Openai CEO Sam Altman acknowledges the shortcomings of AI-generated art, but continues to argue that the surge in popularity brings the overall benefits of society.
“I think democratizing content creation was a huge net victory for society. It wasn’t a complete victory. There was certainly something negative about it, and certainly something about art form, but overall I think it was a victory.”
Altman’s remarks come against the backdrop of awkward debate about the AI-generated art that has been re-expressed by the recent trends in the virus Ghibli AI on social media.
The floodgates were opened when Openai introduced native image generation functions equipped with the GPT-4O model within ChatGPT. Soon, images generated by art-style AI from Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli were all over the internet. The incident deepened the rift between AI enthusiasts and their critics.
Altman also touched on other polarization issues, such as the automation of AI coding, its impact on the job market, and its impact on India as AI use case capital. The key highlights of the podcast are:
“People with different abilities will have more competition.”
Amidst backlash from Ghibli fans and AI critics, legendary animator and studio co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has emerged online. The video is said to have shown Miyazaki criticised AI as “an insult to life,” but some users point out that it is out of context.
When Maya asked Altman on video about his criticism of Miyazaki’s AI, the Openai frontman said, “It doesn’t mean that (AI-generated art) doesn’t cause job losses.
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Altman further said he deeply believes in the power of technology to lower entry barriers. “My own experience with this was looking at the barriers to entry to start a company. The open eye itself was an example of a company that ended up happening because the barriers to entry into different technology stacks have been significantly lowered and this bundle of ragtags weren’t we could do,” he said.
Altman’s statement that artists may be competing more for AI is worth noting. Critics have long argued that the generated images of AI models are likely to be trained in the artist’s original work without consent. It raises concerns that these tools could ultimately compete with the creators whose work was built on.
“India is the open and fastest growing market.”
User activity in CHATGPT has reportedly been rising sharply since the development of the text-to-image generation feature.
Altman said the images generated by more than 1 billion ChatGPT are beyond the future, not too distant. Openai’s Chief Operating Officer Brad LightCap announced last week, and more than 130 million users have generated over 700 million images since ChatGpt was upgraded with image generator Brad LightCap.
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“What was exciting for me was the breadth of creative use cases. (…) Obviously, there are a lot of great commercial use cases where people use it to generate new logos and graphic designs,” says Altman.
“India was one of the first markets outside the US and it really jumped into AI in a very big way. It’s now the fastest growing market since this moment happened,” he added.
Lowering ChatGPT subscription rates in price-sensitive markets like India, says Altman: “Unfortunately, our computational costs are still quite high, but we work with a more efficient model. I’m optimistic.
A few weeks
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“The impact of AI on jobs is uneven.”
“It’s different for different types of jobs. There are a few jobs that go completely because AI just does it all the way to the edge. I think most of the time it’s a new tool that allows people to work with a much more productive and high quality,” says Altman.
He hypothesized that there could be a new class of work that was driven by an increase in demand for previously unknown products.
Using the work of a graphic designer as an example, he said taste still matters. “We’re probably going to explode the number of websites we can get (using AI), so there’s more people (graphic design). Maybe there was far more demand for graphic design worldwide than we can afford to meet,” he said.
“The degree to which AI is important for coding”
Altman said that AI can make it possible to predict coders 10 times this year or next year. “If there’s one area in the world that I think there’s far more demand than we can supply now, that’s because we write code,” he said.
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“What happens is that someone who can write code with some value can write code or write software at much higher values. “This will lower the market price of the code, but I’m sure this is an example of Jevons Paradox.”
For context, Jevons Paradox suggests that as technological advances make resource use more efficient, overall consumption of that resource tends to increase.
“People were calling Openai a rapper.”
Altman said there was a time when people probably called companies AWS rappers in response to popular criticism of AI companies such as Perplexity being GPT-Wrapper.
“People are building absolutely incredible new companies based on AI. Most of them will fail or not work, but some of them will find a really lasting business and create a ton of value. That’s always the case,” he said.
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Altman said the most important lesson for entrepreneurs is that if investors were calling the company GPT-Wrapper, they could be heading in a promising direction.
“The 20-year-old Y Combinator has a company idea that is probably completely crazy and bad for me, but it’s probably going to be the next Openai (…). Your crazy idea is my advice.”
As healed expectations for the future of AI, he said, “I thought somehow it would be a bigger change for society than it turned out.”
