Dalí Vs Dall-E: Why AI Novelty Lags Human Creativity

I have just put the new Gemini Nano Banana image generator through its paces. It has impressive capabilities, yet, for me, DALL-E remains the original and best. But how does it compare to one of the premier proponents of human creativity?

DALL-E debuted as a research paper with a working demo in 2021, before ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, but the two were eventually integrated in October 2023. The name "DALL-E" refers to the artist Salvador Dalí and the Pixar character WALL-E. It is striking that OpenAI selected the most eccentric humans and the most human robots to describe their AI product. Nonetheless, these choices provide the perfect starting point to explore the differences between human and AI creativity.

Salvador Dalí and his creative process

Dalí's work is instantly recognisable, from melting clocks draped over barren landscapes to elephants on impossibly thin legs. His paintings merge the precision of Renaissance masters with the chaos of dreams. His interests ranged from religious mysticism to nuclear physics, from Freudian symbolism to his wife Gala. More than just a great painter, he is an enduring global brand who created an entire mythology around himself, complete with a museum in his hometown where he is now buried.

Dalí's creative process was as extraordinary as his output. His "paranoiac-critical method" involved inducing hallucinogenic states without drugs to access his subconscious. He published his techniques in 1948 in an entertaining, outrageous, and revealing book, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship.

One of his signature methods was "a slumber with a key". Dalí would sit with a key between his fingers over a plate while he induced a one-second micro-nap. Once asleep, the key would hit the plate and wake him. This is what we now call hypnagogia, which is known to induce hallucinations. He had many other tips, including making a telescope out of an urchin skeleton, organising an art studio based on a spider's web, and deliberately wearing uncomfortable shoes.

"The difference between me and a madman, Dalí famously said, "is that I am not mad."

He was right. His seemingly bizarre approach allowed him to maintain technical control while accessing the irrational. His induced visions were meticulously rendered with astounding technical precision, resulting in a realistic depiction of the impossible.

DALL-E's creative process

The creative technology behind DALL-E is known as a "diffusion model". A diffuser must be trained on the relationships between images and their descriptions using vast datasets. DALL-E eventually encodes objects, styles, spatial relationships, and artistic techniques in addition to simple labels.

The diffusion process begins with random noise, which is gradually refined into a coherent image, much like the crew of the Starship Enterprise materialising during a transporter "beam". The model is guided by a text prompt at every step of the de-noising process, using a specialised pretrained text-image encoder to map abstract concepts like "sadness" or "minimalism" into visual directions that shape what emerges.

As such, DALL-E does not search a database of existing images; it generates entirely new depictions pixel by pixel based on the text and its semantic context. This is extremely impressive technically and genuinely creative.

Dalí vs DALL-E

Dalí and DALL-E's dramatic differences in creative methodology, result in fundamental variances in how works are initiated, constraints are navigated, and ownership of the end product is determined.

Every element in a Dalí painting is intentional. The melting clocks represent the fluidity of time in dreams, and the crutches symbolise human frailty. Even seemingly random elements emerge from his systematic exploration of the unconscious. In contrast, DALL-E has no intentions and only passively responds to prompts. When it places a shadow or chooses a colour, it is following learned patterns, not expressing a synthetic will. Even WALL-E (DALL-E's partial namesake) shows artistic vision in its expert repurposing of pre-existing components.

Dalí worked with physical constraints such as canvas size, paint properties, and notoriously cramped studios. He was also highly conscious of the physical limitations of his senses and hand-eye coordination, plus the natural processes of fatigue and hunger (he had a lot to say about sleep).

DALL-E has constraints of a very different kind, including compute power, data availability, ethical guardrails, and economic realities. Nonetheless, an AI diffuser can produce the 1,500 works of Dali's whole life every hour, although the question of their relative significance and value is obvious.

Given clear authorship under copyright law, every Dalí painting was originally owned by the artist and now by his estate. A DALL-E image, however, exists in a contested space. Is it owned by the AI platform, the engineers who designed it, the person writing the prompt, or even the original creators whose works were used to train the AI model? Currently, the law requires a human author, meaning AI-generated works often fall outside copyright altogether. The issue is far from settled, and rights-holders are pushing back hard. For example, Anthropic agreed just last month to settle a $1.5 billion class action from authors. This is likely to be the first of many similar cases that will bring clarity in the medium term.

