Thread by @pereztruglia

I always wanted to create illustrations for my research papers, but I have no artistic skills whatsoever. Thanks to @OpenAI, that’s no longer a problem.

I had a blast creating with DALLE, and I encourage you to try it too.

My favorite creations below 👇

#EconTwitter

The paper “What’s My Employee Worth?” (with @zoebcullen and @ShengwuLi) is about how employers figure out the right salaries for their employees.

I asked DALLE for “a weight with a businesswoman on the left plate and cash on the right plate.”

The paper “Partisan Interactions” is about how Republicans and Democrats exert social pressure on each other.

I wanted to be a bit more abstract here, so I asked DALLE for “a red person inside a herd of blue people.”

The paper “Choosing Your Pond” (with @NicoLBot) is about how choosing your reference group reveals your preferences for relative income.

I wanted something cute, so I asked DALLE for “a fish jumping from a small fishbowl to a large fishbowl.”

The paper “The Effects of Income Transparency on Well-Being” is about how income transparency makes people happier, or less happy, due to social comparisons.

I wanted a dark spin, so I asked DALLE for “a man holding a pile of gold coins while a woman looks at him with envy.”

There are two remarkable things from this last illustration. First, I never specified that the woman should be holding anything, but AI decided to give her a single coin to emphasize that she was poorer. And I didn't ask that the man should be looking down on the woman.

Last, I asked DALLE for "a Nobel-winning idea for an economics paper." No luck there. It looks like I'll have to wait a few more years until they add that feature...

And if you had not heard of DALLE before and want to learn more, there are lots of newspapers articles on the topic. For example:
nytimes.com/2022/04/06/tec…