AI : Is it Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Imagination?

Artificial Intelligence is Everywhere. In our smartphones, e-commerce sites, entertainment apps, e-learning, recommender systems, maps... Literally everywhere. 

Imagination and the art associated with it are also now within the boundary of AI. Should we call it Artificial Imagination? Though image construction with algorithms has a proven track record, the recent wave of tools to create artistic images has captured the attention. 

With AI-assisted Art winning the first prize in a competition, there is a debate on the role of algorithms in Art. Navigate to this article for more information. (Image is sourced from the linked article page). 

There are various tools available for processing and styling images. The following two tools seem to be capturing lots of attention in recent days:

• MidJourney
• DALL.E

Midjourney

Midjourney has a powerful state-of-art algorithm to convert the textual descriptions into beautiful artistic images. You can try a demo with their bot at Discard. Midjourney has a Freemium model. You can create stunning images with their bot using the imagine command. 

Here are a few of the images that I experimented with Midjourney. 

The text I entered for this: South-Indian Temple with Huge Towers on a free-flowing river bank on a Full Moon day. 

For this image, I gave the following text: Tajmahal in Ravi Varma style.

Text: The Himalayas with Golden Light

Text: Last man on Earth standing on a beach watching the sunrise.

Text: A beautiful garden with 1000 varieties of flowers

DALL.E

DALL.E is built by OpenAI. It has got the ability to build images from natural language descriptions. April this year DALL-E was updated to include enhanced abilities. It can now process concepts, attributes, and styles. 

Here is a sample from DALL-E Mini. 

You can have fun with DALL.E mini at Craiyon . 

Text: An ancient Indian painting of a king working on a laptop !!!

Art is generally considered to be a unique feature of the human species. Now there is a competition. An inorganic competitor in the form of Algorithms. Slowly but steadily AI is tightening its grip in almost every field. The next few years are going to be very interesting as we are on the verge of major breakthroughs in AI. 

Intelligence without Imagination is mechanical. Algorithms are breaking this mechanical shield to enter into the world of imagination. Let's have fun.