Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you aware that this is how human artists work, too? They make countless works that aren't comparable to their top works. Even more so if you count the practice when they were just starting out. I think some people just refuse to believe that real art can be generated without humans and selectively look for things that confirm their pre-determined conclusion. Witnessing this always feels like witnessing someone be…
There is a crucial difference: the human artist does this choosing themselves. If DALL-E just spits out 1000 images and then a human goes through them and picks the best 2-3, and those are good - it's impressive, but the human was still a crucial part of the process. On the other hand, if DALL-E were to generate 10 billion images, and choose the best 2-3 itself and give those as output, and if at least one of those 2…
It's worth noting that the OpenAI samples for DALL-E 1 used CLIP to rank generated samples, and got a big boost from that. For many model architectures, you can run them in reverse to do 'image -> caption', and 'score the caption' quality: if 'the caption is bad', that indicates your image was screwed up and low-quality (introduced by Cogview). DALL-E 2 doesn't use either approach, or finetuning on user choices like InstructGPT, and I dunno if OA is going to implement any of these, but there is a wide universe of techniques applicable here to improve quality and we should keep that in mind (https://www.gwern.net/Forking-Paths) if we are going to make any assertions more sweeping than "this specific model, at this very instant, with this particular interface, is only at this level of quality".