There’s a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)—made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains—often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability.
Shutterstock is well aware of the ethical concerns. In its announcement, the company said it plans on launching a fund to compensate artists who contributed to any AI art generation through the DALL-E 2 integration. This includes paying artists royalties when the AI-generated art they helped inspire is used.
“innovate_rye isn’t alone. Since OpenAI unveiled the latest application programming interface (API) for its widely-used language model, GPT-3, more students have begun feeding written prompts into OpenAI’s Playground and similar programs that use deep learning to generate text. The results continue the initial prompt in a natural-sounding way, and often can’t be distinguished from human-written text.”
“Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore. They already have, albeit around simpler AI systems. In 2020, Jay-Z ‘s record label filed copyright strikes against a YouTube channel, Vocal Synthesis, for using AI to create Jay-Z covers of songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” After initially removing the videos, YouTube reinstated them, finding the takedown requests were “incomplete.” But deepfaked music still stands on murky legal ground.”
Despite some dubious recent claims—for example, the ex-Google engineer who claimed a chatbot had gained sentience before being fired—we’re pretty far off from that reality. Instead, one of the biggest barriers to a robot overlord situation is the simple fact that compared to animals and humans, current AI and machine learning systems are lacking in reason, a concept essential to the development of “autonomous” machine intelligence systems—that is, AI that can learn on the fly, directly from observations of the real world, rather than lengthy training sessions to perform a specific task.
Google’s latest flagship phones have an impressive set of automated, AI-powered tools to help make your photos look better, with smart blurs, object removal and skin tone exposure. While we’ll have to test them out to see if they work as advertised, they could be useful for everyone from pixel peepers to casual snapshot takers.
