Since the beginning of time, we’ve all been obsessed with the concept of ‘firsts’. What was the first movie ever made? Who was the first person to walk around the world? When was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube? With a climate crisis looming over our heads and new outbreaks being declared as national health emergencies every other month, however, we’re slowly being forced to foreshadow our ‘lasts’ on planet Earth as we know it.

And what better way to visualise the downfall of our own species than leveraging the space-age technology called artificial intelligence (AI)? Over the years, humans have used AI to reimagine Disney characters as Pokémon trainers and even create heartbreaking renditions of what missing children would look like today.

But as of August 2022, netizens have increasingly tapped the potential of the technology to predict what our last day on Earth would look like—more specifically, our last selfies snapped on the planet we’ve come to call our home.

Brace yourselves, as you’re about to embark on a terrifying journey and witness 13 images generated on a scale of doomism that only AI tool DALL·E mini can offer.

In 2021, AI research laboratory OpenAI invented DALL·E, a neural network trained to generate images from text prompts. With just a few descriptive words, the system (named after both surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the adorable Pixar robot WALL-E) can conjure up absolutely anything from an armchair shaped like an avocado to an illustration of a baby radish walking a dog in a tutu. At the time, however, the images were often grainy, inaccurate and time-consuming to generate—leading the laboratory to upgrade the software and design DALL·E 2. The new and improved model, supposedly.

While DALL·E 2 is slowly being rolled out to the public via a waitlist, AI artist and programmer Boris Dayma has launched a stripped-down version of the neural network which can be used by absolutely anyone with an internet connection. Dubbed DALL·E mini, the AI model is now all the rage on Twitter as users are scrambling to generate nightmarish creations including MRI images of Darth Vader, Pikachu that looks like a pug and even the Demogorgon from Stranger Things as a cast member on the hit TV show Friends.

pic.twitter.com/9kJlbTqIXP

— Weird Ai Generations 🦫 (@weirddalle) June 13, 2022

While the viral tool has even spearheaded a meme format of its own, concerns arise when text prompts descend beyond innocent Pikachus and Fisher Price crack pipes onto actual human faces. Now, there are some insidiously dangerous risks in this case. As pointed out by Vox, people could leverage this type of AI to make everything from deepnudes to political deepfakes—although the results would be horrific, to say the least. Given how the technology is free to use on the internet, it also harbours the potential to put human illustrators out of work in the long run.

But another pressing issue at hand is that it can also reinforce harmful stereotypes and ultimately accentuate some of our current societal problems. To date, almost all machine learning systems, including DALL·E mini’s distant ancestors, have exhibited bias against women and people of colour. So, does the AI-powered text-to-image generator in question suffer the same ethical gamble that experts have been warning about for years now?

Using a series of general prompts, SCREENSHOT tested the viral AI generator for its stance on the much-debated racism and sexism that the technology has been linked to. The results were both strange and disappointing, yet unsurprising.