Still, OpenAI says that its work addressing DALL-E 2’s gender and racial bias gave it the confidence to go ahead with the full launch. It won’t be the final word, however. Bias in AI is a pernicious and intractable problem, and the company will have to carry on its game of whack-a-mole as new examples arise. OpenAI says it will pause the roll out whenever the product needs tweaking.
It’s a balancing act, says Welinder. Tweaks can sometimes curb what users create in unexpected ways. For example, when OpenAI first released its fix for gender bias some users complained that they were now getting too many female Super Marios. That kind of case is hard to predict ahead of time, says Welinder: “Seeing what people were trying to create from it lets us fine tune and calibrate.”
But monitoring hundreds of millions of images produced by a million or more users will be a vast undertaking. Welinder won’t be drawn on how many human moderators it will take, but they will be in-house staff, he says. The company takes a hybrid approach to moderation, mixing human judgment with automated inspection. Welinder says that the make-up of the team can be adapted as required by adding more moderators or adjusting the balance between human and machine intervention.
In May, Google showed off its own image-making AI, called Imagen. Unlike OpenAI, Google has said very little about its plans for the technology. “We still don’t have anything new to share re Imagen yet,” says Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel.
When OpenAI was founded in 2015 it presented itself as a pure research lab, with a belief in artificial general intelligence and a commitment to making sure that technology would benefit humanity—if it ever arrived. But in the last few years, it has pivoted to become a product company, offering its powerful AI to paying customers.
It’s still all part of the same vision, says Welinder. “Deploying our technology as a product and at scale is a critical part of our mission. It’s important to iterate on the usefulness and safety around the technology early, while the stakes are lower.”