Images without prompts and statistics are... meaningless. We don't know if/how these adhere, whether they took a thousand hours or a thousandth of a second.

> “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

> “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

> “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

> “Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk,” said the Cat.

(Lewis Carroll)

No modern or over-time comparisons?

In some ways I prefer looking at these over the hyper-polished 2026 image generators tbh.

Nice pictures. Really wish I'd started my GenAI benchmark back when DALL-E 2 were still around, just to have them as a fun little baseline for how much things have changed.

The only DALL-E 2 images [1] I could dig up in my archives that matched any of the bench prompts was the Alexander the Great prompt:

  A painting of Alexander the Great riding a hippity hop into battle. The hippity hop toy was an old children’s toy that looked like a giant rubber ball with rubber handles that one straddle and ride.

And while it's not exactly the same, DALL-E Mini [2] (from back in 2021) is still around and you can run it locally using pretty modest hardware.

[1] - https://imgpb.com/ZyzuX

[2] - https://github.com/borisdayma/dalle-mini

Oh wow, throwback! Pretty remarkable how looking thru these janky old images actually did give me a sort of fuzzy nostalgic feeling. The tells/flaws are such a recognizable style. I remember absolutely abusing the DALLE endpoints when we first got access after the waitlist ended. This was in my old job, where work looked a lot different from today. Also just a vastly different time in my life, funny how much time flies in four years.

(I do wish this had a before/after sort of comparison to demonstrate newer sota models handling the same prompts)

Oh my gosh. Makes me want to wake up my comfyUI setup on a RTX 2080 egpu which still works like a charm today even. I think the last time I touched it was about two years ago!

I always found the commercial stuff to be complete rubbish. I was astounded by how I could just spend a couple of hours using open models and open source software to produce better results.

Interesting post but I would love to see the process behind these images. I agree that the base capability has definitely increased but man, editing via prompts still remains a pain in the neck. I've found that it's difficult to be able to maintain stability in certain areas of an an image, while making changes in others, and avoiding artifacting across the images.

For a side project that's very art-asset heavy (and that I'm picky on), it takes me about an hour to get from an initial sketch up to a final image that I'm fairly happy with.

technically impressive but also soulless in a way. maybe i'm already biased knowing they're ai, but artistically they seem so uninteresting.

I vastly prefer (still slop) these over modern slop.