Innovation Profs - 11/28/2023

Generative AI News

What does Sam Altman’s firing — and quick reinstatement — mean for the future of AI?

In case you missed it, Sam Altman has been reinstated as CEO of OpenAI after an unexpected firing at the hands of the OpenAI board. The precise reason for Altman’s initial ouster remains unclear. Was it due to a newly developed superintelligence that had spooked OpenAI employees (see the article on OpenAI’s Project Q* below)? Was it due to a dispute between Altman and OpenAI board member Helen Toner over AI safety? And what role did OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever play in Altman’s firing? One of Altman’s conditions for returning to OpenAI was a new board—so far we know that Toner and Sutskever are no longer on the board, while Larry Summers, former Treasury security and president-emeritus of Harvard, has joined the new board. We’ll continue to monitor this story and its impact on the generative AI market.

Sarah Silverman Suffers Legal Blow

Last week, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabri dismissed most of Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against Meta, the basis of which was the claim that Meta’s LLaMA language models made unauthorized use of Silverman’s books as part of their training data. According to Chhabri, “There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs' books.” You can find more details about the case here. Meanwhile, another lawsuit, this time from non-fiction authors, was filed against OpenAI last week.

Men 2X More Likely To Use Generative AI Than Women: Report

According to the study “50 Most Visited AI Tools of 2023,” nearly 70% of ChatGPT users are men. In addition, the study found that ChatGPT receives 60 times more traffic than Google Bard, that ChatGPT accounts for 60% of all use of the top 50 AI tools, and that Character.ai, a tool for generating characters to dialogue with, accounts for 16% of all use of these tools.

ChatGPT's voice chat feature is rolling out to free users

ChatGPT Voice is now available for all users, not just ChatGPT Plus subscribers (who have had access to the tool since September). You can access the tool through ChatGPT on Android or iOS.

Microsoft Paint’s DALL-E 3 integration is rolling out on Windows 11

As of this week, users of the Windows 11 version of Microsoft Paint can now access DALL-E 3 through the Cocreator feature (although the article did report that some users may need to join the waitlist and wait a few days to receive approval).

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: EverArt

EverArt lets you train an AI on your own visual style. Upload images and it will use those as a baseline to create more images. Try it out for art ideas, or upload some photos from a photoshoot to create more images of yourself (like the AI images made popular with apps like Epik.

Innovation Profs Homework

Ask AI to identify your plants. We used a GPT called Plant Doctor to upload an image of a plant that is struggling to grow. It identified the plant as an African Violet and gave a list of instructions on how to take care of it.

This made us wonder if ChatGPT 4 could do the same thing. It identified the plant as a violet, but it didn’t seem quite as sure.

AI-generated image of the week

Last year a family member sent everyone a bag of cockroaches for the holidays. He called them “Christmas cockroaches,” with no other explantation. So we decided to see if ChatGPT could write a story of the Christmas cockroaches.

Below is one of the images it created with one of our stories. Look for us to share those in an upcoming newsletter. -CS

Prompt: write a childrens story about christmas cockroaches that help santa determine who has been naughty and nice. include images to go with the story.

Generative AI tip of the week

Want to show the same model wearing different clothing? You can do that with AI. Here’s a tutorial on how to use Midjourney to create stock images of models, then use inpainting to change the outfits.

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

• NightCafe image prompting tips

• Learn ChatGPT prompting

• Best AI image generators

• AI terms everyone should know

What we found:

A new meme, “Make it more,” is powered by Generative AI. You can read about the meme in the article linked below the tweet.