Wow. I've seen DALL-E's pictures from other topics elsewhere previously, but now I tried it myself for caving. And since we just had the pre-Xmas party of our association in the cave, I gave the AI the task of imagining what it would look like. True to its style, the generated images are mixture of amazing with some very disturbing undertones.
DALL-E is of course the image-generating AI that takes natural language descriptions as input. It is created by OpenAI, and you can read more about it here.
The first task was to imagine "Finnish Caver's Association's Annual Pre-Christmas party in a frozen cave in the woods with mood lights and a dog. Mulled wine was served, along with cookies." See the picture at the top! It is somehow right ... yet disturbingly right because the dog is too human, and the human is reminiscent of my friend Jaakko, who is one of the owners of the actual dog we had in the party. How would the AI know this?
The next question was "A cavers' association Christmas party in a small but warm cave in the frozen Finnish forest". The first picture is kind of nice, well done DALL-E.
But the second one is just wrong somehow .... what is the contraption in the head, a helmet or a hat?? And the thing in front is surely not a lamp? And the human seems definitely wrong somehow, like an alien is about to jump out. Scary.
The final question was about something the AI surely would not know about, and we didn't do this year. But sometimes we have a squeeze box competition. I asked DALL-E to draw pictures of "Squeeze box competition in a caver's party. Box was set to only 16 cm, and it is very difficult for people to squeeze through. They have to empty their lungs to be able to push forward." But I don't think DALL-E really knew what a squeeze box is:
But in this picture it is somehow getting there... 16cm box that people try to squeeze their head through? But again some disturbing imagery:
This was so much of a mixture of fun and worry about our new AI overloads, that I had to give it a bonus task: "Red granite stalactites, wish we had them! But the rock is too hard." Reliably, DALL-E cave us red stalactites and cave bacon, in a style reminiscent of some aliens:
This article has also been published at TGR. Read more urban exploration stories from theurbanexplorer.net, and other underground stories from planetcaver.net. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot or TGR. Photos, videos, models, maps, and text (c) 2022 by Jari Arkko. All rights reserved.
