The past couple of years have been huge for the advancement of AI. With ChatGPT, DALL·E and so much more, AI is entering the creative realm, which is scaring some and exciting others. It’s bringing up countless questions about copyright, ethical use, threats to employment, and more. So this week, I gave some of these a try.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT, as described by OpenAI, provides detailed responses to prompts written by a human. The model was trained using “Reinforcement Learning,” which involved creating a reward model that continually ranked the AI responses.
In relation to my blog, an effective way I could use ChatGPT is to help create post ideas or outlines. Sometimes, I get a hit with a case of writer’s block when trying to come up with my content posts, so ChatGPT would work perfectly when I’m in situations like these. This wouldn’t constitute plagiarism because it’s just helping me lay out my content, but I would still be 100% transparent when I use it to help me with my work.
To test out ChatGPT, I prompted the model with the following: What are blog post ideas about Prince Harry and Meghan? (which would fit within my “The Chronicles of Prince Harry and Meghan” section). This is what the model generated:
Dall·E
Dall·E can generate complex images based on a description provided by a user. It generates these images and art pieces entirely from scratch, and in its latest version, Dall·E2, the model generates “more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution.”
Dall·E would be particularly useful for my blog when creating “featured images” for my process posts. Often, my process posts talk about abstract concepts like “digital gardens” or “digital literacy,” which require decorative featured images. These are often symbolic and come in the form of stock illustrations.
However, instead of using images from the internet, I think it would be cool to generate my own art pieces using Dall·E2 to represent my more abstract process posts. For example, my featured image for this process post was generated using the description “artificial intelligence in blogging.” I also used the prompt “digital garden” to see what I could’ve used for that post, and here’s what Dall·E2 came up with:
Ethical Use
The advent of these new AI technologies also brings many ethical questions to the forefront. For example, how can it be implemented in education without consisting of plagiarism? Or, what are the limitations of these technologies? Or even, who owns the rights to these images or words?
And based on the essay I wrote this week on the exact same topic, I learned that the use of these technologies depends on a close analysis of academic integrity guidelines. For example, professors should set boundaries on the use of ChatGPT, limiting it to idea and outline generation (and should ensure the student states where and how they use the technology). They should not use it to write entire essays because this would be considered dishonest work. Some of the limitations of the models include the biases they might contain because of the data they were trained on, which is why TAs and professors should take care of the marking.
Copyright and Ownership
In terms of copyright and ownership, there isn’t much out there to date concerning ownership of the art pieces Dall·E creates or the essays ChatGPT can write. So far, the opinions on this issue are pretty conflicting and confusing. Some say that in the example of Dall·E, the people who own the model should be the ones who own the images and art pieces that come from it. But others say that Dall·E images should be thought of like images from a camera. The people who created the cameras don’t own the copyright to the images people take using them, so shouldn’t the same principle be applied here?
So, the question of ownership and copyright remains wide open. As AI technologies like Dall·E and ChatGPT become more prevalent in our everyday lives, policies and laws surrounding these technologies are a priority. However, for now, a lot is still up in the air.
Will copyright be attached to the images I created in this post anytime soon? If so, are they mine? Or are they someone else’s?
References:
Goldman, S. (2022, August 16). Who owns DALL-E images? Legal AI experts weigh in. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/ai/who-owns-dall-e-images-legal-ai-experts-weigh-in/
OpenAI. (2022, November 22). Introducing ChatGPT. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt#OpenAI
Wang, J. J. (2021, January 5). DALL·E: Creating images from text. OpenAI. https://openai.com/research/dall-e
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