Admired by humans for more than 130 years, Eureka’s Queen Anne Victorian “The Pink Lady” is now a subject of inspiration for intelligent machines.

The image-generating software DALL-E 2, developed by the company OpenAI LP, was recently used to visualize Humboldt’s prized Victorian as a work of modern architecture.

The advanced program uses human-typed words or phrases to create original art and realistic images by sourcing billions of captioned pictures collected from the internet.

DALL-E 2 explained | OpenAI.

“DALL-E 2 has learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them,” the company stated on its website. “It uses a process called ‘diffusion,’ which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image.”

DALL-E 2 co-creator Aditya Ramesh shared an animation of The Pink Lady’s AI-generated remodel on social media yesterday, drawing astonishment and revulsion from many viewers, including New York Magazine’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Senior Art Critic Jerry Saltz.

“Please no Victorian Architecture nostalgia. We all love it,” Saltz wrote on social media in response to The Pink Lady’s transformation. “This isn’t about that.”

A portmanteau of artist Salvador Dali and Pixar’s WALL·E, DALL-E was developed in 2021 through funding partly provided by celebrity billionaire Elon Musk.

The company has stated that the purpose of this software is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by attempting to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.”

However, the ability to generate completely original false images that can be indistinguishable from real life photographs, poses major ethical questions for how this technology may affect the future of our society.

“We recognize that work involving generative models has the potential for significant, broad societal impacts,” the company stated. “In the future, we plan to analyze how models like DALL·E relate to societal issues like economic impact on certain work processes and professions, the potential for bias in the model outputs, and the longer term ethical challenges implied by this technology.”

The software is not yet accessible to the general public. Select professionals like artists, journalists and researchers can currently join a waitlist to one day preview the program. OpenAI reportedly hopes to one day make DALL-E 2 available for use in third-party apps.

While The Pink Lady may be vulnerable to infinite alterations in the “metaverse,” in the real world, the newly remodeled Victorian is set to re-open this summer as a new location for dining, shopping, weddings, public tours and more.