Deeper questions

Moving from methodology to the nature of the "artists" themselves, humans often create out of their lived experiences, particularly of suffering, whereas AI lacks emotions, long-term memory, sensory experiences, or social needs.

To illustrate, I listened recently to Nick Cave's album Ghosteen, which grapples with the tragic death of his son Arthur. Cave communicates raw emotion, disorientation, and a struggle to reconcile tragedy with faith. There is no doubt that AI could "write an album in the style of Nick Cave about the tragic loss of his son", but could it ever convey anything authentic? Or perhaps it is the audience who supplies the meaning, fusing the work with their own experiences.¹

This raises an even deeper question: is consciousness a prerequisite for creativity? Does it further require the capacity to hold beliefs, ascribe meaning to experience, or reach toward transcendence? These are contested human attributes at the intersection of anthropology, neuroscience, and metaphysics, but creativity brings them into sharp relief. When Dalí painted The Sacrament of the Last Supper, he grappled with transcendence directly, encoding his evolving relationship with Catholicism into the geometric precision of a dodecahedron framing Christ. By contrast, when DALL-E creates, it performs statistical operations over patterns in its training data. It has no beliefs and does not understand the significance of the forms it generates.

Ultimately, what it means to be creative cannot be separated from what it means to be a creator. Until we address those questions, debates about AGI will remain speculative. Nonetheless, the lens of AI is already bringing generative new perspectives to these old questions (no pun intended).

Conclusions

Comparing Dalí and DALL-E illuminates the nature of creativity and the different creators behind it. The melting clocks of The Persistence of Memory endure not because Dalí performed brushstrokes in a striking pattern, but because a human consciousness wrestled with the subjective nature of time and found a way to make us see it too. DALL-E can generate infinite melting clocks, each unique and technically accomplished – but they are reflections of reflections, simulacra without the existential weight of the original.

Yet we should not dismiss AI creativity as mere mimicry. DALL-E represents something genuinely new: machines that can generate novel images at scale. Perhaps, then, there are at least two kinds of creativity. One, with a small "c", that recombines existing patterns in derivative but novel ways. The other, with a capital "C", that pushes the boundaries of human meaning and understanding. Humans can do both. For now, AI can only manage lower-case creativity.

Looking ahead, AI creativity will only grow more sophisticated. The field is advancing rapidly: multimodal systems are beginning to see, speak, sing, and compose, and may eventually take embodied form as robotics converge with software. Already, artists are experimenting with AI not as a replacement, but as a collaborator – a digital brush, an instrument, even a co-composer. Perhaps this will lead to a new era of hybrid art. Yet for now, fundamental creativity remains irreducibly human.

A designer's afterword: Relationships
by Joshua Miller

In this article, Rob illustrates the differences in creative methodology between Dalí and DALL-E.

I would like to add another dimension to this difference based on my own experiences of working in the creative industry. I have learnt that as humans we all have a different relationship with creativity. Some people have a companionable relationship with it, as if there were friendly exchanges during office hours and chatting at lunch. Ideas flow from a diplomatic and civilised process that has its boundaries.

Others are almost held captive in a more abusive relationship. Utterly oppressed by the need to create what is inside them, unable to rest or stop until the work is done. Then there is a group who are wooed by creativity. People whose every action is art, inspiration, and ideas flow freely as if whispered into their ears by a lover. The complexities of form and meaning are understood and expressed with the elegance of a ribbon dancer. I boil with envy and resentment at the thought of it. All of this brings me to the real point: what is AI's relationship with creativity?

It would seem the answer is simple: there is no relationship. AI can't experience that relationship; it can only produce a likely "correct" image based on what has come before. But wait, isn't that exactly what humans do when they are creating things? This is somewhat true, but there's a lot missing. Creative work is, in large part, driven by inspiration, and therein lies the problem. Hindsight lets us construct casual narratives that suggest inevitability: Jony Ive was influenced by Dieter Rams, Rams was influenced by the Bauhaus and so on, until you trace back to cave paintings. No new ideas under the sun.

