Can AI Create Photos That Tell Economic Stories?

Let's find out with this fun exercise!

What happens when you ask ChatGPT 4 to create photos exploring economic conditions? Let’s find out together! I used DALL-E, which comes with ChatGPT-4, and asked it to create images.

For all of these, they created two images. I usually just picked one to show you, but in a couple spots I’m showing both.

My first question:

Can you create a picture of a person who looks sad because of the national debt?

Not bad! Although unless that’s a two-sided printout, he’s not really reading it. :)

Can you create a photo of a young person who is excited about landing her first job after college?

Ok, so DALL-E didn’t quite get the spelling right, but she does seem excited.

Let’s try to get a little more difficult …

Photos of people experiencing hyperinflation

I had to include both - I just thought these were great. I recall old photos of people pushing around wheelbarrows of cash during hyperinflation in the 1920s, so the updates are good.

Let’s try to get more difficult…

I asked ChatGPT to provide “a photo that shows the business cycle”:

Ouch. On this one, not so great. The top one seems to have all the words, plus a bunch of extra … words? The bottom, well, “recsuch” isn’t part of the economic cycle. For context, here is an example from Britannica Money.

Not as pretty, but it gets the point across.

Finally, let’s have some fun:

A samurai attacking inflation with a sword:

Striking union workers politely offering coffee to their replacement workers:

I love how the workers of IRI JOSIKS will “Striike to yur strike”.

And of course, we need an economics professor teaching while wearing a sweater vest:

Clearly, that’s the best photo of the bunch.

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