Here's what Pokemon cards look like to the DALL-E art generator across the decades.
One of the cooler trends of 2022 so far is the DALL-E art generator, an online tool that you can ask to make art for you based on specific prompts. Although there have been several popular art generators over the past few years, DALL-E seems to be the most popular and manages to make some of the more detailed pieces of art from the prompts.
Twitter user xkcd decided that they wanted to test the DALL-E art generator (specifically the DALL-E 2) and ask it to create Pokemon cards from 2001 all the way back to 4000 BCE. The cards from 2001 start out pretty recognisable, ignoring the fact that they're called Polockn, Pastobok, and Pitoklen, and look like the sort of thing you might find in bootleg Pokemon packs. Gold star so far, DALL-E.
The next bunch of cards generated by DALL-E are meant to resemble ones from 1980, and to be fair they do look like the sort of cards you'd get with a stick of bubblegum. DALL-E also seems to have some sort of obsession with Pikachu here, as it's the only Pokemon it's tried to recreate. After that is cards from the 1970s and these look seriously cool and simplistic, even if Potockaton will give you nightmares for life.
As the art generator goes even further back from the 1960s all the way to 1900, the cards get noticeably simpler, losing a fair bit of their colour and going for more washed out designs. All of these weird Pikachu rip-offs look like they'd be right at home trying to sell you some kind of miracle tonic for your ails, but at least we see a few more Pokemon-esque creatures chucked in here.
The thread goes even further back in time, showing cards all the way from 1890 to 4.1 billion years ago when the Earth's crust was still solidifying. That is absolutely a ditto, by the way, so I guess we've figured out what the first ever Pokemon truly was.