by Kate Hedrick
Arts, Style, & Beauty Editor
Artificial intelligence has been a source of existential dread for as long as it has existed. From AM to Hal 9000 to Skynet, it seems like humanity has been anticipating a hostile AI takeover for decades now. Thanks to Microsoft, the wait is over, and our robot overlords are here. Rather than waging war against humanity as seen in sci-fi, they’re taking over from the inside- and doing our jobs for us.
OpenAI, a subsidiary of tech giant Microsoft, debuted two software programs that can generate written work and images without the need for human creators. The speed with which they can produce pieces indistinguishable from those made by humans is nothing short of a technological wonder. These programs go by the names of DALL-E and ChatGPT.
DALL-E, named for surrealist painter Salvador Dali, was first unveiled by OpenAI in 2021. It took the internet by storm in its infancy, being able to create intricate and shockingly realistic images of whatever a user could think of. The software’s structure is simple: input a description, and it will produce an image to match. My first image was generated using the description of ‘Jaguar anchoring a TV broadcast’.
If we look past the lack of eyes and the scrambled mess of data that is the jaguar’s hand, it’s shockingly high quality for an image made by a robot. It wouldn’t look out of place on a Bradley news broadcast- it even includes the signature Bradley B. However, some are advising against premature celebration. There are many ethical questions that have arisen as a result of AI art programs such as DALL-E, and the majority of them are being asked by artists.
Firstly, is AI art real art? The dictionary wouldn’t say so. The Oxford English dictionary describes art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”, which inherently excludes AI generated images from counting as art.
ChatGPT is a Microsoft-owned artificial intelligence chatbot launched in November of 2022, making it a younger sibling of DALL-E. The bot fulfills a litany of functions from essay writing, to providing ideas, to answering a user’s questions. The conversational and human-like way in which it talks with the user is innovative to some, but deeply unnerving to others. While many articles have been published jumping to conclusions one way or the other about the software, I prefer to let the AI speak for itself. So I held an interview with it.
The AI was quick to remind me that, being an AI, it does not have beliefs or opinions. Instead, it operates on a purely factual basis. It stated that “these tools are not meant to replace human writers or critical thinking skills. They can assist in generating ideas and organizing information, but ultimately, it's up to the writer to create a cohesive and well-supported argument.” This has not stopped widespread worry about works written ChatGPT completely overshadowing work written by humans.
There is some merit to this. There have been reports of independent publishers being inundated with AI generated spam, much to the detriment of human authors just hoping to make a living through self-publishing.