This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This has been a wild year for AI. If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably bumped into images generated by AI systems like DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, or jokes, essays,…
In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a…
This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine? Since it was released in late November, ChatGPT has been used by over a million people. It has the AI…
It’s no secret that people harbor biases — some unconscious, perhaps, and others painfully overt. The average person might suppose that computers — machines typically made of plastic, steel, glass, silicon, and various metals — are free of prejudice. While that assumption may hold for computer hardware, the same is not always true for computer…
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been at the heart of the San Francisco-based firm since co-founding it with Elon Musk and others in 2015. His vision for the future of AI and how to get there has shaped not only what OpenAI does, but also the direction in which AI research is heading in general….
Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the world’s most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it has announced. Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Hendon who have built a website called HaveIBeenTrained, that allows…
It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps,…
Sketch a doodle of a drum or a saxophone to conjure a multi-instrumental composition. Look into a webcam, speak, and watch your mouth go bouncing across the screen — the input for a series of charmingly clunky chain reactions. This is what visitors to the MIT Lewis Music Library encounter when they interact with two…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. My social media feeds this week have been dominated by two hot topics: OpenAI’s latest chatbot, ChatGPT, and the viral AI avatar app Lensa. I love playing around with new technology, so…
When I tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, I was hoping to get results similar to some of my colleagues at MIT Technology Review. The digital retouching app was first launched in 2018 but has recently become wildly popular thanks to the addition of Magic Avatars, an AI-powered feature which generates digital portraits…