DALL-E 2 - New Wave of Futuristic Art?
If you’ve been following me or the LLM/multimodal community on Twitter, you’ve probably heard the big news last week that OpenAI has announced their release of DALL-E 2.
I’m sure as a substack subscriber, by now, you’re aware I also made a whole YouTube series talking about what multimodal technologies like DALL-E could mean for the future of creativity.
However, one smaller thing I’m really excited about is the tech community actually more actively participating in art itself, I tweeted last summer that:
I’ve always felt that, for too long, mainstream art, pop culture, and blockbusters have become too pessimistic and dystopian about the future:
There are many reasons behind this. Perhaps, there is some deeper truth behind the perils of the tech industry and humanity’s fear of it, reflecting in our art and zeitgeist. Maybe part of it is we just find dystopian movies more entertaining as story lines. But also, some reasons are highly practical. I’ve heard from a filmmaker directly that he chose to make a dystopian movie simply because he felt the production costs were lower to portray one over a utopian movie. So, there are reasons outside of the tech industry itself for this.
It’s not to say that all technologists are optimistic about the future, but I actually think some significant representation of technologists in the artistic sphere could provide new takes to the kinds of art and media we consume now. Without much of a skills based learning curve, models like DALL-E 2 will allow technologists to simply enter text descriptions for futuristic cityscapes, concept products, reimagine existing services, and express themselves better. Perhaps, this could snowball and inspire other people to get involved and build more ambitious things in the world. I also think it could add some much needed hope and positivity to the world.
Totally agree! We need more positive stories of how tech may really help humanity, to counter-balance the evil robot movies heh (Terminator, Matrix, etc). Love this idea. I actually found "Her" to be kinda sweet but even that one can be sad and scary. I guess even The Matrix shows some pretty cool AR/VR type experiences, "gaming" with friends - like the martial arts training scene.
I think Asimov's "The Foundation" series and even some aspects of "Dune" are really appealing, like inter-stellar space travel and cures for diseases... and of course flying cars! :) I'd love to see some fan takes on short films for The Foundation, or future Dune since there are like 100 more stories in each series (though hopefully Villeneuve makes like 5 more films). The rights-holders should issue fan NFTs to give them film snippets and character rigs, let us make stuff in Unreal Engine 5.
Would love to see a tale of "The Metaverse" gone right, with a new worldwide community forming in infinite 3D settings like The Holodeck on Star Trek (or even the "Danger Room" in X-Men).