It was at the end of July when I finally got access to DALL.E after having registered for it 2 months back. Thanks to the 50 free credits for the 1st month (after that it's 15 free credits monthly), I was able to experiment with a variety of text prompts (from which it generates 4 images within seconds) and slowly understand how to get the most out of it. There were many fails, but the few amazing results made up for the disappointments, and even some of the fails were amusing in their own way!

(My prompt for the above image was "bridge from Mars to Earth, digital art" so technically this is a fail, but instead getting this post apocalyptic scene from Mars is not something I'd complain about!)

As August approached, I started thinking of some little gesture I could do for my group of 4 (including me) college friends this Friendship Day. I thought it would be fun to use DALL.E to recreate some memories we all share and create a collage of them. Very soon my friend (and roommate) Angmo got access to DALL.E too, and I shared the plan with her. She too thought this would be a nice little surprise for our other 2 friends, Pranav and Priyanshu, who aren't on campus right now.

Soon it was Saturday, Friendship Day was the next day, and we started brainstorming all our core memories and how to best phrase them for DALL.E's comprehension. Being aware of its lack of expertise with human faces, we had to be creative in minimizing them. For some cases, we decided to use just memory triggers instead of the entire scene (like a plate of cheesecakes on the grass rather than us digging into those while sitting outdoors) and for others we changed the perspective of the image to not include faces (like a back-view or just a silhouette).

It was an unexpectedly fun experience: We went down memory lane, picking the most stand out moments, editing each prompt to perfection including all relevant details, finally pressing the "Generate" button, praying fervently that our credit wouldn't go to waste as we waited for DALL.E to do its magic, then squealing with joy when the results showed up...

There is something inexplicably delightful about working in tandem with an AI to create an image from your head, and not get an accurate plain photograph, but instead the AI's unpredictable unique interpretation of it. In my experience, using the right words in the text prompts, DALL.E can almost always generate beautifully whimsical art and is excellent at capturing the mood you describe.

For moments that we have no photographs for, because we were too engaged in living them, we now have DALL.E's artistic depictions of them. They are as unique as can get (each generation is!), are personal to us but not private, and are probably better composed and prettier than the average smartphone captured photo. It's a win win anyway you look at it!

This is the collage we ultimately ended up with. Priyanshu and Pranav loved the creative and cute result, and many others complimented not just the result but the idea as well, and commented on what fun creating this must have been!

This made me realise that not just with friends, recreating memories with DALL.E is a really fun bonding activity, with any loved ones! If you have any moments you regret not having captured on film, now is the time to get together with your friends and family to relive and generate a uniquely yours snapshot of them! It is also a great excuse to introduce your non-tech near and dear ones to the wonders of AI!

Another unexpected surprise was getting great wallpaper material! Now both my phone homescreen and lockscreen are DALL.E's portrayals of my favourite moments with my favourite people!