Sam Altman Says AI Images Are Just a Continuation of Photos
Sam Altman has compared AI images to photos, a demonstrably false juxtaposition that has been wheeled out before by AI tech executives.
Sam Altman, who leads OpenAI, is arguably the most influential figure in artificial intelligence. The company’s flagship product, ChatGPT — used by an estimated 800 million people — includes a powerful AI image generator, formerly known as DALL-E, built into the platform.
While talking to YouTuber and journalist Cleo Abram, Altman was asked about the recent AI video showing bunnies bouncing on a trampoline that fooled an extraordinary amount of people.
“How do we figure out what’s real and what’s not real,” Abram asks while pondering the future. It’s a legitimate question.
“I can give all sorts of literal answers to that question; we could be cryptographically signing stuff, we could decide who we trust, if they actually filmed something or not,” Altman says. “But my sense is what’s going to happen is it’s just going to gradually converge.”
Altman takes iPhone photos as an example, alluding to computational photography which processes a smartphone’s image via composites and an algorithm to improve the overall look.
“It’s, like, mostly real, but it’s a little not real. There’s some AI thing running that you don’t understand and making it look a little bit better,” Altman says. “There’s a lot of processing power between the photons captured by that camera sensor and the image you eventually see.”
Essentially, Altman argues that because society has accepted smartphone photographs as real, it will eventually accept AI images as real, too.
“I think the threshold for how real does it have to be to be considered real will just keep moving.”
Altman adds that media has always been a “little bit real and a little bit not real” before comparing AI images to a “beautiful photo” of someone on vacation they’ve posted to Instagram.
“Okay, maybe that photo was, like, literally taken,” he says. “But, you know there’s like tons of tourists in line for the same photos that they left out of it. And I think we just accept that.”
Altman argues that media has been trending towards “not real” for a long time, so AI is the latest installment of that.
The Bunnies Aren’t Real
Commenters on Abram’s Instagram page accused Altman of “gaslighting” people by comparing AI images to photography. Others said he was “unserious.”
As The Verge notes, there is a huge difference between a photo that is brought to life by photons hitting a sensor and an image that is created by generative AI.
It’s not the first time a tech chief has wheeled out this line before. In the wake of the Moon smartphone photo scandal, a Samsung executive argued that there is “no such thing as a real picture.”
