I was recently using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to test what it would provide if I was looking for examples of a Martian colony. I put in the following request: “Realist painting, surface of Mars, rocket and habitat in the foreground, ultra detailed.”
One of the images, shown above, clearly shows the rocket yet the habitat may be the ruins next to it. If so, this is an interesting perspective on the human endeavor. Maybe I should just assume the rocket is the habitat. Another image from DALL- E 2, shown as the next image below, is a little better with a spacecraft in the background and apparently a habitat in the foreground. Not necessarily inspirational, yet funtional.
After this I decided to see what Microsoft’s Image Creator (DALL-E 3) would produce. This was the opposite of the grainy, somewhat dismal images from the earlier version. As shown below, the updated program provided me with a colorful, sleek image that seemed more fantastical than real. Is that a Ferris wheel on the right of the structure? And since when did Mars have at least five moon orbiting it? At least the surface is reddish, but what is this craziness?
Microsoft has certainly upgraded the imagery, but what does it represent? Is it pure science fiction with little regard for the location being named. I would rather kids using AI software see the DALL-E 2 images as a starting point rather than the Microsoft Image Creator images representing nothing slightly realistic on a planet that cannot be Mars.
Maybe this is the hallucination problem cited with ChatGPT. I had not heard that the problem spread to AI imagery, but it makes sense. I will need to keep this in mind as I play with these new programs.
Our Awesome Universe 