Apr 19, 2023

Hany Farid Breaks Down All You Need To Know About Generative AI

From The Conversation

Generative AI: 5 essential reads about the new era of creativity, job anxiety, misinformation, bias and plagiarism

By Eric Smalley

The light and dark sides of AI have been in the public spotlight for many years. Think facial recognition, algorithms making loan and sentencing recommendations, and medical image analysis. But the impressive – and sometimes scary – capabilities of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other conversational and image-conjuring artificial intelligence programs feel like a turning point.

The key change has been the emergence within the last year of powerful generative AI, software that not only learns from vast amounts of data but also produces things – convincingly written documentsengaging conversationphotorealistic images and clones of celebrity voices...

Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley computer scientist who specializes in image forensics, explained the process. The software is trained on a massive set of images, each of which includes a short text description.

“The model progressively corrupts each image until only visual noise remains, and then trains a neural network to reverse this corruption. Repeating this process hundreds of millions of times, the model learns how to convert pure noise into a coherent image from any caption,” he wrote...

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Hany Farid is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and EECS.

headshot hany farid
Hany Farid (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small for the School of Information)

Last updated:

April 26, 2023