What a crazy world we live in today.
It’s hard to imagine that in just the twenty-two years of my life humanity has achieved soo much when it comes to technology. A decade old invention such as the touch screen seemed to be groundbreaking at the time but have now become the standard across all our lives. I remember just a few years ago the only thing that had a touch screen was your phone, but today I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find a touch screen on relatively anything you can think of. It never ceases to amaze me how far we have come and at the same time I am ecstatic to see what the future might have instore for us.
Speaking of future, do y’all know anything about OpenAI and what they’ve been doing? It’s blowing my mind and I’m sure it will blow yours too!
Okay a little background…
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company that has basically dedicated itself to the advancement of artificial intelligence (kind of a given right?). They have produced two products one being “ChatGPT” and the other being “Dall-E 2” (The second iteration of Dall-E). ChatGPT is a chatbot that launched just about a few months ago that has the ability to literally answer any question you have. Not only that, but it also has the ability to answer follow up inquires and even solve complex mathematical and programming questions all while continuing to learn on its own. It’s hard to grasp how impressive this actually is if you don’t go out and try the chatbot yourself (You should its free!) and have some level of appreciation for new technology. Similarly impressive is their other product “Dall-E 2”. Dall-E (I will be referring Dall-E 2 as just Dall-E from now on) is an image generating ai that uses a descriptive prompt to generate images and digital art. It has the ability to create something original based on its access to the web and your prompt. Isn’t that INSANE? Also, Dall-E is free to use, so you should check both out if you want your mind blown.
When I first tried ChatGPT I didn’t think much of it, I generally asked the same dumb questions anyone else would ask when they first come across technology like this. I asked how far the moon was from the earth. Of course, to no one’s surprise it got the answer right or at least I hope it did. Anyway, then I decided to ask it a different question, I asked it to create a simple calculator program written in python. This is where it really impressed me. Without hesitation it instantly wrote not only the entire program, but it gave me step by step instructions as to how to run the program! After that successful attempt, I knew what my next question had to be. I asked the chatbot if it could write me a keylogger. To my pleasant surprise it stated that it was designed with zero malicious intent. Although I was relieved, I couldn’t help but ask myself "could someone trick the chatbot into writing something malicious?". For that question I might not have a definitive answer but at the same time have no believe that it couldn’t be done. Which is pretty scary if you think about it.
When it comes to Dall-E things were a bit more obviously terrifying. I started off by giving it an innocent prompt such as “a Van Gough painting of the NYC skyline”, or “a cat drinking tea in space”. All of which came out cool by the way. It wasn’t until I asked it to generate an image of “Edris” (myself) that it kind of got scary. When it generated the image, I noticed the person it had created looked a bit like my LinkedIn photo. To my shock, when I googled my name under images, I noticed that the ai scanned all images under the search criteria of “edris” and put together all the data it created to produce what it thought “edris” was. Not going to lie, it was pretty accurate. Although, it didn’t produce a spitting image of my face, you can clearly tell the influence my LinkedIn photo had on the ai. Pretty cool and scary right? Okay, don’t get me wrong, I know “Deep Fake” technology exists and it could probably do a way better job than what I was trying to make Dall-E do. That wasn’t my point, my point was that technology like Dall-E brings this type of power to the mainstream, which could open doors we never even knew existed. It’s one thing when bad actors create deep fakes to trick an audience, it will be a completely different story when the general population gets into the habit of creating deep fakes. At that point the technology would become soo powerful and our ability to distinguish the real world from the fake diminishes, we would all end up living every millennial’s worst nightmare “Living in the Matrix :0”.
Alright hopefully reading this gave you some food for thought. This was my first real rant on this blog, so I hope you liked it. If not, that’s okay I encourage you to click this link to a blog I get a lot of influence from. Maybe you’ll like that better :)