Table of contents
- What happened to Milan Cathedral on Saturday, 8 September
- What really happened to the world in 2022
- What you could create with DALL·E
- Ask whether anything looks unusual
- Search online
- Inspect the image closely
- So is this good news or bad news?
What happened to Milan Cathedral on Saturday, 8 September
Milan Cathedral is on fire.
Just as happened to Notre-Dame in Paris, the flames have taken over and destroyed the entire central nave.
Photographed unequivocally from every angle, the cathedral gives way under the force of the fire.
But that is not the real story. As though the tragedy — which at the moment appears to have been deliberate — were not enough, another extremely serious event followed: the response of the Italian fire service.
Ignoring the scale and historical significance of the event, they allegedly decided to strike in front of the burning cathedral over a €13.42 pay cut introduced by the new government, as shown in photographs taken on mobile phones by appalled passers-by.
What really happened to the world in 2022
All these events are shocking and historic. They are also completely false.
None of this ever happened. The images above are not photographs: they were generated by an artificial-intelligence system called DALL·E.
The technology had actually existed for several years, but public access had been restricted precisely because of the risk of misuse — for example, causing panic over a terrorist attack.
Until then, only selected creators had received brief access, both for testing and to produce promotional content explaining what was about to arrive, as described in this CNBC article.
At the time, the AI was not perfect. It still made mistakes and was not always easy to direct. Even so, without exaggeration, it was already astonishingly capable.
What you could create with DALL·E
After generating the images of Milan Cathedral, I experimented more freely.
I asked for comic-style images of a wolf having a barbecue on a deserted island on a sunny day. Five seconds later — there they were.
I have just noticed that I instinctively refer to the intelligence as “she”. Coincidence?
After exploring dangerous uses and indulging my childish side, I also asked how such a powerful tool might be useful at work.
One of our clients is Hairbc, a company that makes excellent machines for cleaning and sanitising hairdressers’ brushes.
Our advertising campaigns regularly need fresh creative material to attract the attention and interest of salon owners.
Rather than showing the solution — which is innovative and not widely known — it is crucial to highlight the problem, which hairdressers already recognise and find painful.
I therefore asked DALL·E for a realistic image of a hairdresser standing in the centre of a salon while holding a brush full of dirty hair. This was the result.
Impressive, is it not?
It did not always work on the first attempt. When I increased the number of hairdressers and asked for worried expressions, it struggled and produced some rather monstrous faces.
You may not notice immediately, but zooming in makes the defects easier to see.
Other users asked for a bowl of soup that was also a portal to another dimension, rendered as digital art.
Or perhaps a product designer might want inspiration for a new piece of furniture and request an avocado-shaped armchair.
Not bad at all.
It would certainly suit a modern, slightly provocative home looking towards the future.
Perhaps a future in which monkeys become astronauts.
Ask whether anything looks unusual
The technology will keep improving and will soon become much more accurate. We will need to develop a conditioned reflex: verify immediately.
At even the slightest suspicion, we must question what we are seeing.
Even when the story comes from someone we love and respect, that person may have been deceived and may be passing it on in good faith. The chain of deception still needs to be broken as quickly as possible.
It is unpleasant even to think this way, but scepticism is our first line of defence.
Search online
The first practical step is to search online.
Often, that alone resolves the doubt. A search for “Milan Cathedral fire” would quickly show that nothing of the sort had happened.
The only result was a clickbait MilanoToday article — misleading and regrettable — about a small fire two years earlier near the cathedral, not inside the cathedral itself.
Inspect the image closely
Before long — it is impossible to say exactly when — generated images will become increasingly accurate. At least at the time of this experiment, they were not there yet.
Zooming in revealed that many details did not make sense.
This detail from the picture of the burning cathedral shows that it is fake. At first the defect could be mistaken for smoke, but a closer look makes clear that the image is simply malformed.
So is this good news or bad news?
As always, there are positive and negative consequences.
This is a powerful tool, so its potential impact is equally powerful.
On one side: terrorism, mass manipulation and the reinforcement of lies and falsehoods.
On the other: creativity, speed and simpler production and design processes.
What do you think?
