TLDR:

• AI Research of the Week: OpenAI Releases DALL-E 3 and Changes Image Generation Forever

• Leaders: Understanding ChatGPT’s Biggest Upgrade Ever, Building the Sensorial Computer

🤯 AI Research of the week 🤯

It’s pretty clear by now that OpenAI makes announcements in a big way, as this week has come packed with revelations from the star-studded AI company.

Among those, the most interesting by far is the release of DALL-E 3, the new version of their image-generating model.

However, the reason it’s interesting is not really the fact it generates better images… but how it does it.

This time, DALL-E 3 is built on top of ChatGPT, and that changes everything.

In fact, they have explicitly claimed that DALL-E 3 intends to be the nail in the coffin of what could become the shortest-living hot job in history, prompt engineering, begging the question:

Will AI eradicate AI jobs just as quickly as normal ones?

Refining what state-of-the-art means

When working with current image generation models like MidJourney or Stable Diffusion, one has to deal with many problems.

Are you listening to me?

First and foremost, current image generators, models that take a text description and generate the image that portrays that description, are terrible at following instructions.

In most cases, they won’t respect structure, meaning that if you require a certain object in a certain part of the image, simply forget about it.

Yes, models like ControlNet allow us to condition a model to generate an image that resembles a certain structure or, for instance, a given scribble:

But ControlNet is only great if you’re an artist, but those like me who aren’t, have to deal with the tendency of these models to obviate critical parts of your description and, most often, will require extensive tailoring of the prompt, a concept known as prompt engineering, to end up with the ideal image.

But lack of instruction following isn’t the greatest problem.

The Great Impersonator

Just like Ferdinand Waldo Demara became a legendary impostor portrayed by Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor, image generation models have had their fair share of notoriety in the press for imitating several artists who, put mildly, were not happy about it.

But imitated artists aren’t the only ones unhappy about these models, because unless you’re living under a rock, you have seen AI-generated photos of Donald Trump’s arrest such as the one below:

These images are funny but can scar the people portrayed heavily.

And considering how voice synthesizers are becoming scarily good at imitating the desired voice, one can easily create fake imagery at a scale that could seriously damage the reputation of the people portrayed.

And you don’t have to be famous to get portrayed with these models. The targeted person could be you.

However, I myself tried to generate images from famous people and was quite successful with it.

Luckily for those people, I don’t do it in bad faith, but you know how the world works.

But if there’s one thing that current image generators suck at is at generating text.

What the… never mind

This is what MidJourney, my image generator of choice, gave me when I asked it for a logo displaying “I’m a 90s kid!”:

If you watch carefully, it has represented 90s imagery, giving the image a nostalgic aura, but the text… never mind.

Long story short, current models are really not that useful. But now, DALL-E3 has erased all these problems in one go.

Leveraging synergies

OpenAI has decided that it wants to create the first truly useful image generator, and for that, they have used none other than the crown jewel of the AI industry, ChatGPT.

Put simply, DALL-E 3 has been built natively on top of ChatGPT.

This means that, from early October, you will be able to directly ask ChatGPT to generate images (if you’re a paying subscriber).

Besides the UI appeal of this feature (you can now chat and generate images on the same screen) the real disruption comes when we read between the lines of OpenAI’s announcement.

Really, they are not only seamlessly adding DALL-E 3 to the user interface, but they are actively engaging ChatGPT in the process, a monumental change.

But how?

The intelligent middleware

In layman’s terms, the new image generation procedure will have ChatGPT as an active participant that suggests ideas and enhances your prompts behind closed doors… so that the ending result fits your needs.

In other words, ChatGPT will act as your prompt engineer.

And adding this to the fact that DALL-E 3 will already be great at following instructions, gets you this:

Unlike previous image generators, DALL-E 3 will actually obey your commands and portray objects where they should be.

Sounds too good to be true, but it’s here guys and gals.

It’s here.

Adding to this, again leveraging ChatGPT’s world representations, DALL-E 3 has gotten a reasoning upgrade toward knowing what prompts it should accept or not.

Specifically, DALL-E 3 is now trained to ignore prompts that ask for public figures or to resemble artists, thanks to OpenAI’s great efforts with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.

You can think about this complete solution as one that leverages ChatGPT for two things:

• Prepare the best prompts possible

• Actively acknowledge when something shouldn’t be generated to protect artists or public figures

Overall, a home run for ChatGPT users.

But we still have to address the elephant in the room… is this the beginning of the end for prompt engineering?

A quick ride to death

For months, prompt engineering was hailed as the next big job for humans, AI whisperers that maximized the results when interacting with these models.

But as many research papers have proven, LLMs are actually far better than humans at crafting prompts, so DALL-E 3 could signal the first time that humans are thrown out of the picture completely.

This underpins a truly potential case for AI being capable not only of eradicating traditional human jobs, but also devouring jobs that have been born thanks to AI… just as quickly.

Predicting the future of the human labor market has just gotten quite more complex and scary, don’t you think?

🫡 Key contributions 🫡

• DALL-E 3 represents the first image generator that doesn’t require prompt engineering to generate images that adhere to the user description

• It leverages ChatGPT to be more ‘self-aware’ of what it can generate or not, becoming much more safe to use

🔮 Practical implications 🔮

• Marketing campaigns have become something only limited by imagination, and logos, brands, and Internet imagery are now much easier to create, democratizing real art

• We should see an explosion of self-service solutions from B2B and DTC companies, and human customer support is seeing its last days

• Prompt engineering won’t become a job in itself, as LLMs will close the expertise gap for us

👾 Best news of the week 👾

😍 Legendary creative John Ive & OpenAI discussing creating the “iPhone of AI”

🚗 Future driverless cars will speak to occupants using GenAI

👓 Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses are out of this world

🤩 Mistral releases its first model and makes it totally free

🥳 Meta’s exciting famous avatars are here!

🥇 Leaders 🥇

This week’s issue:

ChatGPT gets its biggest enhancement ever and becomes a different beast

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