Mar 14, 2023 2 min read

First encounter with DALL*E

Cezzane painting of a village in rural nepal with mount everest in the background (NB: I didn't bother about caps and lower case)

IT WAS a few days before Chinese New Year. My son had come up from Singapore with his family for the reunion and celebration. During one of our conversations he asked me if I had used ChatGPT and DALL*E. I said no and he suggested that I did. Alone or together with the grandchildren, the artificial intelligence (AI) service produced the following using the phrase or sentence I posted on it (they are reproduced as captions):

Picasso cubist painting of a man climbing a coconut tree

a floating island with a umbrella attached to the island with a beach chair and a tiny house behind realistic

digital art with red giant ant and green elephant in a concrete jungle in the style of dali

greeting card with a red rabbit in a red garden van gogh

My comments:

(1) These are highly-sophisticated cut-and-paste jobs from known sources. They surpass the standard that is expected of most publications so the job of illustrators, junior and senior, is at great risk. Indeed a creative-director friend of mine suggests that online editors today need not have a production team anymore.

(2) Artists in the purely digital and digital-analog spaces may need to document the process by which they arrive at their final artwork so as to allow their work to be “audited” for authenticity. Indeed technology itself may help in the process by making sure each time we illustrate and scan, edit, print a piece, etc, it is recorded somewhere, like the way we keep track of copy editing and layout in print production.

Lim Siang Jin

Malaysia