OpenAI’s new DALL.E model turns your words into pieces of art

OpenAI, the AI research startup, has announced (opens in new tab) DALL·E 2, an update to its text-to-image generator that looks like a serious step forward. 

In essence, DALL·E 2 can create art from a natural language input, such as: “a painting of a fox sitting in a field at sunrise in the style of Claude Monet”. OpenAI says the goal is to create “original, realistic images and art” that can “combine concepts, attributes, and styles”.

It's a seriously impressive feat for a company that has been plugging away at various AI initiatives, including GPT-3 (opens in new tab), which can generate pretty remarkable prose.

OpenAI's accompanying research paper goes into a lot more detail on how DALL·E 2 works. Using the CLIP contrastive models, DALL·E 2 runs in two stages: the first creates a CLIP image embed with a text caption and the second generates an image based on that.