The OPENAI concept

I was extremely happy with the Dragon Fantasy Challenge. Though they are mythical creatures, I adore dragons. The great wings, the ability to breath fire, majestically long beautiful bodies, horned heads, gorgeous eyes and the gift of speech are just a few of the amazing qualities of these legendary brave dragons.

My dream of writing exciting narrative about soaring great beasts needed great, funny, adorable and flattering pictures to accompany my humble stories. But, how to get them. My artistic family member, age fourteen, said, "I cannot draw dragons", teenagers, no patience. My forty I won't tell year old friend said, "you know sketching something like this will take a bit of time, too busy, too busy".

Dragons

What was I to do? I can barely draw a decent stick figure.

Maybe everyone knew about OPENAI, DALL*E before this challenge, I am woefully behind the times with technology, but I had not heard of it. So I groaned to myself thinking that I would have to actually create the drawings myself. I ignored the offer by the Vocal prompt to use the AI technology for the first few days. Out of sheer desperation, and finding no pretty dragons on Unsplash, I decided to try the DALL*E suggestion.

Why did I not lead with that? It was so great, I spoke, or rather wrote and the AI did my bidding. I could finally draw, well, technically I was cheating at drawing, but who cares. I had gorgeous computer-generated drawings at my beck and call. How great is that. Take that, you artistic, talented, totally unwilling gift of God artists who ignore their talents and will not take the time to help me, people. Is it not wonderful, not having to beg and plead for help.

YEAH, OPENAI. YOU ROCK!

The concept

"In December 2015, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other investors announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over US$1 billion to the venture. The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. On April 27, 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research.

On December 5, 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites and other applications.

On February 21, 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing "a potential future conflict (of interest)" with Tesla AI development for self-driving cars, but remained a donor.

In June 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. It also announced that an associated API, named simply "the API", would form the heart of its first commercial product. GPT-3 is aimed at natural language answering of questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text.

In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E. One year later, their newest system, DALL·E 2, generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution". (Wiki)

Moral aspect of the concept

Some scientists like Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, have voiced concerns that if AI's advance towards the capability of re-designing itself at an ever-increasing rate, it could result in an unstoppable 'intelligence explosion' that could lead to the extinction of the human race. Elon Musk characterizes AI as 'humanity's biggest existential threat'.

The founders of Openai initially structured it as non-profit, but that has changed somewhat. "In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit. The company distributed equity to its employees, and partnered with Microsoft Corporation, who announced an investment package of US$1 billion into the company. OpenAI then announced its intention to commercially license its technologies, with Microsoft as its preferred partner".

The software is so user friendly, even I, a total 'old' neophyte in everything electronic, can navigate, generate, save, share, create, make it private or public, have my collections and favorites, among other yet undiscovered ways that I can use the site. Fifty free credits are granted when you first use the AI technology, credits can be bought thereafter, as well as a gift of 15 free credits on the repeat date of the months following. Free credits do not roll over, so use them every month.

OK! So, after watching many movies about how AI's and robots will eventually and potentially take over the world and either kill us or make us their slaves, or worse, make us their pets, I am a little concerned. Actually, we are already their slave/pets. We spend so much time worshipping at the altar of technology that I fear it is already too late for the human race.

I have been saying it, and will continue to say it. "Throw away technology and run for the hills, far away from anything computerized or electronic before it is too late to have a choice".

In the meantime, while we are still debating the issue, I love DALL*E 2 and will continue to use it until it enslaves me.

Thank you!

N.A.