I tried to generate images of cartoon characters having colonoscopies. Any submitted string of text is turned into pictures by the artificial intelligence model housed on the website. I am a practicing gastroenterologist who identifies as online, but not very, and the viral tweet that introduced me to the model served as my benchmark for submissions that felt appropriately niche. Daffy Duck was shown standing on a stretcher, Porky Pig was registered as an actual pig, and Bugs Bunny was put into a human colon.
Weird Dall-E Mini Generations is a collection of the best hits from the internet. Popularity in this genre is dependent on a specialized calculus that balances the creativity of a user with the fidelity of their visual output. Their early tendency is toward medical themes, such as a car mechanic installing a kidneys in the engine, and a DJ laying down sick beats in the cardiac ward.
Making jokes at the convergence of high and low is a time-honored recipe and is ripe for profaning. The medical preoccupation may be just a phase of development for the Dall-E Mini phenomenon. The images have a bias towards smudged, featureless faces that gives them an almost nightmare quality. Analyzing images for patterns can seem like an exercise about as useful as interpreting dreams. When our imagination was presented with a powerful new canvas, it wasn't just my mind that was drifting in a clinical direction.
Conventional narratives of medical progress always focus on the transformation of past fantasy into future reality: a failing organ successfully transplant, a terminal cancer cure. These achievements have consolidated the power of medical science and made the body more legible. Health care has had a darker cast lately. There is the still-smoldering pandemic with its long tail of death, disability, and socioeconomic upheaval, as well as the collision between politics and public health in the United States, sparked by Covid and accelerated by partisan legislation around assault rifles and climate change
There are some submissions that bear the imprint of current events such as plague doctor fans or fetus with a gun. Others seem to be inspired by a more generalized sense of wonder. Contemporary strains of clinical fantasy seem to tug society in the opposite direction and undermine both scientific authority and the basic precepts of human physiology. It is in keeping with the software's guiding spirit, but also with an awareness that these are particularly challenging times for biomedicine in the real world.
We have a lot of representations of how the body works. The Ohio state legislature considered a bill that would have required reimplanting the embryo into the uterus for ectopic pregnancies. Conspiracy theories suggest that coronaviruses can change your genes, make you infertile, and even facilitate your location. Some popular health trends, such as horse drugs, but for people, sound almost as if they came from a different era.
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