Mediaboss Marketing

Have you ever wanted to see a polar bear riding a skateboard? What about a hot dog wearing a tracksuit?

Well, if youll settle for AI-generated images of those things or anything else you can dream up then youll appreciate DALLE mini, the free website currently taking over the internet.

It may sound like sci-fi, but the premise is simple: On your phone or computer, go to huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini. Type out any prompt in the text box for example, Dak Prescott holding a banana. Hit the button that says Run (you may need to hit it multiple times before traffic subsides and your request goes through).

Eventually, nine images generated completely by artificial intelligence will appear, bringing your concept to life with varying levels of accuracy and hilarity. In the case of Dak Prescott holding a banana, the results were good for a laugh, but stopped short of realism see below.

The ripe-for-memes program was created by Boris Dayma, a machine learning engineer based in Houston. He made the website available for public use last year, but only in the past two weeks has it taken off in social media popularity, with users sharing images of everything from Darth Vader ice fishing to Karl Marx making an appearance in Seinfeld. A Twitter account that shares some of the weirdest creations has racked up over 600,000 followers.

Dayma was inspired to build the program after reading a research paper about DALLE, a sophisticated text-to-image artificial intelligence program created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company co-founded by Elon Musk. Last summer, as part of a program organized by the AI company Hugging Face, Dayma and a team developed DALLE mini, a scaled-down version that, unlike the original program, is open to the public. (There is currently a waitlist to access the original DALLE).

Being able to create an image that looks like what you wanted, on the technical level, to me, it was very interesting, said Dayma. I want to be able to try it out myself and I want to be able to let other people use it.

The way the DALLE mini program works, Dayma said, is by processing images and captions from across the internet. Slowly, the program begins to discern patterns, such as a visual patch of blue when the caption indicates sky. When a user types in a text prompt, the program, using these associations, will try to put it together to make something that makes sense, Dayma said.

It learns very tiny concepts like that, and over time, it becomes better and better, he said.

Demand for the app, Dayma confirmed, has soared as of late. Many users now complain of getting a pop-up saying, Too much traffic, please try again, when they try to generate images.

We obviously didnt plan for such crazy traffic, so weve been working on improving the code, improving the model, said Dayma. People seem to like it, so they need to be able to use it.

Despite the wait times, Dayma said the public nature of the program is an asset to the technology. Beyond the futuristic entertainment it provides the masses, the program is open source, meaning the code is publicly available, so some people are able to play with the model itself and program and tweak it, he said. Since he is still training the model to produce better images, input from other users proves valuable.

People can learn about the limitations of the model, the biases, what its good at, what it can be used for, he said. Everybody can benefit from having a public model like this.

After improvements are made on the traffic capacity and the model itself, Dayma said, the sky is the limit. You can generate videos, you can generate music, he said. Its a new area thats opening up.

Its an area, however, thats fraught with controversy. Experts have raised concerns that artificial intelligence technology will perpetuate biases or promote disinformation. But with DALLE mini, Dayma said, the quality is just not there for most people to be fooled by the images at least for now. By bringing AI out of the ivory towers of Silicon Valley and into the hands of anybody with a smartphone, Dayma said, he is hoping not only to amuse, but also to sound the alarm.

At least people can learn that that type of thing is coming, and now you need to be aware with the content that you see online, he said. I hope it helps people develop their critical thinking.

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