Engines of Wow

Generative AI can now make better art than most humans.Soon it will transform how we design just about everything.

- By Kevin Kelly

Picture Lee Unkrich, one of Pixar's most distinguished animators, as a seventh grader. He's staring at an image of a train locomotive on the screen of his school's first computer. Wow, he thinks. Some of the magic wears off, however, when Lee learns that the image had not appeared simply by asking for "a picture of a train." Instead, it had to be painstakingly coded and rendered-by hard-working humans.

Now picture Lee 43 years later, stumbling onto DALL-E, an artificial intelligence that generates original works of art based on human-supplied prompts that can literally be as simple as "a picture of a train." As he types in words to create image after image, the wow is back. Only this time, it doesn't go away. "It feels like a miracle," he says. "When the results appeared, my breath was taken away and tears welled in my eyes. It's that magical."

Our machines have crossed a threshold. All our lives, we have been reassured that computers were incapable of being truly creative. Yet, suddenly, millions of people are now using a new breed of AIs to generate stunning, never-before-seen pictures. Unlike Lee Unkrich, most of these users are not professional artists, and that's the point: They do not have to be. Not everyone can write, direct, and edit an Oscar winner like Toy Story 3 or Coco, but everyone can launch an Al image generator and type in an idea. What appears on the screen is astounding in its realism and depth of detail. Thus the universal response: Wow. On four services alone-Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, and DALL-E-humans working with AIs now cocreate more than 20 million images every day. With a paintbrush in hand, artificial intelligence has become an engine of wow.