We live through images. Our brain processes images, photographs, drawings better than letters and words. That’s how it’s designed. This is why our digital world is filled daily with new images that appear in Twitter messages, in Facebook posts, we interact on Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube which are pure images.

Again OpenAI, the company I was talking about earlier, is developing an artificial intelligence image generator. That’s right, creating images without human help, entirely by computer.

The program called: Dall-e2, christened by the media as: Dalle-2 (referring to Disney’s Wall-E character) is the development of AI to generate images, to better understand it, let’s analyze some of its functions:

The first is that he can create new images from the description of a text, for example, if we ask him: “Canadian forest” he searches for photographs, paintings that have this motif and he will show us a forest of pines or oyameles. But when we ask: “Canadian forest on Mars” we can combine: forest + the planet Mars. It seems impossible for a human, but Dall-e2 will present us with its own version of this or more images with the combination of the two elements.

Second, its editing feature is impressive. As we see in some of the photography applications on cell phones that add faces, gestures, colors, in the case of Dall-e2 you can add or remove elements from a photograph from shadows, reflections, textures depending on the parameters that allow us to indicate . For example, if we want to reduce the colors or increase a shadow in a non-existent place, the program will do it without any problem, harmoniously modifying the image and the rest without the alteration generating errors.

A third feature is the ability to enlarge images from the original canvas. OpenAI on its site shows an image of a classic painting, a peasant woman and how Dall-e2 augments the shelves around her with pots from the era, enlarging the painting which was just a fragment captured by the artist, but that the AI ​​recreates from its point of view or with the parameters we gave it.

A fourth feature is that you can take an image and create different variations of it based on the original. Do not hesitate to find a Mona Lisa of Asian origin, with light hair and urban origins. Or see a photograph of Gandhi rejuvenated and with western features. Both would be the work of Dall-e2.

The fact that an AI can create images, modify them and recreate classic works of art opens up a field of possibilities and doubts that should be taken into account. This technology available on a trial basis will allow us to modify our relationship to images, to ask ourselves if they are true, false or modified by computer; In itself, this breakthrough in artificial intelligence has us wondering if everything we see online is real. The subject forces several reflections that I must make in a future collaboration.