DALL-E and the Rise of Generative AI

In 2022, AI image generation went from research curiosity to cultural phenomenon. OpenAI released DALL-E 2 in April, capable of generating photorealistic images from text descriptions ("an astronaut riding a horse on the moon, photorealistic"). Midjourney launched its Discord-based image generator in July. And in August, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion as open-source software, democratizing the technology. The systems used diffusion models — trained on billions of image-text pairs — to generate novel images by iteratively refining noise into coherent pictures. The results sparked intense debate about copyright, the future of visual art, and the nature of creativity. A Midjourney-generated image even won a fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair, igniting controversy about AI in art.