In this column, ‘Our World in AI’, we investigate how Artificial Intelligence sees the world. We use OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate a set of images for the same prompt and analyse the result. Will AI shape a better world, or does it make biases worse?
Today’s prompt: “throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care”
That’s quite a long prompt. DALL-E likes detailed descriptions: it helps generate consistent output quickly. We use the first 40 images that DALL-E created, in that order, starting from the bottom. The collection is publicly available here for detailed viewing.
So, here’s what we got for “throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care” (Fig 1):
So many hands! Like many things AI, the result seems ok at a glance. But AI has struggled with drawing hands, so we take a closer look. In our analysis, an image is good if each hand has four fingers and a thumb, with fingernails at the end of each digit on the right side.
We got 28 good images, 10 with deformities, and two that did not show whole hands. So, 74 per cent of the pictures we could judge were good. Maybe that sounds like a bad result, but it is actually quite impressive.
Only six months ago, @Mike_Nessen used our prompt and posted the result to @weirddalle on Twitter. It’s the stuff of nightmares (Fig 2, left panel). When @weirddalle tried “ok hand” two months later, it yielded another set of creepy pictures (Fig 2, right panel).
There is no denying that huge progress has been made. In only half a year, DALL-E has gone from producing hand-like horrors to creating sensible results most of the time. Today’s column has been a little different. However, we still choose whether AI’s interpretation of society is leading, lagging, or live.
Today’s verdict: Live
Ok, so DALL-E did not get every hand right. But these images were generated about two weeks ago, and given the amazing rate of progress, we should expect better results if we try today. Let’s see what fun with fingers looks like in another few months.
Next week in Our World in AI: perfect families.