as well as a free trial; it’s an invaluable resource for giving people of all experience levels the fundamentals they need to build the world they want to see.
As for Dall-E Mini, while some have opted to create beauty, most have opted for memes. Here are some of the internet’s favorites:
pic.twitter.com/DbLoe1s00c
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 8, 2022
pic.twitter.com/cxtliOrlHz
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 12, 2022
no fuck every other dall-e image ive made this one is the best yet pic.twitter.com/iuFNm4UTUM
— bri (@takoyamas) June 10, 2022
pic.twitter.com/rEBHoWR7lH
— Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) June 12, 2022
pic.twitter.com/RSZaCIDVV7
— Chairman George (@superbunnyhop) June 9, 2022
back at it again at the DALL•E mini pic.twitter.com/iPGsaMThBC
— beca. ⚢ (@dorysief) June 9, 2022
There’s no looking back now, not once you’ve seen Pugachu; artificial intelligence is here to stay.
In Their Time - A Book We Love
Poems can help us muck our way through this COVIDIUM twilight zone
Full disclosure: As a general rule I hate poetry for reasons I tell myself are valid.
Why? Most of it seems solipsistic and fortune cookie filler. Haiku goofballs. Impossible to discern the good from the bad. Poets are no longer widely read, even the 'greats' (Yeats, Plath, Whitman, Angelou.)
There's no market for their words, and those words typically don't have a narrative that clicks with the literal-minded sockets of my imagination. That said, once in a long whiie, I come across a seamróg, a work by a poet that feels like light in a tunnel, a portal of reckoning. Then I realize that this craft of poetry should never die, never drown under the rising tide of our gnatish attention spans and cultural decay.
Well, I recently found one such shamrock:In Their Time, by Bill Buege. This isn't the first book by this poet but I consider it his best. Although Buege hasn't made his living as a poet - is that even possible anymore? - he is a modern-day Renaissance man, a scholar, a poet, an artist, an inventor, and an accomplished businessman.
During a stint in his career when he worked at Edward Jones Investments, he fused his art and science and invented, out of whole cloth, an algorithmic model that is, to this day, the underpinning of wealth management firms worldwide.
Buege, who turns 80 in November, is a shamrock himself. His life is one fully lived, but he's not done yet. He creates an innovative framework in this book: 52 speakers, half male, half female, looking back on pre-industrial Europe, season by season. His wayback machine on these characters creates narrative force and truth that shows that we still need poets to tell us what actually counts.
Bill Buege's poetry collection - In Their Time
In Their Time contains characters who could be you or me, mucking our way through this COVIDIUM twilight zone. In poem 45, Norman keeps a sloth bear in a pit. In another, Paulette loses her husband but gains a tavern and a horse.
In poem 21, Hildy survives the pox:
"The doctor diagnosed I'd got the pox / and then the brilliant man administered / his tincture of mercury / gave me some patches and white powder / advised I make love in the dark."
There's humanity in these pages, sex and greed, suffering and beauty, and survival.
In Their Time is a book we need right now.
You can buy the collection here.
W.M. Jones is a professional musician and a social commentator who loves words that shed light on the zeitgeist.