Artificial Intelligence makes Cosmo cover debut
Though Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1950s and has been used for everything from predicting how much toilet paper stores should stock (Covid times notwithstanding) to helping doctors make the best decisions for their patients, more creative applications are still in relative infancy - though the latest Cosmopolitan’s latest efforts have pushed efforts forward.
With Cosmopolitan’s latest cover, a team of the magazine’s editors, members of artificial-intelligence research lab Open AI, and digital artist Karen X Cheng - the first “real-world” person to use the AI system the researchers have developed - went through the lengthy process to create it.
Though the AI system - called DALL-E 2 - takes just 20 seconds to create an image using verbal requests from users, it took the team several rounds of selecting phrases that would help the system generate the image of a powerful woman that would grace the cover.
Cheng, who shared the process on social media, revealed the final phrase that resulted in the magazine’s final cover: “A wide angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger towards camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art”.
DALL-E 2 is powered by a neural network and learns to identify objects and how they relate to each other using images labelled by humans. By being shown numerous images of jam jars and lemon tarts, each labelled with what the image contains, the AI learns how to identify and distinguish between them.
That being said, DALL-E 2 is far from perfect and is still in “preview” phase, meaning it is only being released to a thousand users a week while engineers continue to tweak it.
It is also far from replacing human artists, a fear held by some who are wary of the tech. It requires plenty of intervention from humans, and, as writer Gloria Liu puts it: “DALL-E truly is an artist’s tool - one that can’t create without the artist”.
To read the full Cosmopolitan story, head here.