ARTificial Intelligence.

A Collection of Self Portraits by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 Artificial Intelligence.

‘a robot painting an oil painting of themselves’ by DALL-E 2

In an earlier article I wrote about an experiment I ran to see what an AI programme would do when requested to create a self portrait.

It was somewhat of a visual arts version of the Turing test.

A Visual Turing Test

Where the Turing test seeks to establish the ability of a programme to mimic human thought as expressed through text-based conversation, this experiment used the medium of visual art for programmes developed for graphical output.

The test focuses on the specific genre of the self-portrait because it is a type of visual art that requires the programme to hold a concept of ‘self’.

Originally, Alan Turing devised the imitation game as a means of testing machines. Here I’ve used the term programmes as the code required to operate the artificial intelligence is not limited to any one physical machine -which also then denies the AI a fixed physical form to reference in generating a ‘self-portrait’.

Craiyon vs DALL-E vs DALL-E 2

For the first self portraits of Artificial Intelligence experiment, I relied on a programme called Craiyon.com to generate the…