{"id":476843,"date":"2022-07-22T23:36:25","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T20:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/openais-dall-e-2-is-the-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green\/"},"modified":"2022-07-22T23:36:25","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T20:36:25","slug":"openais-dall-e-2-is-the-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/openais-dall-e-2-is-the-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green\/","title":{"rendered":"#OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E 2 is the big tech equivalent of \u2018soylent green\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a3e2199d39c3\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a3e2199d39c3\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-1'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/openais-dall-e-2-is-the-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green\/#%E2%80%9COpenAIs_DALL-E_2_is_the_big_tech_equivalent_of_%E2%80%98soylent_green%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E 2 is the big tech equivalent of \u2018soylent green\u2019&#8221;<\/a><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-2' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/openais-dall-e-2-is-the-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green\/#Greetings_humanoids\" >Greetings, humanoids<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h1><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9COpenAIs_DALL-E_2_is_the_big_tech_equivalent_of_%E2%80%98soylent_green%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E 2 is the big tech equivalent of \u2018soylent green\u2019&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h1>\n<div id=\"article-main-content\">\n                            This article contains spoilers for the 1973 film \u201c<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Soylent_Green\">Soylent Green<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a hot AI summer out here for everyone who has even the slightest interest in putting the \u201cart\u201d in artificial intelligence. I\u2019m talking about DALL-E 2 and OpenAI\u2019s announcement that its incredible text-to-art generator would be entering a closed-beta.<\/p>\n<p>Most exciting of all: an additional one million people will gain access to DALL-E 2. Woohoo! Let\u2019s do a cartwheel.<\/p>\n<div class=\"inarticle-wrapper neural channel-cta hs-embed-tnw\">\n<div id=\"hs-embed-tnw\" class=\"channel-cta-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"channel-cta-img\"><img class=\"js-lazy\" https:=\"\"\/><\/div>\n<p><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/src=\" https:=\"\"\/><\/noscript><\/p>\n<div class=\"channel-cta-input\">\n<h2 class=\"channel-cta-title\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Greetings_humanoids\"><\/span>Greetings, humanoids<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"channel-cta-tagline\">Subscribe to our <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/news\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"2\" title=\"News\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">news<\/a>letter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Up front:<\/b> <em>There would be no cartwheels in the Neural offices at TNW that day.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>DALL-E 2 is, in this humble editor\u2019s opinion, a scam. But that\u2019s nothing new in the <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a> world. <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Facebook<\/a> is a scam. Google is a scam. Microsoft is a scam. They\u2019re all profiting off of something that has nothing to do with what they\u2019re telling us they\u2019re selling.<\/p>\n<p>If you lay bricks, you\u2019re a bricklayer. And if you write programs, you\u2019re a programmer. But if you sell ads in 2022, you\u2019re probably a search giant or a social media company. It doesn\u2019t have to make sense so long as it makes profits.<\/p>\n<p>For the most part, big tech makes its profits by convincing you to be the product. Why try and sell everyone on Earth a TV, when it\u2019s easier and more profitable to find a TV manufacturer who\u2019ll pay you for advertising access to just about everyone on Earth?<\/p>\n<p>The data we generate powers the products that these companies sell. The agreement we make with them is pretty much <i>you can use our data to make the product that we\u2019re logging into better<\/i><span>. And, in practice, that basically means that we\u2019re cool with Meta using our surfing data to help advertisers target us as long as we can keep playing Candy Crush for free.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><strong>Background:<\/strong> DALL-E 2 is a fancy extension of OpenAI\u2019s transformer model, currently iterated as \u201cGPT-3.\u201d It takes text prompts and turns them into pictures. It\u2019s mind-bogglingly good and will absolutely 100% revolutionize the world of content creation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Let me be super clear here: I love it. I think it\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s a technological triumph and the whole world deserves access to it (with the giant caveat that OpenAI has to make it safe). <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>However, <\/span><i>selling<\/i><span> access to it is dangerous. It\u2019s not just unethical. It could represent a significant shift from the current level of exploitation big tech\u2019s able to get away with, to a paradigm in which big tech essentially turns us into the digital equivalent of Soylent Green.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><strong>Spoiler alert:<\/strong> Soylent Green is an old movie but it\u2019s a classic. I\u2019m going to spoil the giant twist in this film right now, so you\u2019d best surf away if that\u2019s going to be a problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Per the movie, in a distant future humankind is on the brink of starvation. To survive, the government gives them nutrition bars and that\u2019s all most people ever eat. One day, they come out with a new flavor called \u201cSoylent Green.