Warning: Lots of images below!
Earlier this week, I was finally invited to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 public beta! And I’m completely in love with it. Below are some of my favorite pieces I’ve generated with it by giving it simple text prompts.
First, a few details about the app: Generating these pictures is a computationally intensive process, so they limit how many pictures you can generate. This is done with credits. Upon receiving an invite, they give you 50 free credits to start with. Each credit allows you to send one text prompt, and you get four variations in return. Each month they give you 15 more free credits. However, you can buy credits as well. Currently that price is $15 for 115 credits, which comes to a little over $0.13 per prompt, which really doesn’t sound bad, but it adds up quickly when you get addicted! Still, personally I think it’s totally worth it. Just wish I had more money to spend on it!
Sometimes you get really awesome results, sometimes you get weird abstract nonsense that’s nothing like what you had in mind. So you have to get a feel for what sort of prompts might give you something interesting, and what sort of prompts it won’t understand.
So here’s a little gallery of some of the stuff I’ve created so far. I’ve already spent $30 and it’s only my first week with access, so I will have to restrain myself now. (I still have around 85 credits left.)
Finally, it generates images at a resolution of 1024×1024. I’ve resized the images below in an effort to conserve screen space and bandwidth.
Dolphin eating a cheeseburger
This is similar to a prompt I tried on another AI image generator last year, so I was curious to see how DALL-E would do with the prompt. Much better!
Libraries
My favorite “style” of DALL-E’s output tends to be “oil painting”.
Steampunk owls
Animals wearing headphones
DALL-E tends to draw animals much better than humans, I suppose because they can be a bit more abstract and less structured than a human’s face. (Although note it doesn’t understand that headphones should go on mammals’ ears rather than the sides of their heads, haha.)
Some abstract art
The prompt here was something like “A painting of a giant eye ball sitting in a chair by the fire.”
Portrait of Mozart as various animals
Owls reading books
Painting of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam in the style of Van Gogh
Castles on cliffsides
Starry skies above castles
Flowers growing out of skulls
Money and treasure!
Pirate treasure maps
Skulls on fire
Weaknesses
The above are all cherry-picked examples of some of my favorite outputs so far; some results come out a lot less interesting. DALL-E is particularly not very good with images that require specific structural detail, such as human faces, or pianos, or even dragons. It excels at looser, less-structured forms, such as flowers, trees, and clouds. Below are some examples of output that I was less pleased with, showing some of its weaknesses.
Conclusion
Overall, despite its weaknesses, I’m still completely blown away by the quality of DALL-E’s output. I can’t wait to put some of the images I’ve generated to use as album covers or something! I love it!