There Is No Such Thing as A.I. Art

Before I discuss my own judgments of DALL-E—the name, by the way, is a portmanteau of the Pixar film WALL-E and the artist Salvador Dalí—it’s important to review how it works. DALL-E relies on computerized brute strength. In this case, it amasses tons of images—hundreds of millions, my research revealed—and extracts certain patterns from the vast sample, which it generalizes into rules and formulas. For example, DALL-E has learned what sort of pictures tend to be thought of as cute by human beings.