If anyone asked me at the beginning of the year about AI, I would have said, it’s quite useful for text processing and predictive tasks. In the realm of artificial items' creation in graphics, art, or music, it felt like a playground mainly related to the arts.
GPT-3 as an accelerator – GPT-4, entry to the mass market?
The power of GPT-3 unfolded its power, starting in June 2020 and throughout the last years. We saw many upcoming apps using these skills to help you write, structure or code.
Due to their familiarity with the topic, most know or have tried some software for writing text, including jasper, rytr or others. As mentioned in my other article How AI Assistants can help you with text and art, they are useful, but help you more on the surface and for mass-tasks. Maybe GPT-4 will bring massive change and acceleration to the market. GPT-4 is expected to be released in 2023 and will push the market forward again.
Besides known applications, we also find novel approaches to things we are accustomed to, such as "googling", for example. Metaphor is another way to use a search engine, maybe not leading to issues google (and others) are already facing. See my criticism in the article "Value, objectivity and the risk of being trapped by search".
Getting back to GPT-4, most of us don’t know that Microsoft has exclusive rights on GPT-3. When GPT-4 comes out, it may give them an edge. They could add new features to Microsoft Word to make it a writing assistant.
The whole AI market helps them filter the best ideas from current apps and incorporate them into their own product. Having started my career in the first dot com bubble, I currently see similar dangers, as startups pop out from nowhere. Prototypes get released and make incredible money within a few days. From self-portrait apps such as Avatar AI and profilepicture.ai to logo makers and Figma plugins like Magician, there are plenty of great tools to help you create amazing designs.
Applying GPT or Stable Diffusion is now more accessible due to decreased entry barriers. On the other hand, we also see giants firing employees (and maybe shifting their business focus towards more integrated AI applications).
Do we face a paradigm change in applied creativity?
During the days of the Renaissance, humanity itself moved into the center of discovery and human creativity. Do we face a paradigm shift towards machines?
I am sure many people think like that, but not only for creative purposes. We ask for more automation in many aspects of our lives and replace repetitive tasks with automation. In my opinion, this is fine.
It's unsettling how rapidly technology is evolving. Everyone could start generating their own comics, storylines, always supported by AI.
On the one hand we have the text-to-image generators, on the other we see tools writing for oneself and adding other dimensions of ideas. For me, it feels nearly impossible to keep track of all the developments.
With the release of ChatGPT on the 30th of November, another fascinating tool arrived on the scene. If you ask ChatGPT what it is, it answers something like this: ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot that allows users to interact and ask questions with a virtual assistant in real time. This chatbot is driven by an advanced machine learning algorithm that adapts to the user's conversational style and interests to provide a customized and enjoyable chat experience. This chatbot can be used to write poems, to do some programming for you or write songs. Explore the creativity of users on Twitter and you will see that there’s nearly no limit. The hype cycle of innovation and the peak of inflated expectations is already here.
Various business ideas around ChatGPT see the light of day each day. With the release of GPT4 we might reach another crazy dimension of text to anything tools. Bloomberg titles “ChatGPT Could Be AI’s iPhone Moment". I guess not yet, but we are close. My guess would be GPT4 would be this moment as ChatGPT is a kind of version GPT3.5 and already shows how impressive it is.
The development speed is incredible. Stable Diffusion is currently available in version 2.1, making progress on some details, and accelerating other tools such as the hyped lensa app (available for iOS as well).
In June I thought, Dall-E mini was wow, but since summer we have seen more advanced wows with midjourney, dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion.
As I mentioned in my article Speaking computer language – welcome AI Art, the text prompt gets more important. Expression of thoughts and ideas as a tool to facilitate creativity. In a current course at university called “Interaction in space”, we touch diverse forms of interactions and now face generative programming. During the course, I told the students that generative programming helps with your creative process. The use of generative programming could generate inspiration and provide you with results and directions you might not have considered. The same applies to text-to-anything converters. It’s a supporting tool in the exploration of ideas.
Looking at text-to-image tools, it is crazy how fast one could test visual ideas and modify them into another direction. With ChatGPT you could generate initial code and modify it with the ChatGPT assistant. Maybe learning programming could get easier for students.
The downside of open data
One of the biggest issues I see currently is the problem with scraping data from the web and using this data for training AI models. There's no control and being a creative I could collect great pieces from my favorite designers and feed my own models. You could scrape data from collections like FWA or CSSDesignAwards to train a Website Design model. Maybe such a solution is already available in the market.
My point is... is it fair? Using data someone else collected and categorized for your own models? As in the hyped times of bitcoin, ethical standards are not the focus of business ideas. It's only about making money. Many people who once mined with cryptocurrencies now lend their GPU power to machine learning. Local learning (I tried with a GeForce 3060) takes ages and the footprint of generating all those models is also huge.
I am concerned about the fact that anyone could work with someone else's data without asking for permission. A new Image format including scraper protection might help since everyone should be able to decide if someone else can access the data. Any blog or written word falls into the same category.
noai and noimageai as a solution against bots – as long as they respect them
After some research, I discovered that there's already a solution for the scraping part of it. Deviant Art introduced the noai and noimageai for all their users by default back in November 2022: UPDATE All Deviations Are Opted Out of AI Datasets.
The solution could also be implemented fairly easily on your website – so this is only a bot protection if the bot respects the rules:
Don't allow AI at all:
<meta name="robots" content="noai">
Don't allow AI to use images:
<meta name="robots" content="noimageai">
Make sure none is used
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai">Still the problem is the ethical agreement itself. The idea of a Hippocratic Oath for developers, ML applicants or anyone using AI is great. Scrapers/bots need to respect rules and those rules must be implemented directly. Similar to early stages of privacy policies, there's no opt-in by default. It's always an opt-out by default before anyone uses another's data.
As artists are mostly affected, it is great to support them by using the protected good of major corporations, see the discussion and examples in this post. Or the way ArtStation reacted, by removing its own creations.
For all creatives I could finally say: trust in ideas and learn to use generative AI.
Block ChatGPT from your website
In addition to the former options to prevent the usage of your images, since August 2023 there are ways to also indicate that ChatGPT should respect your content and not index it. To do so, put the following code into the robots.txt file. Opting out seems the new paradigm.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /Living in Europe, I am quite sure, we will have new regulations in the near future; that on the one hand do good at saying no to auto-opt in, but on the other hand add too much overhead, which stops progress.
In the end, it will be interesting what happens if many AI-generated contents flood the internet and AI crawlers work with this mostly generative, bad content. In German there's an expression "the cat bites its tail", which means it's kind of a circulating problem not coming to an end (similar to the expression catch-22).
Related Contents
Microsoft and OpenAI Working on ChatGPT-Powered Bing in Challenge to Google
Updates from January 2023:
A helpful explanation about some parts ChatGPT is struggling with and about how WolframAlpha might be helpful: Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT
Great article on the consent issue from the creators of haveibeentrained.com: AI Art and the Problem of Consent.
The Great Generative AI Debate: To Use or Abuse?
All online Contents should be crawlable for AI
Updates from October 2023:
Data Poisoning generative Image Models