Today, Alex Cloud, a current NC State graduate student who works at Riot Games (the studio behind video game titles such as League of Legends and Valorant) came in to teach us about academic statistical concepts such as the difference between estimands and estimators, reinforcement learning, and luck and skill in games such as Randochess(p). He also showed us DALL-E, an artificial intelligence software developed by OpenAI that uses AI to generate digital artworks based on a prompt that is typed as an input. We got to play around and test it and it was incredible to see how the AI was capable of stitching together realistic and believable images and how it was able to understand many different prompts (that were taught by training the AI using images associated with captions). Of course, there were some shortfalls. For example, DALL-E interprets the input “tree bark” as a visual of a dog barking at a tree instead of actual tree bark, as is shown in the demo video for the software.
Shown above is an example from DALL-E’s website about how to use the software, I unfortunately don’t have any of the resulting images for the prompts we tested, however, some of the prompts we gave were “A painting of a cat by Caravaggio”, “Mario graduating from middle school”, “An Impressionist painting of Jinx from League of Legends”, and “Mona Lisa but as Zelda”!