IN BRIEF AI text-to-image generation models are all the rage right now. You give them a simple description of a scene, such as « a vulture typing on a laptop, » and they come up with an illustration that resembles that description.
That’s the theory, anyway. But developers who have special access to OpenAI’s text-to-image engine DALL·E 2 have found all sorts of weird behaviors – including what may be a hidden, made-up language.
Giannis Daras, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin shared artwork produced by DALL·E 2 given the input: « Apoploe vesrreaitais eating Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons » – a phrase that makes no sense to humans. But to the machine, it seemed to generate images of birds eating bugs consistently. Daras made the following claim: