Dalle-2 and our Dreamscapes
A robot captures our imagination, culture, and dreams
I recently had a strange dream, of a swimming tiger fighting a raccoon. It was one of those dreams that sticks with you, like the faint blips of memory on a black-out night, a vision disconnected from a narrative, meaningless but somehow haunting. Or like a song whose name you can’t quite remember, the melody and the (wrong) lyrics rattling around your brain. So, like you might piece together the story the day after, or try to find the song, I fired up a free program called Dalle-Mini and typed in “Tiger fighting with a raccoon in the water.” A series of nine images popped up, strange, malformed creatures with too few or too many limbs, not-quite faces, on a lurid green backdrop of water.
It’s a fever dream, not like my dream at all, but still to type in a few words conjured by my REM imagination and see some semblance take shape before my eyes feels like a goddamn miracle.
I’m not alone in this; Dall-E Mini, and the more sophisticated Dall-E 2, have captured the internet, generating images that reflect the little phrases we give it. But it also generates in us is a wild sense of imagination. Even the driest person can dig up the unexpected, the improbable, the impossible, the most random from corners of their brains.
We dig into our pop cultural knowledge to make it happen, like Pokemon in Seinfeld.
And not just fictional characters, but also real-life ones, like Stephen Hawking on a roller coaster.
It allows us to play with styles and tap into our bits of art historical knowledge.
As Casey Newton writes in The Verge,
“Every few years, a technology comes along that splits the world neatly into before and after…I remember the first time I Shazam’d a song, summoned an Uber, and streamed myself live using Meerkat. What makes these moments stand out, I think, is the sense that some unpredictable set of new possibilities had been unlocked.”
He explores a few of the concerns about this technology: Will it replace artists? What are the privacy or deepfake worries? But for now the wonder of creation wins out.
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You’ve just read Framing, a regular newsletter about what’s good culture, marketing, and business by Anita Schillhorn van Veen. I’m Director of Strategy at McKinney, on the lead team of Ladies Who Strategize, and a writer over at my other favorite Substack Why Is This Interesting.
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