[nutanc]

I would associate a bird with a bird. I wouldn't associate birmongle with bird just because both start with the token "bir". What Dalle is doing here is what it has been trained to do. Just find the closest token match and try to draw something. It does not understand something. And that's absolutely fine. I am just saying it does not have a secret language or something. It's just regular language and it's closest matches.

[adastra22]

But there's nothing particularly avian about the phonemes "bird". Your brain just matches that pattern of sounds to the nearest concept in thought-space, which happens to describe birds. That's what language is, a consistent mapping of words to concepts.

Which seems to also be what this article is describing.

[aetherson]

I think the weird thing is that it creates these "words" and uses them in its output.