Dal-E 2 and Kids

“Two unicorns on a roofgaRDEN having tea”

Number one granddaughter came to see us today. We were talking about stuff and playing games, as you do. And then I thought it might be fun to show her Dall-E 2. This is a lump of cloud-based AI that will take text from you and make a matching picture. We decided we wanted to see two unicorns on a rooftop garden having tea. Above you can see one of the results.

Then we tried some more phrases and we found that some worked, and some didn’t. All the time I was wondering whether showing this stuff to a five-year-old was the right thing to do. Would she now give up drawing and work on the basis that she can just ask for pictures to be drawn when she wants one? I really hope not. And actually, I don’t think she will.

The program is very clever but pretty soon we started to find that it tended to head off for the one thing it knew about, which was not always what we wanted. Tools like these are going to find their way into our lives whether we want them or not and knowing what they are and how they are limited is really important.