"It’s hardly news to anyone that we are in the middle of the first image-generation craze in human history. Over the past year, OpenAI, the San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, has released two generations of its newest AI: DALL-E, a portmanteau of “Dalí” and “WALL-E.” Building on the company’s last hit release, GPT-3, DALL-E generates images based on a text prompt. Immediately after its January 5, 2021 release, the internet was flooded with generated images. DALL-E gives its users the weird ability to create a photorealistic representation of anything that comes to mind. From the sillier “teddy bears working on AI research on the moon in the ’80s,” to the slightly more serious “Möbius strip as a fractal in the style of MC Esher,” any sentence can suddenly be converted into an image. Some of these images are quite beautiful, and it certainly seems that DALL-E’s pieces have some real aesthetic value. This raises a host of questions: Have we made a machine that can imagine? If so, does it imagine in the same way that we do? And perhaps most distressingly, at least for anyone with a slightly dystopian attitude towards AI, has the age of human art now passed? Have we made the first genius program? Perhaps this truly is an electronic Dalí, as the name suggests. On its website, OpenAI says that its “hope is that DALL-E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively.” Can self-expression be outsourced to a machine? Can an automatically generated image have anything to do with self-expression? It certainly takes a genius, or an analyst, to guide someone else to self-expression. Think of Socrates, the midwife of philosophical positions."