BY KIM BELLARD

I can’t believe I somehow missed when OpenAI introduced DALL-E in January 2021 – a neural network that could “generate images from text descriptions” — so I’m sure not going to miss now that OpenAI has unveiled DALL-E 2.  As they describe it, “DALL-E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”  The name, by the way, is a playful combination of the animated robot WALL-E  and the idiosyncratic artist Salvator Dali.

This is not your father’s AI.  If you think it’s just about art, think again.  If you think it doesn’t matter for healthcare, well, you’ve been warned.

Here are further descriptions of what OpenAI is claiming:

“DALL·E 2 can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.

DALL·E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption. It can add and remove elements while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into account.

DALL·E 2 can take an image and create different variations of it inspired by the original.”

Here’s their video:

I’ll leave it to others to explain exactly how it does all that, aside from saying it uses a process called diffusion, “which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image.”  The end result is that, relative to DALL-E, DALL-E 2 “generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution.”