Hello children of the internet. This episode is short and sweet because I have important paid work to do — I will not be apologising for the errors in spelling and grammar.

This week was sort of okay I guess? 🤷. I’m going to briefly talk about my lack of respect for OpenAI…

🤖 If you weren’t on the waiting list for DALL-E 2… you’re an idiot.

It’s time! The first million people on DALL-E 2’s waiting list can now pay to use it on subscription. You can use this to create mood boards or concept art or anything you can’t be bothered to draw yourself. You can also just use it for fun, but it’s $15 for 115 goes which sounds like a good deal, but if you think about how many prompts that won’t do what you want them to do, it might not be so great.

There’s also the other thing: the racial and gender bias present in the model (yes that thing we’re all tired of hearing about, because AI companies continue to release products without really fixing this problem). My solution would be to simply stop churning out so much AI tat; Open AI’s solution is just to mitigate the bias after the fact. That means placing heavy controls on what kind of prompts you can put in, and censoring images afterwards. So, in essence, they are just putting a plaster on it, and no ‘fixes’ are applied to the model itself.

Controlling prompts is an interesting one. You can’t search ‘naked Jennifer Lawrence’ which makes lots of sense, but you also can’t search ‘dog that has been run over’ or anything gory like that. However you can search ‘dog taking a nap in a puddle of red paint in the middle of the road’. There are work-arounds, basically.

There’s also the OTHER other thing: uh… remember how OpenAI used to be a non-profit? Remember that? They said that they wanted to “build value for everyone rather than shareholders” and also to make sure AI didn’t shit all over humanity. Well, that unrealistic motivation lasted about four years, at which point they realised just how much money AI products could make them. They switched to being for-profit in 2019, and then received a $1bn cash injection from Microsoft, so that they could have exclusivity to some of their products.

This really is a classic tale in tech. A plucky little AI non-profit comes to terms with the fact that their activities are extremely expensive, and so accepts money from a tech giant, and now is at their mercy. The system WORKS (for shareholders).