“Generative AI” is booming, and it’s revolutionizing the way people make art — and money
We generated this image using DALL-E and the prompt “an oil portrait of a Shiba Inu wearing a business suit and holding an iPhone, in the style of Claude Monet.”
Memes become Monet paintings… A new kind of AI is transforming the way people create art and do business. Generative AI uses deep learning and tons of data to convert text prompts into images, videos, and articles. We made the image above using gen-AI and a text prompt.
- Main character: OpenAI, which has raised billions from Microsoft and others, launched the first major gen-AI tool, Dall-E, last year. It was released to the public last month, and Reddit’s already filled with viral Dall-E creations.
- Other players: Stability AI raised $100M this month (at a $1B+ valuation) for its open-source gen-AI tool, Stable Diffusion. Meta, Google, Salesforce, and Adobe have built in-house gen-AIs, too, but they’re not publicly available.
Goofy images were only the start… Now entrepreneurs are putting gen-AI to work. 140+ gen-AI startups have launched in recent months: Jasper, which makes AI-generated blog posts, raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation last week. Companies can use it to automate copywriting (think: “a promotional post about air fryers in a friendly tone”). Other startups are auto-generating clothes, floorplans, and ad jingles. Microsoft added Dall-E to its design tools, and Shutterstock plans to use it to make stock images. But ethical concerns abound:
- Payment problems: Critics say gen-AI doesn’t compensate artists who create the content that “feeds” its algorithms (though Shutterstock has a “contributor” fund).
- Harassment hitches: Dall-E has safeguards, but some argue that gen-AI can still be used to produce celeb deepfakes and misinfo. Others say it replicates biases, like sexist imagery.
- Automation anxiety: Some fear gen-AI will put writers and designers out of work (others disagree).
Highly visible = highly valuable… AI has many existing applications (think: self-driving cars, disease diagnosis, fraud protection),but it often operates behind the scenes. And yet generative AI has an accessible wow factor that’s already dazzled many. Some investors say it’ll be a huge industry: prominent VC firm Sequoia predicted that gen-AI could generate “trillions in value” and revolutionize industries that require humans to create original work.