7 posts tagged with "Ethics"

DeepMake's software is dedicated to supporting AI education and expanding AI access for everyone. As we say on our website, "As an open core company, we believe that open source software democratizes AI development and promotes accessibility, leading to rapid iteration and scaling. True open source — available to anyone regardless of background, industry, or location — enables experimentation without constraints and drives innovation."

When we say we're committed to remaining open source, we mean it. Our software has no behavioral use restrictions, also known as ethical use licenses. 

Furthermore, we don't believe in behavioral licenses. We don't think they're appropriate for open source software and we don't believe they're enforceable. We're here to develop and promote AI tools and techniques, not control users' actions.

Ever since the term "deepfake" was first coined in 2017 --- describing a type of AI that can create fake but convincing images, audio, and videos --- the media began speculating about how deepfakes could change the world. Fake videos came with the possibility of widespread ethical issues and misuse. If you believed everything you read six years ago, you would have thought that we were headed for a deepfake apocalypse --- a world where seeing is no longer believing and video footage can no longer be trusted.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it has become part of everyday life. In 2022 alone, AI startups received $52.1 billion in funding from 3,396 venture capital deals. Investment figures like this are a strong indicator that AI has great potential to transform our everyday lives.

Rapid growth, however, comes with challenges. In the case of AI, an increasingly pertinent concern is the issue of AI bias. The tech industry has long struggled with diversity and inclusion. According to a 2019 Wired survey, Silicon Valley still suffers from imbalances, with the combined population of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous individuals making up only 5% of the workforce. In 2023, a staggering 83% of tech executives are white, and only 37% of tech companies have women on their boards. This striking lack of representation extends to AI, where it's estimated that 78% of global professionals possessing AI skills are male, resulting in a significant gender gap in the field.

All AI models require training data — and most developers get their data unethically. Everyone seems to be doing it: OpenAI was recently hit with multiple lawsuits (more) claiming the company stole internet data to train its popular ChatGPT tool. And Stability AI, the creator of the well-known Stable Diffusion tool, is being sued by Getty Images for copyright infringement for using millions of images without the proper licensing.

Read the news on any given day and you’ll see media firestorms about the dangers of AI and fearmongering over robots being developed for warfare. Simultaneously, countries are diving headfirst into AI development and new software is emerging daily. The hustle for AI dominance has our heart rate rapidly rising, reminiscent of the nuclear arms race of the twentieth century.

The reason AI development has made such impressive strides lately is largely due to the use of open source software. This isn’t just some niche trend — everyone’s using open source AI, from programmers to academics to everyday users.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard about deepfakes. Deepfakes are videos that blend reality with fiction by training a generative neural network to replace a person’s face with someone else’s. These videos are making news, and not always in a good way. They can create the idea that a person — usually a celebrity or political figure — is doing something they did not do. And sometimes, they are made and distributed with malicious intent.