A visual retrospective uses a set of images made with DALL·E 2 in August 2022 to mark how far image generation has come since then. Rather than explaining the technology or presenting measurements, it displays four generated variations for each prompt, letting the range and unevenness of the results speak for themselves. The prompts combine unusual subjects and situations, such as an elephant teaching in space, a man golfing on Mars with a baseball bat, and a skeptical raccoon consulting a ouija board.
Many prompts also test the model’s ability to blend animals, activities, and artistic references. Examples include a sea otter or squirrel in a painting attributed to Johannes Vermeer, mice learning economics, a bird eating a sour gummy worm in a flower field in watercolor, and a golden retriever portrayed as the Queen of England. The collection also includes an armadillo and toucan surfing, a dog dressed as an army general, and balloon animals fleeing a man with a thumb tack. Its substance is primarily demonstrative: it captures the imaginative, often comic requests people made to early text-to-image systems, alongside multiple attempts at each scene. The title invites readers to compare those 2022 results with more recent image-generation capabilities, though no newer images or technical comparisons appear in the supplied material.
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