Trams: Dark and dream-like

I take a tram every day. You could say it’s my favorite means of transport in a city. I even started following a Facebook group (yes, I am that old!) that revels in posting pictures about trams around the world. That group is dominated by trams in Budapest, my home city. That shouldn’t be a surprise: Budapest has 36 tram lines, many of which cross the entire city in a direction or another.

So, one day I turned to DALL-E with this:

Create a photo that shows a narrow street in a Central European city in the 1950s, with a single track for trams. Put an approaching tram on the tracks. The scene is at dusk on a rainy October day. The street lights, also in the 1950s style, are already on.

Then I gave in to my affinity to the absurd, or in this case, the surreal, and asked this:

Me: Thank you. Now please re-create the images in the style of a painting by Salvador Dalí.

But ChatGPT aka DALL-E gave me this answer, to my profound surprise:

ChatGPT aka DALL-E: I’m sorry, but I can’t directly reference Salvador Dalí’s style. However, I can create images inspired by surrealism, dream-like atmospheres, and melting forms which are some of the characteristics commonly associated with his work. Would you like me to proceed with that?

I made the mistake of not asking ChatGPT why that was. I assumed this was a kind of safeguard so that the AI doesn’t infringe any intellectual property rights. This is a plausible assumption because Dalí died in 1989, and his work only becomes public domain 70 years after his death. That said, the previous version of DALL-E didn’t even flinch when I asked it for a painting in Dalí’s style.

So, I accepted the AI’s offer to create surrealistic images, and answered “Yes please.”

Interestingly enough, DALL-E didn’t add surrealistic twists to everything in the images. The road surface, the lights and the sky became dreamy but the buildings and the trams themselves remained pretty realistic.

Today, I don’t want to go into speculations about why this happened. But I am curious to find out what you think.