Artists are increasingly using AI-powered tools for their creative projects. Alper Yesiltas, an Istanbul-based artist, has posted numerous images of celebrities that have been aged convincingly using AI.

One of his collections is called ‘Young Age(d)’ and uses AI to age well-known (and very much still alive) figures such as Greta Thunberg:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

And the more divisive individual, Justin Bieber:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

However, Yesiltas’ arguably more interesting collection is ‘As If Nothing Happened’ which imagines what deceased celebrities would look like.

The collection includes Freddie Mercury:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

Steve Jobs:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

And the beloved Princess Diana:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

In 2012, a performance at Coachella made headlines after a “hologram” of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur joined Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg onstage. The hologram was created by the special effects production house Digital Domain and portrayed Shakur in his prime.

Thanks to Yesiltas, we can see what Shakur would likely look like today:

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A post shared by Alper Yesiltas (@alperyesiltas)

With permission from the artist while they’re alive, combining AI for convincing ageing with holographic technologies could be a way for performers that died early to preserve their legacies and continue delighting old – and even new – fans long after they’re gone.

Yesiltas’ work can be viewed in-person as part of the ‘Digital Serendipity’ exhibition at Akbank Sanat until 11 February 2023.

(Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash)

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The stock image service will offer “direct access” to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generator through its website.

“The mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding. We recognize that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices,” said Paul Hennessy, CEO at Shutterstock.

“We have a long history of integrating AI into every part of our business. This expert-level competency makes Shutterstock the ideal partner to help our creative community navigate this new technology. And we’re committed to developing best practices and experiences to deliver on our purpose, which is to empower the world to create with confidence.”

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 is one of the most popular image generators. To train DALL-E, OpenAI licensed data from Shutterstock.

“The data we licensed from Shutterstock was critical to the training of DALL-E,” said Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO.

“We’re excited for Shutterstock to offer DALL-E images to its customers as one of the first deployments through our API, and we look forward to future collaborations as artificial intelligence becomes an integral part of artists’ creative workflows.”

Shutterstock is creating frameworks that will compensate artists when their intellectual property is used and when their works have contributed to the development of AI models.

At its core, DALL-E uses a process called diffusion, which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognises specific aspects of that image.

Put simply, users can input what they’re looking for and DALL-E 2 will generate an often very accurate image.

Due to concerns about the societal impact, including the generation of fake images for propaganda or hate purposes, OpenAI delayed making its tool publicly available until it was able to implement “a variety of mitigations aimed at preventing and mitigating related risks”.

Other popular AI generators – most notably, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion – beat OpenAI to public availability and surged in popularity.

DALL-E and Midjourney have fees when users exceed their free allocation, which serves to dissuade people from using them on any large scale for malicious purposes.

In contrast, Stable Diffusion is free and can be run on a local computer with under 10GB of VRAM. The result is that it’s become popular with communities that create explicit images of celebrities.

OpenAI says that more than 1.5 million users are now actively creating over two million images a day with DALL-E. Shutterstock says that it will launch its DALL-E integration in the coming months.

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DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 which is trained to generate images from text descriptions.

“We find that DALL·E is able to create plausible images for a great variety of sentences that explore the compositional structure of language,“ OpenAI explains.

Generated images can range from drawings, to objects, and even manipulated real-world photos. Here are some examples of each provided by OpenAI:

Just as OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator caused alarm about implications such as helping to create fake news for the kinds of disinformation campaigns recently seen around COVID-19, 5G, and attempting to influence various democratic processes—similar concerns will be raised about the company’s latest innovation.

People are increasingly aware of fake news and not to believe everything they read, especially from unknown sources without good track records. However, as humans, we’re still used to believing what we can see with our eyes. Fake news with fake supporting imagery is a rather convincing combination.

Much like it argued with GPT-3, OpenAI essentially says that – by putting the technology out there as responsibly as possible – it helps to raise awareness and drives research into how the implications can be tackled before such neural networks are inevitably created and used by malicious parties.

“We recognise that work involving generative models has the potential for significant, broad societal impacts,” OpenAI said.

“In the future, we plan to analyse how models like DALL·E relate to societal issues like economic impact on certain work processes and professions, the potential for bias in the model outputs, and the longer-term ethical challenges implied by this technology.”

Technological advancements will almost always be used for damaging purposes—but often the benefits outweigh the risks. I’d wager you could write pages about the good and bad sides of the internet, but overall it’s a pretty fantastic thing.

When it comes down to it: If the “good guys” don’t build it, you can be sure the bad ones will.

(Image Credit: Justin Jay Wang/OpenAI)

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