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.
The imagination is valuable, and we must clear space to let it live and thrive.
As children, our creativity is boundless. We have a few things that fuel it: energy, curiosity, and a passion for the make-believe. When I was a kid, I filmed my stuffed animals in hyper-human situations. I pretended to ride horses with my friends around the playground. I looked out over the slide to watch giant sea beasts. I pretended I lived in the 18th century, speaking in a foreign tongue. I drew cartoons of talking amoebas. None of it was real, and I loved it.
Instead of your ability to imagine, it becomes your ability to predict that starts to count. Instead of the fantasy of your stories, it's how good of a liar you can be that's more important. The adult world is less about color and more about stroke. Creativity is judged by one's ability to find new ways to trick people into doing what you want them to do.
In the adult world, creativity metamorphoses into something more profit-driven.
Young kids do not necessarily have to be stimulated by a "muse" to produce something creative. But as we age, we're less inclined to have these spontaneous thoughts. They're considered unproductive or silly. But daydreaming performs an essential function: that of stimulating different parts of our brain that need some serious dusting off.
How do we get back to that precious state of creativity? We need to free ourselves from repetitive and mundane tasks. Opening our eyes to the beautiful things around us instead of just seeing what we expect to see: the same street signs, the same faces.
We also need to perform a more difficult task. According to Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan, who is the culinary artist behind South Korean temple food, creativity and the ego cannot exist side by side. If one is to grow creatively, one has to let go of the ego. Now, everyone has ego, but having too much of it limits our ability to move forward because we are always keeping judgment at the forefront of our minds. When we stop thinking about what others think of us, we can access a new level of freedom from within, the freedom to be creative again.
But what does letting go of your ego mean? For a lot of us, this means tempering ourselves on social media, or not allowing ourselves to feel superior or inferior to anyone. We must go into situations knowing that people will be people, and we have to let them do their thing so that we can do ours. We fill our brain space with too much minutiae so we don't have any room left for our imagination. The imagination is valuable, and we must clear space to let it live.
