Vox

A picture of a sea voter's head inside an oval gilded frame. Christina Animashaun/Vox; Courtesy of OpenAI. A new AI draws delightful and not- ...

“We are, in a sense, building the plane as it is taking off.” But it’s easy to see how these incentives may be misaligned for producing AI that truly benefits all of humanity. It’s also to be expected in any organization that aims to make a profit. “There’s a lot you can’t predict, so it’s valuable to get in contact with reality,” he said. In February, before DALL-E 2 was released, OpenAI invited 23 external researchers to “red team” it — engineering-speak for trying to find as many flaws and vulnerabilities in it as possible, so the system could be improved. The fact that the deployment approach has changed for DALL-E 2 seems like a positive step. And you’ve got to wonder: Is that acceleration a good thing, at this stage? OpenAI knew about the bias problems but released the model anyway to a limited group of vetted developers and companies, who could use GPT-3 for commercial purposes. As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it: millions of images scraped off the internet and their corresponding captions. But there is also the risk that DALL-E 2 — like so many other cutting-edge AI systems — will reinforce harmful stereotypes and biases, and in doing so, accentuate some of our social problems. “Bias is a huge industry-wide problem that no one has a great, foolproof answer to,” Miles Brundage, the head of policy research at OpenAI, told me. That’s a change from how OpenAI chose to deploy GPT-3, a text generator hailed for its potential to enhance our creativity.