Is AI Art a ‘Toy’ or a ‘Weapon’?

Earlier this year, the technology company OpenAI released a program called DALL-E 2, which uses artificial intelligence to transform text into visual art. People enter prompts (“plasticine nerd working on a 1980s computer”) and the software returns images that showcase humanlike vision and execution, veer into the bizarre, and might even tease creativity. The results were good enough for Cosmopolitan, which published the first-ever AI-generated magazine cover in June—an image of an astronaut swaggering over the surface of Mars—and they were good enough for the Colorado State Fair, which awarded an AI artwork first place in a fine-art competition.

OpenAI gave more and more people access to its program, and those who remained locked out turned to alternatives like Craiyon and Midjourney. Soon, AI artwork seemed to be everywhere, on hundreds of millions of image-text pairs, these programs’ technical details are to the general public—more black boxes in a tech ecosystem that’s full of them. Some worry they might threaten the livelihoods of , provide new and relatively easy ways to generate propaganda and , and perpetuate .