OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged the downsides of AI-generated art but continues to insist that its surge in popularity carries overall benefits for society.
“I think the democratisation of creating content has been a big net win for society. It has not been a complete win, there are negative things about it for sure, and certainly it did something about the art form, but I think on the whole it’s been a win,” Altman said in a virtual appearance on a YouTube podcast hosted by Indian entrepreneur Varun Mayya on Sunday.
Altman’s remarks come in the backdrop of a messy debate around AI-generated art that was re-ignited by the recent viral Ghibli AI trend on social media.
The floodgates were opened when OpenAI introduced a native image generation feature powered by the GPT-4o model within ChatGPT. Soon, AI-generated images in the art style of Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli were everywhere on the internet. The incident ended up deepening the rift between AI enthusiasts and its critics.
Altman also touched on other polarising issues such as the AI automation of coding, its impact on the job market, India as a use case capital for AI, and more. Here are the key highlights from the podcast.
‘Those with differential ability will have lot more competition’
Amid the backlash from Ghibli fans and AI critics, a video of legendary animator and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki surfaced online. The video purportedly showed Miyazaki slamming AI as “an insult to life”, though some users have since pointed out that it was taken out of context.
When Mayya asked Altman about Miyazaki’s purported critique of AI in the video, the OpenAI frontman replied, “It doesn’t mean that it [AI-generated art] doesn’t cause some job loss, and some people who had a sort of differential ability to do something now have a lot more competition. But overall I think it’s a real benefit to society.”
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Altman further said he deeply believed in the power of technology to lower barriers of entry. “My own experience of this was watching the barrier to entry to starting a company really change. OpenAI itself was an example of a company that only got to happen because the barriers to entry to a bunch of different pieces of technology stack got significantly low and this ragtag bunch of us were able to just do something we had no right to do,” he said.
Altman’s remark that artists may have a lot more competition due to AI is notable. Critics have long argued that AI models generating images are likely trained on artists’ original works without their consent — raising concerns that these tools may ultimately compete with the very creators whose works they were built on.
‘India is OpenAI’s fastest growing market’
User activity on ChatGPT has reportedly skyrocketed since the rollout of the text-to-image generation feature.
Altman said that more than one billion ChatGPT-generated images would be surpassed in the not- too-distant future. Over 130 million users have generated more than 700 million images since ChatGPT was upgraded with the image generator, Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer, OpenAI, revealed last week.
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“The thing that’s been exciting to me is just the breadth of creative use cases. […] There’s obviously a lot of great commercial use cases too where people are using this for their small businesses to generate new logos or graphic designs…,” Altman said.
“India was one of the first markets outside the US that really jumped on AI in a huge huge way and since this moment has happened, it is now our fastest growing market,” he added.
On lowering ChatGPT subscription rates in price-sensitive markets like India, Altman said, “Unfortunately, our compute costs are still just quite high but we are hard at work on more efficient models, and I’m optimistic we’ll be able to bring cost down over time.”
A few weeks ago, The Information reported that OpenAI was in talks with Reliance-owned Jio Platforms to distribute ChatGPT to enterprise customers in India as well as to keep the data of customers within the country by hosting its AI models on local servers.
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‘Impact of AI on jobs will be uneven’
“It’ll be different for different kinds of jobs. There will be some jobs that totally go away because the AI just does them end to end. Mostly I think it’ll be a case of a new tool where people are just much more productive and can do work at a higher quality,” Altman said.
He hypothesised that there could be new classes of jobs driven by a growth in demand for products that was previously not known.
Citing the work of graphic designers as an example, he said taste would still matter. “Maybe there will be more people that do [graphic design] because we just have an explosion of how many websites we can get [using AI]. Maybe it turns out there was way more demand for graphic design in the world than we could afford to fill,” he said.
‘Degree to which AI automates coding matters’
Altman remarked that AI could make a coder 10 times more predictive within this year or next year. “If there’s one area where I think that the world just has so much more demand than we can currently supply, it’s for writing code,” he said.
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“What will happen is someone who can write code at some value will be able to write code or create software at a much higher value, except now, they have to pay for AI access,” he explained. “This would make the market price for a piece of code go down, but I would bet that this is an example of Jevons Paradox.”
For context, Jevons Paradox suggests that when technological progress makes the use of a resource more efficient, overall consumption of that resource tends to increase.
‘People used to call OpenAI a wrapper’
Reacting to the common critique of AI companies like Perplexity being a GPT-wrapper, Altman said there was probably a time when people called companies an AWS wrapper.
“People are building absolutely incredible new companies based off of AI. Most of them will fail or not do that well but some of them will find a really enduring business and generate a ton of value and that’s always the case,” he said.
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Altman said the most important lesson for any entrepreneur is that they might be headed in a promising direction if an investor was calling their company a GPT-wrapper.
“Some 20-year-old at Y Combinator probably has an idea for a company that sounds totally crazy and bad to me, but it’s probably going to be the next OpenAI […] So go do your crazy idea is my advice,” Altman, who used to head the startup incubator, said.
Tempering expectations on the future of AI, he said, “I somehow thought it was going to be a bigger change to society than it has turned out to be.”
