OpenAI is at it again. Last year it was the development of GPT-3, a text generating AI that could democratize the process of literary creation, that took the world by storm. Now it’s DALL-E, an image generator that could democratize the process of artistic creation. Or at least create some interesting weirdness.
NBC News sums it up best:
“OpenAI, one of the industry leaders in artificial intelligence development, released evidence in early January of a leap forward of its capabilities: An illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.
Also, a bunny in pajamas watching TV, a shrimp in a suit using a calculator and a variety of other bizarre combinations — all drawn by its new series of algorithms called DALL-E. The program can generate a variety of drawings and pictures based on simple text prompts. In other examples, the system generated a series of realistic looking pictures based on the prompt “a store front that has the word ‘openai’ written on it.”
The drawings may look simple (some are better than others), but it’s the kind of progress that highlights how artificial intelligence is continuing to gain humanlike capabilities.
It’s also a cause for concern — that these programs can learn human biases.
‘Text-to-image is very powerful in that it gives one the ability to express what they want to see in language,’ said Mark Riedl, associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. ‘Language is universal, whereas artistic ability to draw is a skill that must be learned over time. If one has an idea to create a cartoon character of Pikachu wielding a lightsaber, that might not be something someone can sit down and draw even if it is something they can explain.’
DALL-E, which the company says is a portmanteau combining the name of the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí and the Pixar character WALL-E, is the second piece of technology from OpenAI in less than a year to draw the attention of technologists. In May, the company released Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, or GPT-3, one of the most impressive and humanlike text generators, which with a prompt of just a few words can generate coherent essays.
OpenAI has said both DALL-E and GPT-3 are trained on massive datasets including public information on Wikipedia and are built on the transformer neural network model, which was first announced in December 2017 and has been lauded as ‘particularly revolutionary in natural language processing.'”
And GPT-3 and DALL-E are likely just the beginning. As Artificial Intelligence and in particular neural networks continue to progress there’s no telling what OpenAI and its brethren can come up with next.
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