Over the last few months, an AI-generated art scene has exploded as hackers have been modifying an OpenAI model to make astonishing image generation t

AI Generated Art Scene Explodes as Hackers Create Groundbreaking New Tools

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2021-07-12 01:00:08

Over the last few months, an AI-generated art scene has exploded as hackers have been modifying an OpenAI model to make astonishing image generation tools.

All you have to do to guide these systems is to prompt them with the image you want. For example, you might prompt them with the text: ‘a fantasy world.’ With that prompt, the author of this article generated the image that you see above.

The crisp, coherent, and high-resolution quality of the images that these tools create differentiate them from AI art tools that have come before. The tools are highly iterative—in the video below, you can see the generation of an image based on the words “a man being tortured to death by a demon.”

The primary engine inside the new tools is a state of the art image classifying AI called CLIP. It was announced in January 2021 by the company OpenAI, renowned for the invention of GPT-3, which was itself announced only in May 2020. GPT-3 can generate text of a truly general, human-like nature, just by feeding it a simple prompt.

While the new CLIP-based systems are reminiscent of GPT-3 in their “promptability,” their inner workings are much different. CLIP was designed to be a narrow-scoped tool, albeit an extremely powerful one. It is a general purpose image classifier that can decide how well an image corresponds with a prompt, for example, matching an image of an apple with the word ‘apple.’ But that is all. “It wasn't obvious that it could be used for generating art,” University of California, Berkeley computer science student Charlie Snell, who has been following the new scene, said in an interview.