OpenAI IS DESTROYING CULTURAL HERITAGE. Everyone studying at an art academy to become a professional creative, still has access to creative tools from distant eras, like the Raphaël Kolinsky Sable 8404 brush series, the Polaroid SX-70 camera, or Roland’s TB-303 Bass Line synthesizer (or accurate modern recreations of them), precisely so they can experience, study and learn from the past. So they themselves can decide whether those tools may once again become relevant in the present. There are people who nostalgically look back at DALL·E. But there are many more creatives who already understood how unique that tool truly was, precisely because of its own distinct aesthetic language. Artists such as Suzy One Kenobi never wanted to see #DALL·E disappear. That is what makes it so painful when #OpenAI suddenly decides to kill something that had become #culturally, #technologically and #historically significant. Not because it was merely a sentimental #AI artifact from the past, but because it was a genuinely unique creative instrument. It does not really matter whether someone only developed that appreciation after the system disappeared. The fact that such a tool can simply be taken away from artists altogether feels, at the very least, culturally irresponsible.
OPENAI EUTHANIZED DALL·E TODAY. They officially retired DALL·E, DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3. For many artists this feels like losing an instrument. Opportunists jump from trend to trend, quickly generating a few images before showing the results on LinkedIn as if they mastered an entirely new medium overnight. What wannabes fail to understand is that REAL artists often develop emotional attachments to their tools. Serious #artists spend years studying their instruments. Quirks, imperfections, embracing unpredictable accidents. Today I watched artist Suzy One Kenobi become genuinely sad over OpenAI euthanizing DALL·E 3. Suzy One, from ANÓTHER DIMENSION, recognized by the Financial Times as one of Amsterdam’s 750 Tech Scene Change Makers, over time built a personal relationship with DALL·E 2 and 3. Her work was noticed by artistic peers including Bas Kosters, Arno Coenen, Walter Van Beirendonck and Christie Wright from Moooi, exactly because of the unique visual language Suzy developed. What she loved about DALL·E 3 was that it simply wasn't advanced enough to fully comprehend the complexity of her layered prompt structures. Paradoxically that became part of the artistic #collaboration itself. Where DALL·E 3 shined was materials. Synthetic fur. Glossy enameled ceramics. Artificial plastics. Chrome. Reflective surfaces. At the end of today, Suzy and I sat down together and created the farewell image you see here. Ironically, NOT using ANYTHING OpenAI. We trained krea.ai’s model 2 to understand Suzy One’s visual language. We optimized typography afterwards using Gemini Nanobanana 2. The resulting image became a multimodal collab between us, her agent, and multiple AI models to mimic one: DALL•E 3. People familiar with Western culture recognize the figure inside the glass coffin: a fusion between #Pixar’s WALL·E and Dalí, the two cultural references that originally inspired #DALL·E's naming. To me, this moment also AGAIN says something about #OpenAI. I have written before about how little value OpenAI seems to attach to 'culture'. Today reinforces such. OpenAI benefited enormously from artists, speculative creatives, designers and experimental thinkers during the rise of GenAI. Yet culturally there appears very little respect for preserving historically important creative tools once they are no longer commercially optimal. Midjourney still allows users access to their first models, understanding something fundamentally important: artists remain attached to the tools that become part of their artistic identity. I believe OpenAI should build a museum of retired models. A place where historically important systems remain accessible for experimentation and cultural study. Including that bizarre transitional model between DALL·E 2 and 3 that we internally simply called 'Experimental.' Back when experimentation itself was still culturally valued inside OpenAI. It never made it. And what OpenAI did today, honestly, feels very close to vandalism.