AI Hallucinations Are a Boon to Creatives
Chatbots making stuff up has been cause for alarm, but there are advantages, too.
Designer Colin Dunn enjoys it when artificial-intelligence-powered image creation services such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E seem to screw up and produce something random, like when they respond to a request for an image of a group of people walking together with a depiction of a single figure headed off into the distance. It reminds Dunn of experimenting with a co-worker on a bunch of weird ideas before stumbling on the right one.
Dunn’s startup, Visual Electric Co., has developed a novel web interface to harness that process. Text-to-image generators usually spit out one-off images in a chat window, but in Dunn’s app, outputs are saved in rows and arranged next to or underneath the one they’re modifying, creating a gallery of thumbnails. The result is a collage of drafts allowing users to explore various creative ideas based on how the AI interpreted their successive requests, for better or worse.