Is OpenAI’s DALL·E an existential threat to illustrators and photographers?

OpenAI announced this week that they have trained an AI to take simple one-line briefs and generate corresponding illustrations and photo- realistic images. The results are stunning. But what are the implications for the creative industries and the creative people who work in it? <h1>FIRST OF ALL, WHAT IS DALL·E AND WHAT CAN IT DO?</h1> <a href="https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">DALL·E</a> is based on a previous OpenAI work around image completion. That system, called <a href="https://openai.com/blog/image-gpt/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Image GPT</a>, could take part of an image and generate the rest of it, pretty plausibly. Which is fine, but falls into the parlour-trick end of AI. Impressive but ultimately pretty useless. After all, how many times have you only had part of an image and thought, ‘if only I could make up the rest of this image’? DALL·E takes this one big step further. Built on top of OpenAI’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">GPT-3 </a>language model, which can produces text that mimics human- generated language, DALL-E can not only create imagery, it can take a simple written brief. OpenAI describe it as “creating anthropomorphised versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images”. But really, you need to see it to get it and here are a few I pulled out to give you a flavour. There are hundreds more to play with on the <a href="https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">OpenAI website</a>. Prompt: a professional high-quality illustration of a flamingo turtle chimera. A flamingo imitating a turtle. A flamingo made of turtle. <a href="https://matthewkershaw.medium.com/is-openais-dall-e-an-existential-threat-to-illustrators-and-photographers-8eeae4da5c3f">Website</a>