I enjoy asking DALLE-3 to label things. I learn so much!

Here I asked it to generate a labeled grid of flightless birds.

Ostrich: Actually a reasonable-looking female ostrich with maybe a perkier than usual tail and fluffier than usual thighs. Emu: Body looks like an emu but neck is blue and featherless like a cassowary's. Casowary: One can't help but notice it has two heads. Peguio: Obviously supposed to be emperor penguins but one has very long legs and another has a goose-like body shape. Rheo: A bird with small round body and an extravagantly enormous black and white neck. Perched on its back is a shaggy bird with tiny legs. Wegun: A variety of round birds, one of which looks like a penguin, and the others are unidentifiable speckled orbs.

I think it's trying to do ostrich (a female apparently! unusual for a bird poster but I approve), an emu (definitely not an emu's head), a casowary (pretty good except for the TWO HEADS), penguin (with hilariously long legs), rhea (...what), and ...maybe a weka or a penguin?

Or this attempt:

There are four cassowary things, none of which are labeled cassowary, and one of which has two heads facing in opposite directions. A long-legged bird labeled penguuitn is hunched over and has two creepy clawlike hands (or extra legs?) in front. There's an auklike "kasowary" with two adorable ear-tufts, and a tall long-feathered bird with a cute head-tuft labeled "penguin". A "weedo" has a toucan-like beak but is all black and white.

As far as I can tell, it's the same group of attempted birds, with the possible addition of the dodo. In this set we have some birds with excellent head tufts, another two-headed cassowary, and one bird with creepy hands.

I also like this set. Some of them remind me of cats.

These birds are the squattest and shaggiest, with their feather-floofs stretching nearly to the ground. One "cassowwary" is sitting like a cat. The most alarming "birds" are unlabeled. One stands bolt upright and has a black crest, a hairless orange neck, and featherless snakelike wings. Definitely flightless but dang. At the center of the grid is a three-legged bird standing like a cat. Its feathers are shaggy black and white and it has a dinosaur-like thick tail, as well as a glowing red eye and wispy head-crest.

I asked ChatGPT (which was passing my requests to DALL-E3) what the unlabeled bird in the center was, and it replied that it was a penguin. I don't think it had any ability to label images it had generated, I think it just picked a likely answer based on what it knew the prompt had been.

DALL-E3's flightless birds aren't fit for purpose as scientific illustrations (or as much else, really), but I'd be lying if I said I didn't like them. I like the ones with big chunky fluffy legs, the shaggy ones, and the ones with head tufts especially. I wonder if this is what the Mesozoic was like.

Bonus: more chunky flightless birds!

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