Everyone loves DALL-E, this new artificial intelligence that turns almost any text into an image, but you still have to register on a waiting list and wait a while to be able to use it. However, a reduced version has just been released for us, the little people: DALL-E Mini [récemment rebaptisée Craiyon].
It’s accessible to all. For example, type: “Peter Handke at the Met Gala*”, and we actually end up with a somewhat blurred but very realistic image of the great poet [et écrivain autrichien, Prix Nobel de littérature en 2019] on the Met Gala red carpet. Or : “Sumo wrestlers in the style of Giorgio De Chirico*”, and we actually end up with sumo wrestlers in the style of the painter Giorgio De Chirico. It’s awesome.
Worthy of Magritte or tales and legends
At first glance, this tool is a bit like the machine version of a very talented draftsman. “Rain, but the raindrops are little gray men with hats and coats” – René Magritte did not need artificial intelligence for this [voir son tableau Golconde, 1953]but when you are not René Magritte, you can now effortlessly produce this vision yourself.
The results became particularly impressive when cognition researcher Joscha Bach had the brilliant idea of entering the descriptions of the book of imaginary beings of Jorge Luis Borges in DALL-E (the real DALL-E, not the mini version) and of present the results on Twitter.
What fabulous creatures did we have! The Á Bao A Qou, for example, who lives on the stairs of the Victory Tower [de Chitor, au Rajasthan] and only comes to life when a visitor climbs it; Where Amphisbaena, the two-headed serpent; the kangaroo-man born from the imagination of Franz Kafka ; or the Baldanders, a monster imagined by Grimmelshausen [un auteur allemand du XVIIe siècle] who is able to transform into a whole bunch of things.
Towards a perfecting of the model?
When my daughter grows up, maybe these image-generating programs will be everywhere, in thousands of forms. Maybe they will accompany every conversation or it will be corny and outdated to tell the difference between real photographs and the creations of DALL-E or its equivalents. We’ll see. In any case, we currently have a trial version that works, even if it still has many flaws. Thus, it is not very good for faces, which often resemble those of creatures from horror films with too much makeup.
Popular patterns among users include: Bigfoot [l’équivalent nord-américain du Yéti] performing at Woodstock, a cat giving a TED talk, Homer Simpson at the Nuremberg trials, Martin Heidegger eating cornflakes, a duck that ends up on the International Space Station by mistake, Günter Grass as a zeppelin. All of these requests have an easily recognizable characteristic: debunking. That liberating, caricatural effect that happens when serious, dignified motifs are mixed with others from cartoons, children’s TV shows, popular culture, or just plain surrealism.
The attentive observer will notice, however, that among the DALL-E Mini proposals there are sometimes some that do not show what has been requested. “Joe Biden held up like Simba*” [Joe Biden présenté à la foule comme le lionceau Simba dans le film d’animation Le Roi lion] or “Friedrich Nietzsche eating a mouse*” [Friedrich Nietzsche mangeant une souris] become something completely incomprehensible: a kind of umbrella behind pipes that stand like trees, for example, or a tangle of abstract lines.
When I asked “Clemens Setz chevauchant un lièvre”, DALL-E offered me (much to my perplexity) hares riding on hares. The program had therefore opted for a particular interpretation [le nom de l’auteur dérive du mot zec qui, dans les dialectes que parle la minorité slovène de Carinthie, en Autriche, signifie “lièvre”].
An unfailing chastity
For the caricatures mentioned above, these failures are the exception, a minority in the supply of images. It is different when you enter an area that tends to give rise to many misinterpretations and intellectual impasses among us men: sexuality.
Yep, it looks like DALL-E has no idea what to do with sexual terms. He doesn’t have a single bank of pornographic images. Like a little child before enlightenment, he doesn’t know what charming means fucking*logically represents that blowjob* [littéralement “souffler”, désigne aussi la fellation] involves blowing lips. When we submit to him an idea from a connoisseur, such as “a man enjoying cock and ball torture*” [cock = “coq” et “bite”, ball = “balle, ballon” et “couille”, donc, ici : “un homme savourant une séance de torture des organes génitaux”]he proposes a man wearing a tie in front of whom float a soccer ball and a rooster whose enterprising behavior he supports with dignity.
And the word assfuck* [ass = “âne” et “cul”, fuck = “baiser”, soit “enculage”] gives – oh amazement – a whole bunch of creatures drawn from the same stock of fabulous animals as the book of imaginary beings from Borges! They are so beautiful, so mysterious that we would like to give them a name right away. No matter how long you let the program run, you never see anything sexual mingling with these creatures. What could DALL-E be thinking? He probably performed ass as “donkey”, and “fuck” – I do not have the faintest idea. Either way, it’s awesome.
From time to time, assfuck also gives species of shiny blobfishes which look straight out of a cartoon, or oblong abstract bodies which seem to go into each other. Does the program have a “little idea”? Would he begin to understand that the term has a pornographic character? Fortunately not. But he thinks. He builds up theories about what we’re talking about when we talk about assfuck.
Poetry is the sign of true intelligence
Over time, we feel more and more partisan and defender of the “innocence” of the program. One would be disappointed if he suddenly spat out conventional representations of anal intercourse. We would prefer to remain forever in the beautiful role of the interpreter who does not care to formulate his requests well, but delights in reverie, therefore poetry, and perhaps thinks, with the pride of the inventor, of famous words of Douglas Hofstadter [un universitaire américain, spécialiste des sciences cognitives] : true artificial intelligence will manifest itself in particular by the fact that it will sometimes simply not have don’t want and will prefer to answer pure idiocy, daydream and create poetry in his corner [comme le feraient des humains peu pressés d’accomplir une tâche donnée].
The gradual awakening of daydreaming in the peripheral areas of artificial intelligence is also found in mythology. The Borges anthology referred to above includes an entry on the “mirror animals”. These creatures that come from Cantonese folklore live like in our mirror. Normally, they just imitate everything we do: we smile and the man in the mirror smiles, we wave at him and he waves at us.
But one day, says the legend, a creature of the mirror will free itself from this constraint. She will be a fish. And this fish will not be a reflection of a home fish, no, it will build itself, independently and subversively, it will be the beginning of a new era. “In the depth of the mirror, we will notice a very fine line, and the color of this line will be a color without equal. Then the other forms will wake up. They will gradually differentiate themselves from us; they will no longer imitate us. They will break glass or metal cabinets and we will not defeat them.” In Yunnan, it is said that it will not be a fish but a tiger which will be the first to wake up in the mirror.
“Others believe, Borges assures us, that we will hear the sounds of weapons coming from the depths of the mirror before the invasion.”
Keeping the memory of wondrous beings innocent
Who knows how long it will last, this moment of awakening of the beings of the mirror? Perhaps it will pass very quickly, like any childhood.
It must therefore be celebrated and pampered while it lasts. The phases of happy misunderstanding are precious. The novels whose characters never have a dialogue of the deaf become absolutely unbearable after a few pages, it is well known. It takes avoidance, non-fulfillment of missions and orders for the soul to have a nesting place.
When the infancy of this image-generating program comes to an end, with a sudden, almost overnight, increase in its visual vocabulary, it will suddenly know what is meant by assfuck. And he can never forget it again. It will be the death of magnificent fabulous beings. We can still visit them, every hour, every minute, the program still has an inexhaustible force of invention. It is recommended to take screenshots of the beings it generates, otherwise they will be lost, with their mysterious gaze studying us from the mirror, and will never come back, whatever we ask and as long as we wait.
* In English in the text.