Dall-E is now free to use

The Dall-E program is both amazing and scary in equal measure. You give it a text description of a scene “an oil painting of a man using a phone made of cheese” and it makes four versions of a picture like that. See above for one of them.

I have an idea of how it works. Dall-E takes images from the internet along with their text descriptions and puts them into some kind of structure. It then learns enough about the English language to figure out how things can be combined and is then able to parse an English description of a scene in order to….Actually, I’ve not much of an idea how it works. But it does work. And it poses lots of ethical dilemmas.

Who owns the artwork it makes? Does Dall-E respect the copyright of the images that it uses to make the artwork? Does Dall-E reflect the bias in the descriptions of the artwork it imports? What does this say about the role of artists in the creation of artwork? Tricky stuff indeed.

But, from the point of view of a toy to play with, Dall-E is great fun. And you can now use it for free. If you sign up you are able to make a limited number of images, with a few more each month - or you can buy credit for the platform. Just don’t use it to do your art homework.