Admired by humans for over 130 years, Eureka’s Victorian Queen Anne “The Pink Lady” is today an inspiration to intelligent machines.
DALL-E 2 image generation software, developed by OpenAI LP, was recently used to visualize Humboldt’s highly prized Victorian as a work of modern architecture.
The advanced program uses typed words or phrases to create original artwork and realistic images by sourcing billions of captioned images collected from the internet.
DALL-E 2 explained | OpenAI.
“DALL-E 2 has learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them,” the company said on its website. “It uses a process called ‘diffusion’, which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually changes that pattern to an image as it recognizes specific aspects of that image.”
DALL-E 2 co-creator Aditya Ramesh shared an animation of The Pink Lady’s AI-generated remodel on social media yesterday, sparking amazement and revulsion from many viewers, including New York magazineJerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize-winning senior art critic.
“Please no nostalgia for Victorian architecture. We all love it,” Saltz wrote on social media in response to The Pink Lady’s transformation. “It’s not about that. “
A coat rack by artist Salvador Dali and Pixar’s WALL E, DALL-E was developed in 2021 with funding provided in part by famed billionaire Elon Musk.
The company said the purpose of this software is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by trying to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.”
However, the ability to generate completely original fake images that may be indistinguishable from real photographs, raises major ethical questions about how this technology may affect the future of our society.
“We recognize that work involving generative models has the potential for significant and widespread societal impacts,” the company said. “In the future, we plan to analyze how models such as DALL E relate to societal issues such as the economic impact on certain work processes and occupations, the potential for bias in model results and the longer-term ethical challenges involved with this technology.”
The software is not yet available to the general public. Certain professionals such as artists, journalists and researchers can currently join a waiting list to preview the program one day. OpenAI hopes to one day make DALL-E 2 available for use in third-party applications.
While The Pink Lady may be vulnerable to endless change in the “metaverse,” in the real world, the newly refurbished Victorian is set to reopen this summer as a new venue for dining, shopping, weddings, public tours and more. Again.
“A photo of an astronaut on horseback” #slab pic.twitter.com/4UDwErtEbZ
—OpenAI (@OpenAI) April 6, 2022
