The training images have an undue effect on the output, when numerous images overwhelm a word, and effectively alter the meaning of that word.
I recently joined the “Cursed AI” group on Facebook, and they were discussing how to get rid of cheese in pictures of hamburgers.
In the real world, cheese is an add-on to hamburgers. In the photographic database of the web, hamburgers with cheese dominate. (Do an image search for “hamburger” and see how many cheeseburgers come up. On my search, 11/20 had cheese.)
100% of these burgers appear to have cheese on them.
So DALL-E is doing worse than image searches. It turned the cheese-having majority, into a cheese-having unanimity.
This effectively erases the existence of hamburgers without cheese.
DALL-E might be a Cheese Hegemon.
Pizza Without Cheese
People in the group were also trying to remove cheese from pizza. I managed to do it with a prompt similar to: “flat foccaccia with pepperoni, crust”.
Of the four images returned by Image Creator, three were pepperoni pizzas with cheese. One was what I requested, which would be similar to a pizza without cheese.
So, even if you explicitly ask for something which won’t have cheese on it, it still produces the cheese, and not only that, but pushes the image toward a pizza.
The Cheese Hegemony hasn’t completely wiped out foccaccia, but it’s at risk of semantic erasure. (I just found out I misspelled focaccia. The results were the same, except they all seem to have cheese.)
This one looks almost cheese-free.
Pigs in Blankets
Pigs in blankets are hot dogs wrapped up in bread dough, and baked. When I was a child, it was a school lunchroom favorite, but I forgot the name.
When I asked DALL-E to produce a picture of PIBs, it made one picture out of four:
That one in the upper left is influenced by “PIBs”pigs in blankets”, but the only one grounded in “PIB”pigs in blankets” is in the lower right.
Look closely at the “pineapple”. The Cheese Hegemony seems to be pushing some of those pineapple chunks toward being cheese, and it included cheese in this image.
The meaning of “pigs in blankets” has been turned into “hot dogs”.
People Call it “Average”
People say that if you ask the AIs for something, it’ll give you “the average”. They mean that it’ll give you the conventional advice, or the most common image, unless you make an effort to write a prompt to get something else.
I think these images show something like that, but it’s not an “average”. It’s more like “the median”, or “the majority”, or to be comical about it “the hegemony“.