If you’re somebody that spends a lot of time on certain corners of Twitter, you may have recently found your feed clogged up by a particular type of monstrosity. I’m not talking about the latest flavor of ridiculous discourse, or that one guy you follow who is the living definition of a desperate need to touch grass. There’s a more than generous helping of the platform’s signature wit involved, but it speaks more with pictures than with words. It’s not the latest low-effort image macro to have been cooked up by some jaded online individual, either; instead, it invokes some robotic help. 

DALL-E mini is a project that promises its users a little AI assistance in making their wildest dreams a mutated artistic reality. Offering a free to use knockoff of the DALL-E 2 software released by Open AI last year, the internet’s most finely tuned creative minds have been coming up with some deranged prompts that have been testing the limits of this humble program. Once upon a time, «Osama Bin Laden being slimed» would have been the kind of niche fetish drawing that weirdos would post to DeviantArt, but now it’s a punchline put into a blindly obedient piece of artificial intelligence. 

While the images themselves are equal parts hilarious and terrifying, perhaps the most impressive part of the whole trend are the twisted things that people have invented to torture the technology with. Maybe the dystopian sci-fi is right, and we’ll fall prey to a robot uprising within our lifetimes. However, with prompts like these, maybe we were the monsters all along.