Aberrant AI creations: co-creating surrealist body horror using the DALL-E Mini text-to-image generator

Abstract

The emergence in 2022 of surreal and grotesque image sets created using the free online AI text-to-image generator DALL-E Mini (Craiyon) prompts our analysis of their aesthetic content and connections to preexisting media forms and trends in digital culture. DALL-E Mini uses an unfiltered database of images from the internet to create new images based on a user’s text prompt, often resulting in misshapen bodies and impossible scenarios. Despite its technological limitations, DALL-E Mini’s popularity as a meme-making tool is visible on social media platforms, where crowd-sourced images are shared and experimentation with the tool is encouraged. Through comparison with existing artistic practices and formats (creative automata, surrealism, body horror, celebrity memes), we argue that DALL-E Mini creations can be understood as human-AI co-creations and forms of aesthetic mimicry. Building on the ideas of surrealists such as André Breton, we propose that DALL-E Mini’s images, prompts and the grid interface adhere to surrealism’s historical interests in the unconscious, the uncanny, and the collaborative ‘exquisite corpse’ parlour game. We also consider DALL-E Mini’s relevance to the category of ‘AI Arts’, Patricia De Vries’s call for more research that relates algorithms to the broader artistic and cultural contexts in which they are embedded (2020), and the ‘authoring’ of celebrity bodies as data (Kanai, 2016). Our theorisation of DALL-E Mini is supported by examples drawn from social media and personal experiments with the generator. Overall, we propose that internet users’ experimentation with DALL-E Mini corresponds with a cultural moment in which AI imaging technologies are eliciting excitement and anxiety. The outputs are revealed to be reliant on users’ pop cultural knowledge, with DALL-E Mini allowing for a playful, co-creative algorithmic practice, wherein contemporary anxieties about digital labour, (post)digital culture, biopolitics, and global issues are redirected into surreal visual storyworlds.