It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it.
“Almost always, we build something and then we all have to use it for a while,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s cofounder and CEO, tells MIT Technology Review. “We try to figure out what it’s going to be, what it’s going to be used for.”
Not this time. As they tinkered with the model, everyone involved realized this was something special. “It was very clear that this was it—this was the product,” says Altman. “There was no debate. We never even had a meeting about it.”
But nobody—not Altman, not the DALL-E team—could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. “This is the first AI technology that has caught fire with regular people,” says Altman.
DALL-E 2 dropped in April 2022. In May, Google announced (but did not release) two text-to-image models of its own, Imagen and Parti. Then came Midjourney, a text-to-image model made for artists. And August brought Stable Diffusion, an open-source model that the UK-based startup Stability AI has released to the public for free.
The doors were off their hinges. OpenAI signed up a million users in just 2.5 months. More than a million people started using Stable Diffusion via its paid-for service Dream Studio in less than half that time; many more used Stable Diffusion through third-party apps or installed the free version on their own computers. (Emad Mostaque, Stability AI’s founder, says he’s aiming for a billion users.)
And then in October we had Round Two: a spate of text-to-video models from Google, Meta, and others. Instead of just generating still images, these can create short video clips, animations, and 3D pictures.
The pace of development has been breathtaking. In just a few months, the technology has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive—and set off an intense backlash.
This story is part of our upcoming 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023 series. Sign up for The Download to get the full list in January.
“The shock and awe of this technology is amazing—and it’s fun, it’s what new technology should be,” says Mike Cook, an AI researcher at King’s College London who studies computational creativity. “But it’s moved so fast that your initial impressions are being updated before you even get used to the idea. I think we’re going to spend a while digesting it as a society.”
Artists are caught in the middle of one of the biggest upheavals in a generation. Some will lose work; some will find new opportunities. A few are headed to the courts to fight legal battles over what they view as the misappropriation of images to train models that could replace them.
Creators were caught off guard, says Don Allen Stevenson III, a digital artist based in California who has worked at visual-effects studios such as DreamWorks. “For technically trained folks like myself, it’s very scary. You’re like, ‘Oh my god—that’s my whole job,’” he says. “I went into an existential crisis for the first month of using DALL-E.”
The image above is based on a variation of the prompt that created the final art. “After landing on an image I was happy with, I went in and made adjustments to clean up any AI artifacts and make it look more ‘real.’ I’m a big fan of sci-fi from that era,” explains Erik Carter.ERIK CARTER VIA DALL-E 2
But while some are still reeling from the shock, many—including Stevenson—are finding ways to work with these tools and anticipate what comes next.
The exciting truth is, we don’t really know. For while creative
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By: Will Douglas Heaven
Title: Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/16/1065005/generative-ai-revolution-art/
Published Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2022 09:12:05 +0000
Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/chinese-chips-will-keep-powering-your-everyday-life/