\u201d Everybody loves it and, luckily, it\u2019s produced in abundance. Unfortunately, it turns out that Soylent Green is made of humans. To solve the starvation problem, the government started processing dead people and feeding them to us. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>So, two things:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span>As I recall, Soylent Green was actually free \u2014 <em>I haven\u2019t watched it in a while, I\u2019m sure a reader will correct me if I\u2019m wrong.<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span>It would be impossible to eat a Soylent Green bar made out of your own dead body. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span>I bring all that up because it explains my problem with OpenAI selling access to DALL-E 2. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><strong>My take:<\/strong> Giving people access to DALL-E 2, with certain protections in place, created an environment in which anyone can peruse what I\u2019d like to call <\/span><i>the library of human imagery as interpreted through a transformer model<\/i><span>. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But the moment OpenAI turned DALL-E 2 into a monetized service (<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/blog\/dall-e-now-available-in-beta\/\">OpenAI allows you to purchase credits for use beyond your beta limit<\/a>), it turned our data into a product and began selling it back to us. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It went from being a library of art that we could all (potentially) enjoy, to a for-profit endeavor. OpenAI even makes it explicit (in the above linked post) that those who have access to the beta are legally entitled to ownership of any artwork the model produces at their request. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Who gave OpenAI the right to sell ownership to images our data helped create?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span>It\u2019s easy to make the comparison to a writer who reads a bunch of books and then uses that inspiration to create a new book.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But that\u2019s not what DALL-E 2 does. Don\u2019t get hung up on the \u201cart\u201d aspect of it. If we descale the model, DALL-E 2 takes a picture, holds on to it, and then hands it to you when you ask for it. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>If it has eight pictures of the ocean, and you tell it to hand you one, it will. But since DALL-E 2 is an agent that only exists in a digital world, it can do things that wouldn\u2019t be practical in the physical realm.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It can smash those eight pictures together and make them one picture. And\u00a0it can even be fine-tuned to decide whether eight is the right number of pictures to smash together or if six would do. Maybe ten? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Eventually, OpenAI gets to the point where its model is smashing millions or billions of images together. It\u2019s still the same trick. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><strong>Wr<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>ing it up:<\/strong> Data is data and output is output. Doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s art, text, or advertising profiles. When Facebook takes your data, it sells that data to advertisers so you can play more Candy Crush.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>When OpenAI takes your data, it never had your permission. You never ticked a box or logged into a website that expressly informed you that any images you put online would be used to train OpenAI\u2019s for-profit AI system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And that means, whether it\u2019s super fun like Candy Crush or super convenient like facial recognition, OpenAI is exploiting you and your data every time someone purchases access to the DALL-E 2 model.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The company took your data and trained a model so well that you don\u2019t have to be a futurist to know that eventually, DALL-E will be as crucial for design as Photoshop is now. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The difference between Adobe and OpenAI, however, is that Adobe gets your permission to train its AI on your data. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Nobody ever asked me if I wanted my face in Clearview AI\u2018s database or OpenAI\u2019s, and I feel the same way about both of them monetizing it. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This sets a dark and dangerous precedence for the use of scraped data going forward. <\/span>\n                        <\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMLG0nwswvr63Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">For forums sites go to <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/forum.buradabiliyorum.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/technology\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Technology category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/opinion-openais-dall-e-2-big-tech-equivalent-of-soylent-green\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E 2 is the big tech equivalent of \u2018soylent green\u2019&#8221; This article contains spoilers for the 1973 film \u201cSoylent Green.\u201d It\u2019s a hot AI summer out here for everyone who has even the slightest interest in putting the \u201cart\u201d in artificial intelligence. I\u2019m talking about DALL-E 2 and OpenAI\u2019s announcement that its incredible text-to-art&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":476844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img-cdn.tnwcdn.com\/image\/neural?filter_last=1&fit=1280,640&url=https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2022\/07\/soylent-green.jpg&signature=07d0a0efc149b4140408b2cb574a8b86","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}