Nonsense in , interestingness out

 kw: ai experiments, generated art, dall-e, nonsense processing

I read that an AI researcher made up a word, "crungus", and used it to prompt a generated art app. He reported that this yielded several pictures of ogre-like monsters. I decided to try the same "word" with DALL-E2. I ran it twice, with these results:

While the program primarily associates the prompt with food, it threw a human-ish character into each set of replies. Most of the foods have a crunchy look, like tempura. It is refreshing, however: no monsters for me.

I should mention that every time I run DALL-E2 I use a freshly-opened Incognito Chrome browser window. OpenAI has history of what I've been doing in its own database, but any cookies DALL-E2 may have dropped get erased when I close the browser.

I made up another nonsense word, "knorb", which yielded this:

It's a pity DELL-E2 doesn't have an "Explain" button, but if its neural net consists of many layers of millions of nodes, who wants to read through an "explanation" anyway? This word somehow triggered images related to tools and mechanical things. Next I chose a word made up by a comedian in a funny article about punctuation, "flabbergasterisk". Here the results were so surprising I ran it a second time:

The first set of returns produced more food. The second set also has a food theme, but I rather like the still life composition of the second one in the second set. As originally conceived, the flabbergasterisk looks like this:

To check DALL-E2's vocabulary, I picked three obscure, but genuine, words. The first was "Limerence":

Limerence is a psychological term defined as involuntary, intense, obsessive desire for another person, without sexual overtones. The three women pictured could be objects of desire, but at least one of the images is a bit suggestive in nature. I don't know what kind of bird is pictured at the left. The next real word was "Omnishambles":

Here the program is in uncharted territory. "Omni" means "everything" and "shambles" means to be in disorder, so the word means "disastrous disorder" (it's how I would describe the Biden Presidency). It isn't a geographical term. The final word is "Velleity":

"Velleity" is a mild wish or inclination without motivation; it doesn't lead to action. One could call it the "wishy" side of "wishy-washy". The flower pictures are nice, but are total non sequiturs. I am not sure how a near-empty jar of rolled oats relates to anything.

It has been a fun exercise.