OpenAI, the San Francisco-based research company behind the breakthrough AI language generator GPT-3, has developed a new system that can create images from short text captions.

In a blog post, OpenAI said that DALL-E, a portmanteau of artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s robot hero WALL-E, had demonstrated the ability to create images “for a wide range of concepts”. Among its illustrations is a picture of an armchair shaped like an avocado.

Images generated by neural networks, a type of machine learning that can spot patterns, are not new. Generative adversarial networks, which rely on a pair of neural networks — one creating content and the other assessing how close it is to a desired output — have been used to create images of realistic humans, cats, rental properties and snacks.