Prior to Dall-E, I got almost all my cover art from Unsplash.
Recently, its all been from Dall-E.
Today, for the first time in a long time, I look at Unsplash images.
Almost every image on Unsplash was more pleasing than almost every image that I made with Dall-E.
This probably says very little about either Dall-E versus Unsplash, but rather a real artist versus a geek.
When I look at galleries of Dall-E art created by people who are more talented, they’re also better than mine.
And I bet, even if armed with the same camera and other tools if I uploaded images to Unsplash, they wouldn’t be as good as what is there.
Mainly, it is easier for me to make images in Dall-E than to find appropriate images that talented people have made.
Many years ago, Cal Newport warned that office suite and similar tools would allow those of us to do tasks less well and more slowly than people who would otherwise do such things.
In recent works, looking at the differentiation between presentation-display of graphical information (as opposed to exploration-display of graphical information), I saw how deficient my work product was compared to what experts routinely produced. I realized that I should be getting expert help.
Maybe it’s time to go back to Unsplash.
Perhaps someone will make a stronger indexing tool or even offer a human-guided selection service.
Left image Dall-E.
