The Database of Every Picture Imaginable

DALLE-2 Prompt: a photorealistic round glass fishbowl containing a collection of small colorful 2D images of people, places and things each using a random style, contrasting colors and themes

I wrote the post below in 1993 for April Fools, soon after I’d joined the Disney VR Studio. I posted it anonymously to USENET (the plaintext Reddit of the day).

I didn’t know much about neural nets back then, but the idea with this ‘bit-index’ is that any image can be represented by a single number, a numeric ‘prompt’ of sorts, which in the worst case is the concatenation of all bits in the…