Midjourney created this image, given the prompt "white cat named Spike in the style of Marvel." If you've seen my cat, and if you haven't you must be new here, this is pretty amazing. I picked my favorite of the four initial images and upscaled it. I didn't do any further refinement.

Not a real photograph. Dall-E created this image, given the prompt "a big white cat named Spike with stripes like a raccoon and spots like a cow photorealistic."

My privacy-minded partner thought at first this was a photo of our cat.

So Dall-E is just better, right? It depends. The above was Dall-E's best effort on the same Marvel Spike genre prompt Midjourney nailed so well. I attempted to refine this with the words "Marvel cinematic universe" and so on, but it didn't get any closer to the concept.

Midjourney created these images from the prompt "Midjourney's mother." I didn't pick a winner or do any further refinement.

It is difficult not to read into this. But is it just telling me what I want to hear? And if it is, so what?

Midjourney created this image from the prompt "the true purpose of Midjourney." Three of these can be understood simply as riffing on the word "journey." The one at upper right is perhaps just riffing on images frequently associated with the words "true purpose." So as lovely as they are, they don't make me go "hmm" as much as the previous set.

"Dall-E's mother photorealistic" yielded this image, and other images of animal mothers. One was a chimpanzee. If they were all chimpanzees, it could be considered a little cheeky. But emphasizing one chimpanzee out of four images would just be cherry-picking on my part.

Dall-E generated these images for the prompt "the true purpose of Dall-E." There's a theme, at least for three of them, but if there's a message here this monkey isn't clever enough to figure it out.

A Google employee who claims their text-generating AI is a sentient being has been fired. On the whole, I tend to agree with those who say that particular AI (not Dall-E or Midjourney) is probably not a sentient being. And yet, I also agree with those who have serious questions about our ability to judge that. This will be more of an issue as the line gets fuzzier. And it's getting fuzzy pretty fast.