18 Oct What It Feels Like to Get Hacked (According to DALL-E 2)
The Wordy Intro
When I was a kid, I used to get weirdly excited for the release of the new Madden video game each year.
Keep in mind, this was when every annual edition included so many vast improvements that your head would explode, and you wouldn’t stop talking about it with your pals at lunch for weeks.
As I got older, my affinity for video games waned. This most likely due to the fact that a bunch of pre-pubescent jerk offs from halfway across the globe won’t stop making fun of my mom online. Thanks a lot Internet.
Since video games are now out of the picture, I’ve turned my attention elsewhere. Still, technological advancements have a way of keeping me on the edge of my seat, giddy with anticipation.
Of all the amazing things happening in the world, there’s one development that I simply can’t get enough of: artificial intelligence (AI).
Over the last year and a half, I’ve started to dip my toes into utilizing AI tools to expedite the development of creative content for my marketing agency and a number of our internal projects, as well as our client accounts where applicable. I even wrote a really detailed review of Jasper.AI and gave my honest feedback on the good and the bad.
Beyond content writing tools, I’ve been patiently waiting–not really, but let’s pretend–for the public release of DALL-E, the AI system that generates original images and artwork from a natural language description.
Recently (September 28, 2022), OpenAI made DALL-E 2 available to the public. Since then, I’ve been playing around with it and have been generally blown away by the results. It does take a little bit of patience and training to get the exact output that you want, but once you get the hang of it, the possibilities are truly endless. There are some interesting vulnerabilities and potential misuse cases that I’ll share in a follow up post, but overall, it’s an absolute groundbreaking development in the AI space.
To me, AI is more than just a cool tool or gadget. It’s a whole new way of thinking and approaching problems, and it’s only going to keep getting better and better as time goes on. I’ve always been an artistic person at a high-level, but I lacked the skills necessary to bring my ideas to life in a visually pleasing manner. DALL-E takes care of that problem, allowing me to focus on the concept and strategy instead of getting caught up in the nuances of drawing, painting, or fiddling with pixels in graphic design apps.
When I started to share some of the first images I created with the help of DALL-E, there was a pretty split bag of reactions. One side of the fence shared my excitement. But on the other side, there was general skepticism and even somewhat resentment towards AI. Without prying, it was apparent that these reactions were likely built out of fear that AI will take over our innate human ability and desire to create.
Of all the debate around AI, the argument that these systems will never truly become sentient or capture the essence of what it’s like to be human is one of the biggest arguments against it. And truthfully, I used to agree with that stance. But now, after seeing about a thousand different pieces of AI art, I’m not as convinced.
In the spirit of cyber security awareness month, I wanted to put the AI to the test. Can it truly communicate what we feel as humans? Can it portray what it feels like to have your identity stolen? Will it be able to show the anger that you feel when a fraudulent transaction hits your credit card, where you have to sit on hold with the bank for an hour, getting passed along from department to department, only to end up waiting 5-7 business days for a new one to get mailed? Would it be able to depict the anxiety of having your entire business taken down by a DDoS attack?
I think it can, but I’m sure not everyone will agree. Here are the results so you can decide for yourself:
What It Feels Like to Get Hacked – An AI Art Project
Stolen Identities
- Input: A person gets their identity stolen
- Style: Illustration
- Medium: Classic Oil
- Tool Used: Jasper Art
Self Portraits
- Input: A portrait of someone who just got hacked
- Style: Illustration
- Keywords: Highly-detailed
- Tool Used: Jasper Art
An Executive Reacts
- Input: A CEO reacts to a cyber attack
- Style: Unspecified
- Keywords: Photo-realistic
- Tool Used: Jasper Art
Random Ransom
- Input: A hacker demands a ransom
- Style: Unspecified
- Medium: Mixed media collage
- Tool Used: Jasper Art
Contribute to this Project
We are looking for feedback from the public on the images we’ve shared so far.
Please send us an email to info@gogetsecure.com with your reactions. Do these images make you feel some type of way? Are they better than, equal to, or worse than stock images?
Also, if you are utilizing OpenAI, Jasper, or any other AI image generation tools, please feel free to send us your AI Art related to this project or the world of cybersecurity in general. If you’d like us to generate output for another concept related to “What It Feels Like to Be Hacked”, let us know and we will send them to you and publish here with your approval and attribution.
Lastly, if you like any of the artwork generated here, feel free to utilize them for your own projects. We do appreciate any attribution as it helps us share this project and grow our website, but it is not required. Thanks!