Generating art using AI

Earlier this year, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, the latest version of their AI tool that can generate images by simply providing text input.

For example, “people in togas taking a selfie in front of a volcano”, and it will get to work attempting to create an image that includes all these elements.

The Verge has an interesting article with more details. You can see an example of what is possible on the DALL-E 2 subreddit. It’s honestly insane.

For now (sadly), the service is invite only.

More recently, an ambitious engineer named Boris Dayma created an open source version of the service called DALL-E mini. While it isn’t able to generate results as impressive as DALL-E 2, it’s still pretty crazy!

It’s recently taken the internet by storm and you can see people post DALLE-mini generated images and memes everywhere. The official website has been under heavy load, so it’s been pretty tough to try out the service.

Fortunately, you can download the model from Github and get the service setup on your local machine (providing you have a graphics card beefy enough to run the models).

Who has two thumbs and a graphics card just begging to be used? Hello.

I was able to get the service setup on my machine and start playing around with it.

In this example, I used a prompt to essentially create a Bob Ross painting generator. “Alpine forest with river running through the middle, snow capped peaks in the background, Bob Ross style painting.”

Dalle mini forest

Pretty neat! The images that services like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can create are miles better and I’ve applied to both services.

While I anxiously await my acceptance, I’ll have to continue generating various memes on my own machine.

Monkeys