This book is a charity project I had in mind to increase awareness about stray dogs and this critical issue.
However, those who know me would agree that neither poetry nor illustration is my strength.
Considering my near-null experience in poetry and illustration, I estimate that it would’ve taken me at least a year to write the 36 poems (at three poems/month) and another six months to do their accompanying drawings, plus an introductory drawing course before starting.
But by harnessing the capability of ChatGPT and DALL·E 2, the gigantic endeavor became a weekend project: it took me less than 48 hours to create the book and illustrations and publish it on Amazon.
In essence, ChatGPT and DALL·E 2 helped me to gain an additional year and a half of book sales to benefit rescue dogs, as all royalties from the purchase of B the Jackabee: From Sicily to London: The Rescue and Adventures of a Furry Friend are donated directly to Paws2Rescue, a charity that provides food, shelter and medical care for thousands of stray animals in Romania, and has helped many stray dogs find loving homes in the UK.
The gigantic endeavour became a weekend project: it took me less than 48 hours to create the book and illustrations and publish it on Amazon.
Introduction to ChatGPT and DALL·E 2
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot built on OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3.5 language model.
The tool has exciting capabilities, such as remembering conversations and allowing users to provide follow-up corrections. It has also been trained to decline user requests it deems inappropriate.
Some limitations include: having limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021 (although there are browser extensions that enable this) and occasionally generating wrong or biased content.
DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory composed of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit company OpenAI Inc. The company runs AI research, fostering AI for the benefit of humanity.
These technologies took the world by storm after the decision of OpenAI to make them available to the public in late November 2022.
The AI Advantage
The model’s 175 billion parameters, ability to understand and generate human-like language, and the 300 billion words of data obtained from books, web texts, Wikipedia, articles, and other pieces of writing on the internet make it the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the public. Its release is causing breakthroughs across multiple industries, such as digital content creation, software development, and music production.
Regarding creativity, ChatGPT will make everyone a creator, enabling people to produce their content and invent their worlds. I take my poem’s book as an example.
In terms of creativity, ChatGPT will make everyone a creator, enabling people to produce their own content, to invent their own worlds.
Francisco Castillo
The new paradigm of AI content co-creation – Image created by OpenAI DALL·E 2
Also, ChatGPT technology will enable a disruptive force in productivity, enabling individuals and teams to achieve a 10x scale.
ChatGPT technology will enable a disruptive force in productivity, enabling individuals and teams to achieve a 10x scale.
Francisco Castillo
Challenges
As well-intentioned as the technology is, while I was working on the book project and discussing this project with a few people, many questions started to arise:
Technology dependency: how lazy can you be? In a world where our attention span continues to shrink while the demand for digital jobs rises, it isn’t hard to imagine the psychological dependency that such powerful technology will create as more and more people enter the digital industry.
Intellectual property: who’s the creator? One argument could be that this technology creates nothing unless a user gives it a prompt; thus, it’s the user who is the creator. But the opposing argument could be that the technology’s contribution is made once this AI tool is used, even for a minimal consultation. Therefore, the content property is shared.
Ethical dilemmas: who’s accountable? Issues arising from AI-generated outputs used in decision-making (e.g., what happens if the AI generates a biased response?).
Transparency on the reasoning: who’ll validate the reasoning behind the output? The inner workings of the AI are invisible and could carry errors that would translate to the outputs. The outputs are not only based on information that could be wrong (as in the example of my previous point) but also aren’t tested in the real world and therefore carry a risk of being inaccurate.
Privacy: who is who? With every extra bit of information that I provided, I realised how much better the “personality” of my dog was being mapped by the AI. Malicious uses of this technology could quickly arise, especially with identity thieves.
The future
In a recent interview, Dr. Jordan Peterson predicted that a revolution is coming and cited Jonathan Pageau, who said: “Giants are gonna walk the Earth once more, and we’re gonna live through that.” I couldn’t agree more.
An AI among AIs – Image created by OpenAI DALL·E 2
Giants are gonna walk the Earth once more, and we’re gonna live through that.
Only time will tell if OpenAI sticks to its mission to be on the side of humanity. Moves like this, i.e., giving proprietary rights of the underlying technology to a single gigantic company wouldn’t appear to be fully in line with that…