None of that is necessarily wrong, but it still cannot account for the contingent, imaginative, and emergent nature of human creativity. An excellent example of this is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which turned a commonplace urinal into a pivotal moment in art by shaping its meaning and not its form. It challenged the role of the artist, challenged institutional authority, opened the door for several art movements, and sparked wide debate.

You can easily trace back how these things happened after the fact, but no one could have ever predicted it beforehand. Originality persists not in isolation from history but as a transformative act that exceeds the sum of its influences. Or, to put it more simply, it all makes sense looking backwards; try turning around.

AI can't turn around; it can only offer endless variations on what has come before, but it can never exceed it. That is one of the key differences between big "C" and small "c" creativity that Rob establishes.

Our ability to experience this relationship with creativity is unique to us, right now at least. Maybe the most valuable question we need to ask ourselves is: What is our relationship with AI when it comes to creativity? If we try to emulate or compete with AI, it will always be a wasted effort. Our human minds are capable of the abnormal, able to break barriers and defy logic – Dalí being the perfect example of that. A digital mind isn't. Leave the quantitative exploration of creative work to AI for now and try to explore the qualities of creativity instead.

Read more from Josh here:

An editor's afterword: Beyond Human Creativity

by Mark Crowley

Rob's essay draws a sharp line between the works of Salvador Dalí and DALL-E: Dalí, an artist defined by intention, and DALL-E, a diffusion model producing arbitrary outputs. He distinguishes between "creativity" as a decorative, mechanical act and "Creativity" as a profound engagement with human experience.

But this framing immediately raises a deeper question: what would non-human creativity even look like? Would we recognise it if we saw it? And by what criteria would we judge its value?

Much like intelligence, human creativity has no control group. We cannot step outside ourselves to compare how we think and create with anything (or anyone) else. Corvids use tools; bowerbirds decorate elaborate structures. Are these acts intelligent and creative in a manner similar to us, or is it something else entirely? Beyond such glimpses, no other being (or entity) has been able to express its creativity as something distinct from instinct or habit. Human conceptions of creativity remain irrevocably bound to human existence and our lived experience.

Even within our own species, aesthetic judgment is subjective – there is no such thing as innate or natural beauty. Why does a child select a specific rock to bring home from the beach? No one can know exactly. In all likelihood, not even the child who selected the rock could fully articulate why. Aesthetic judgement, beauty, and creativity are all fundamentally constituted and defined by subjectivity and, more specifically, human subjectivity.

So, when we ask whether AI-generated art is "creative," what are we really asking? Often, the aspiration behind generative AI is the re-creation of human intelligence, or to even engineer "superintelligence". But again, how would we know what that looks like? In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, it is revealed that humans are only the third-most intelligent species on Earth (behind mice and dolphins) – the point being that our "objective" judgments of intelligence (and, by extension, creativity) are inevitably flawed from an external/extraterrestrial perspective. We cannot escape human subjectivity and, as such, we cannot know what lies outside of it.

As Rob concludes, "fundamental creativity remains irreducibly human." And yet, for all we know, AI's hallucinations may already be creative in a way we cannot comprehend. Perhaps they reflect an aesthetic vernacular beyond our reach. Maybe someday we'll be able to appreciate and understand them. The problem, today, is not whether AI is capable of creativity, but that we have no reference point outside of ourselves with which to recognise it.

To call AI creative would require imagining creativity beyond human subjectivity, something we cannot do. Perhaps AI will one day help us transcend those limits, but we're not there yet. Until then, we can't truly know whether AI is really being creative, if it's just approximating creativity, or if it's just hallucinating at random.

What we do know is that the creativity we do value is rooted in and driven by human experiences. Whether a child's drawing or the work of a fine artist, we care about art because it speaks to who we are as people. For now, until we have other options, that's the type of creativity we should value and champion.

Read more from Mark here:

Footnote

1. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer first suggested that art has an existence independent of the artist, which can "perform" for the audience in its own right - an idea that might enhance the impact of AI creativity.

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