Mira Murati, welcome to The Daily Show.
Thank you for having me.
So many people have seen the images that DALL-E creates.
Many people may even think they understand it.
But let's get into it.
Like, how does an AI create an image?
Because it's not copying the image.
That's right, yeah.
It's not taking from something else.
It is creating an image from nothing.
How is it doing this?
Exactly.
It's an original image never seen before.
And we have been making images since the beginning of time,
and we simply took a great deal of these images
and we fed them into this AI system.
And it learned this relationship
between the description of the image and the image itself.
Right.
It learned these patterns.
And eventually, it was generating
images that were original.
They were not copies of what it had seen before.
Right.
And basically, the way that it learns,
the magic is just understanding the patterns
and analyzing the patterns between a lot of information,
a lot of training data that we have fed into this system.
There are people who are terrified about this.
I mean, for instance, there was an art competition
and the winner in the art competition
used a version of this kind of software.
Whether it was DALL-E or not, I don't remember.
But they used a version of this kind of software
to create an art piece that won the competition.
Artists were livid.
They were like, well, this is not art!
It was created by, and the artist said, no, the same way
you use a brush, I use a computer,
and that's how I designed this.
Right.
In creating AI, are you constantly
grappling with how it will affect people's jobs
and what people even consider a job?
Yeah, that's a great question.
The technology that we're building
has such a huge effect on society,
but also the society can and should shape it.
And there are a ton of questions
that we're wrestling with every day.
With the technologies that we have
today, like GPT 3 and DALL-E, we
see them as tools, so an extension of our creativity
or our writing abilities.
It's a tool.
Right.
And there isn't anything particularly new about having
a human helper.
Right, right.
Even the ancient Greeks had this concept of human helpers
that when you give something infinite powers of knowledge
or strength or so on, maybe you had to be
wary of the vulnerabilities.
And so these concepts of extending the human abilities
and also being aware of the vulnerabilities are timeless.
And in a sense, we are continuing
this conversation by building AI technologies today.
Well, it might be frightening,
because some people go, oh, the world is going to end
because of this technology.
But in the meantime, it's very fun, I'm not going to lie.
No, because like, you know, DALL-E for instance,
doesn't just create an image from text.
You know, you've also gotten it to the point
now where as a company, you've designed it
so that it can imagine what an image would be.
So for instance, there's that famous image.
It's The Girl with the Pearl Earring.
Right, yeah.
It's a famous image, right, but what DALL-E can do is,
you've got the famous image.
And then DALL-E can expand that.
All of the uses, everything you're seeing that
never existed.
So DALL-E's like, well, this is what
I think it would look like if there was more to this image.
It can assume, it can create, it can inspire.
Yes, it can inspire.
And it makes this beautiful, sometimes touching, sometimes
funny images, and it's really just an extension
of your imagination.
There isn't even a canvas or the boundaries of paper
are not there anymore.
You just extend it.
So how do you safeguard them?
Someone might look at this technology and go, oh, then
you could type in a politician was caught doing something.
Here, now I've got the image.
You've got, and now all the politicians
say, oh, that's not, that's not me,
it was made by that fake program.
We can very quickly find ourselves in a world
where nothing is real and everything that's real
isn't, and we question it.
How do you prevent or can you even prevent that completely?
You know, misinformation and the societal impact
of our technologies, these are very important and
difficult questions.
And I think it's very important to be able to bring the public
along, bring these technologies in the public consciousness,
but in a way that's responsible and safe.
And that's why we have chosen to make DALL-E available.
But with certain guardrails and with certain constraints.
Because we do want people to understand
what AI is capable of.
Right, right.
And we want people in various fields
to think about what it means.
But right now, we I don't feel very
comfortable around the mitigations on misinformation.
Yeah.
And so we do have some guardrails.
For example, we do not allow generation of public figures.
So we will go in the data set and we
will eliminate certain data.
So if you type something in, you can't pull up a,
it can't create a politician for you.
It won't be a picture of that person.
Yes.
So that's the first step, and the training of the model
itself, just looking at the data and auditing it,
making interventions in the data
sets to avoid certain outcomes.
And then later in the deployment stage,
we will look at filters, applying filters, so that when
you put in a prompt, it won't generate things that contain
violence or hate, and make it more in line
with our content policy.
Wow.
So let me ask you this then.
Obviously, part of your team has
to think about the ethical ramifications
of the technology that you're creating.
Do your team also then think about the greater
meaning of work or life or the purpose that humans have?
Because most of us define ourselves by what
we do, i.e. our jobs.
As AI slowly takes away what people's jobs are,
we'll find a growing class of people who don't have
that same purpose anymore.
Do you then also have to think about that
and wonder like what does it mean to be
human if it's not my job?
And can you tell me what that is?
We have philosophers and ethicists at OpenAI.
But I really think these are big societal questions
that shouldn't even be in the hands of technologists alone.
I like that.
We're certainly thinking about them.
And the tools that we see today,
they're not the tools that are automating
certain aspects of our jobs.
They're really tools extending our capabilities,
our inherent abilities and making them far better.
But it could be that in our future
we have these systems that can automate
a lot of different jobs.
I do think that as with other revolutions that we've gone
through, there will be new jobs and some jobs will be lost,
some jobs will be new, and there will be some retraining
required as well.
But I'm optimistic.
It's interesting, it's scary, because change always is--
[sneeze]
But as long as we have, bless you, as long as we have,
as long as we have koalas riding bicycles,
I think we're headed in the right direction.
Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Thank you.
I appreciate you.