Dall-E Minis Could Be A Slam Dunk For Brands

3 min readJun 15, 2022

If you’ve been on Twitter in the last four to five days, you’ve likely seen a plethora of DALL-E mini images, the six-photo grid created by an open-source AI program that can transmute human language descriptions into their near-exact corresponding images. OpenAI has three different versions of its program. DALL-E mini, at Hugging Face, is currently the most popular version because it produces the silliest, most imaginative images.

DALL-E, at OpenAI, is a bit more sophisticated. Therefore, the images are a lot more realistic and less meme-able. OpenAI has also launched its waitlist for DALL-E 2, the upgraded and improved version of DALL-E.

If you’ve never heard of AI-generated art, it might take a minute to wrap your head around the concept, but it’s really as simple as it sounds. To make your own masterpiece, you simply type in a description of what you want the image to look like and DALL-E mini will generate an image, although with varying results.

Twitter Gimmick Account Weird Dall-E Generations (@weirddalle) has had a huge week. The account, created in February 2022, has racked up more than 500k followers since June 9th after the account began to share DALL-E mini images on June 7th. As awareness of DALL-E mini grew over the last week, @weirddalle continued to post the humorous and outrageous images, typically crediting the original creator in the same thread.

As Twitter obsessed over this limitless meme generator and site traffic to Weird Dall-E Generations increased, we discovered something interesting. Images from Weird Dall-E Generations that include a brand name have performed, on average, 64% better in terms of user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). Of the 126 posts from @weirddalle, only 13 of them featured brand names in the search. Those 13 posts averaged 132k likes, 10.5k shares, and 288 comments each. In comparison, the other 113 posts without brand names in the search title averaged 67.9k likes, 4.9k shares, and 210 comments per post.

Understandably, brands haven’t really experimented with sharing their own DALL-E minis yet. Social media managers are likely waiting for the dust to settle a bit on this viral trend that at first glance might be deemed unusable due to certain brand safety connotations like the Fisher-Price Guillotine. But when you look at the numbers on how users are reacting to this niche of outrageous and nonsensical brand imagery, there is a clear connection between the power of meme marketing and the current sensation surrounding DALL-E mini.

Don’t just take our word for it, see for yourself how these branded DALL-E minis performed.

Brands are understandably apprehensive about being the first to join a viral trend but user reception to these memes offer social media teams another piece of evidence of the effectiveness of using meme marketing. Another commonality you might have noticed in the branded DALL-E minis is bridging fandoms into brand perception. This is a great place for brands to start in beginning to brainstorm the fundamentals for their own meme marketing, whether it’s a DALL-E mini or not. For more on the effectiveness of meme marketing as a brand, check out our recent post on Brand Meme Discourse 101.

Dall-E Minis Could Be A Slam Dunk For Brands

Written by Know Your Meme Insights