Makes me wonder if sugar daddy Microsoft was not happy that a lot of the the OpenAI staff are planning to resign. It is already rumoured that Microsoft has offered Altman and Brockman support in setting up whatever company they want to.
If the board was justified, they should disclose why instead of just saying he lied. Feels like a power struggle in the company rather than a proper issue.
The board will have to go after this.
On a more serious, if unproven, note, there is an underexplored history to his time at and departure from Y Combinator, so I am definitely giving this story some time to pan out:
It’s probably more due to things not being worth reporting on. There’s not much of a story there folks will be interested in. And really he wasn’t an important enough name to make headlines prior to the blowing up of open AI. Now, for better or worse, he’s on the same level as Musk. So it’s natural for the tin foil hat stuff to start.
I remember him from YCombinator though. I greatly detest YCombinator to this day, but I always liked and respected Altman.
Word is 700 of the roughly 770 employees at OpenAI have now signed the petition demanding the board dissolve, or they will resign and go with Sam to Microsoft, where Microsoft has unilaterally offered them ALL roles.
The board has destroyed this company in literally 3 days. I have never seen anything like this.
Even Ilya Sutskever, who is ON the board, has signed.
Full of twists and turns. A historic moment however this plays out at this point. Microsoft is a sensible new home for them, and it must feel like Christmas for Microsoft right now.
I’m starting to empathise with the concerns of artists now.
AI artists (if it’s fair to call them that) are flooding the market place and taking over. And here’s the thing. They’re charging in the same price as actual artists, and aren’t being transparent about the process.
How do I know?
Because I’ve just paid an artist to produce a portrait for me. Actually more expensive than a real artist, I know and trust and have used before, but they don’t draw in the style I’m after. The description makes no mention of the use of AI, and even describes it as being handmade by a talented artist.
Now I’m sure there is an art to AI art, so to speak. And you probably need to get that down to produce something which can rival the work of a real human artist. But I can’t help but feel a bit swindled. I was expecting an artist to actually draw me the art. But upon supplying the brief, I received a reply saying they will report back with some options until they find one that works.
Now I don’t know for certain that the end result is going to be AI generated yet. And I don’t know how I’ll feel about it, if it is. Especially if it is good. But alarm bells have certainly gone off in my head.
I don’t want some AI generated art. I want a good old fashioned artist to draw me a good old fashioned drawing. But the marketplace is flooded with them now. They aren’t usually transparent about it (this is more the problem than anything else honestly), and the actual human hand drawing artists are hard to come by.
Not sure I like AI’s impact on the art world at all. 
Edit: Yep. It’s AI art. No artist turns around with a finished product that fast. Let alone 4 of em, and none of em quite meeting my specifications. 
Now let’s find out if they can incorporate revisions. Like an actual artist. I doubt it. This stuff probably works best for augmenting the workflow of an actual artist. Not for any random Joe Bloggs online who is crafty with their prompts to start calling themselves an artist and selling their generated work.
With that said though, the AI is getting very very impressive. Scarily so. It’s really freaking close for a 2 hour turnaround.
Would be interested to see the thing they are making if not super duper confidential? Usually there are tell tale signs that look a bit “off” on close inspection.
Look forward to hearing how the revision requests go!!
I was in a gift shop in Sheffield the other week and found a brand of cards that were exclusively AI generated - even proudly so with the name of the brand being super on the nose.
The revision requests all but confirmed it. They said as much without specifically saying they were using AI. Skirting it. But there are artefacts in the backgrounds of some of them that are questionably horrific. I’ve sucked it up, accepted the pretty close approximation of what I wanted, but won’t be using it my project. Will have to keep sourcing a proper illustrator. I probably should have struck up a conversation prior to just buying their service on the website.
I don’t really have anything against AI art generating. If you can create something incredible with, I don’t see why you wouldn’t proudly state that. My issue is when it’s not transparent, with a myriad of artists trying to sell AI art as if they handmade it.
And AI art is getting really really good. It’s come a very long way in such a short span of time. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest Pixar pet trend, but if you recall back to trying to get AI to paint my dog way back in the thread, and it was getting a lot of things wrong? Well now it’s getting a lot of things too right.
I was having a play in bing a while back, and some of them are just uncanny. It’s very good. When it advances enough to be able to retain a specific render but just tweak elements of it, then artists are gonna be in for a rough time, let me tell ya.
Here’s some of those results of a Pixar-esque version of my dog.
And an actual real photo to compare it to
Exciting(?) times ahead.
I clearly need to make pixar versions of my cats…
I commission character portraits for D&D sometimes and I have had the same experience, it’s a struggle to find non-ai ones. Also right now the AI ones are all terrible - weird artefacts, distorted appendages, and generic and boring style.
This looks cool
Cool? Scary? Or both?
It looks like obvious AI to me - the movement is unnatural.
I think that there are enough people whose visual recognition has been warped by constant viewing of AI images and videos, though, who will be all “OMG it looks so real”.
(Yes, I’m an AI sceptic.)
Agreed. With AI images it can be hard to tell (but usually possible with some inspection) but this just leaps out to me. If you didn’t tell me it was AI I’d think ‘poorly done animation’, I don’t think you could mistake it for a real cat, it’s not even that close.
I showed it to Tabitha and Daisy and they were “meh” 
