The AI That Draws What You Type Is Very Racist

DALL-E can generate images from a few key words—with predictably racist and sexist results.

To the casual observer, DALL-E is Silicon Valley’s latest miraculous AI creation—a machine learning system that allows anyone to generate almost any image just by typing a short description into a text box. From just a few descriptive words, the system can conjure up an image of cats playing chess, or a teapot that looks like an avocado.

It’s an impressive trick using the latest advances in natural language processing, or NLP, which involves teaching algorithmic systems how to parse and respond to human language—often with creepily realistic results. Named after both surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the lovable Pixar robot WALL-E, DALL-E was created by research lab OpenAI, which is well-known in the field for creating the groundbreaking NLP systems GPT-2 and GPT-3.

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