Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere — or at least, that’s what it seems like to me: A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned in passing that his law professor had warned students not to cheat with AI on an upcoming exam. At the same time, I couldn’t escape the uncanny portraits people were generating with the image-editing app Lensa AI’s new Magic Avatar feature and then sharing on social media. A guy on Twitter even used OpenAI’s new machine learning-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, to imitate what I said on a recent podcast (which, coincidentally, was also about ChatGPT) and posted it online.
Welcome to the age of generative AI, when it’s now possible for anyone to create new, original illustrations and text by simply sending a few instructions to a computer program. Several generative AI models, including ChatGPT and an image generator called Stable Diffusion, can now be accessed online for free or for a low-cost subscription, which means people across the world can do everything from assemble a children’s book to produce computer code in just a few clicks. This tech is impressive, and it can get pretty close to writing and illustrating how a human might. Don’t believe me? Here’s a Magic School Bus short story ChatGPT wrote about Ms. Frizzle’s class trip to the Fyre Festival. And below is an illustration I asked Stable Diffusion to create about a family celebrating Hanukkah on the moon.
Generative AI’s results aren’t always perfect, and we’re certainly not dealing with an all-powerful, super AI — at least for now. Sometimes its creations are flawed, inappropriate, or don’t totally make sense. If you were going to celebrate Hanukkah on the moon, after all, you probably wouldn’t depict giant Christmas ornaments strewn across the lunar surface. And you might find the original Magic School Bus stories more entertaining than my AI-generated one.
Still, even in its current form and with its current limitations, generative AI could automate some tasks humans do daily — like writing form emails or drafting simple legal contracts — and possibly make some kinds of jobs obsolete. This technology presents plenty of opportunities, but plenty of complex new challenges, too. Writing emails may suddenly have gotten a lot easier, for example, but catching cheating students has definitely gotten a lot harder.
It’s only the beginning of this tech, so it can be hard to make sense of what exactly it is capable of or how it could impact our lives. So we tried to answer a few of the biggest questions surrounding generative AI right now.
Very simply, a generative AI system is designed to produce something new based on its previous experience. Usually, this technology is developed with a technique called machine learning, which involves teaching an artificial intelligence to perform tasks by exposing it to lots and lots of data, which it “trains” on and eventually learns to mimic. ChatGPT, for example, was trained on an enormous quantity of text available on the internet, along with scripts of dialogue, so that it could imitate human conversations. Stable Diffusion is an image generator created by the startup Stability.AI that will produce an image for you based on text instructions, and was designed by feeding the AI images and their associated captions collected from the web, which allowed the AI to learn what it should “illustrate” based on the verbal commands it received.
While the particular approaches used to build generative AI models can differ, this technology is ultimately trying to reproduce human behavior, creating new content based on the content that humans have already created. In some ways, it’s like the smart compose features you see on your iPhone when you’re texting or your Gmail account when you’re typing out an email. “It learns to detect patterns in this content, which in turn allows it to generate similar but distinct content,” explains Vincent Conitzer, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon.
