OpenAI’s Dale-E 3 Woke Content Policies Will Stifle Artistic Freedom

OpenAI has been in the news in the past year, all thanks to its revolutionary ChatGPT AI service. However, all is not well in this brave new world as ChatGPT has been plagued with politically biased Regime approved responses. The wunderkind AI app has come under fire from conservatives and traditionists for failing to generate ideologically neutral responses. Of course, this is no accident because all apps are programmed by humans. Garbage in, garbage out.

While ChatGPT can produce incredible results, I know from personal experience that ChatGPT never misses an opportunity to infuse its output with far-left bias and woke moralizing. This comes as no surprise as most Silicon Valley and Bay Area companies have internalized woke idealogy into their personal lives and this has spilled over to their products and services.

This San Franciso-based OpenAI company is also heavily involved in the AI generative art world with their Dale E generative text-to-art platform.

Dale E is much like Midjourney both in terms of features and their woke worldview. Both AI platforms are heavily censored by a rigid, ever-growing filtering system.

The Obsession with Safety

Despite the plethora of obvious benefits that AI offers mankind, there’s a monkey’s paw of unintended consequences that come with the service. Beneath the glittering technology, there is a darker more sinister side: Silicon Valley AI startups are run by a dedicated group of globalist wokesters who are using their technology to evangelize their progressive idealogy.

When you go to the Open AI website, you get the following grandiose slogan:

Using the Trojan Horse of seemingly virtuous initiates like ensuring safety, harm reduction, and stopping misinformation, Bay Area companies are in lockstep with the Regime that seeks to control the Overton Window by promoting a globalist one-world narrative and silencing everything esle.. This is censorship wrapped in a patina of corporate responsibility and kindness.

Recently, OpenAI (which is not open, it’s privately owned) released information about the latest version of their text-to-art AI service: Dale-E 3. Here’s a screencap image:

You will notice, that they are not promoting advanced forms of creativity. Rather, they are obsessed with virtual signaling about “preventing harmful generations.” Harmful generations means images that someone, somewhere might find offensive.

Yet, there is no consistent rationale for text prompts that are allowed and disallowed on platforms like Dale-E and Midjourney. Prompts such as Hitler, Nazi, Xi Jinping, and fascism are banned but Stalin, Mao, and communism are allowed.

Other users of these services have complained that the restrictions on creating human bodies are Puritanical and the women that are created using these services are flat-chested and ugly. We’ve seen the same kind of uglification of females in the video game industry.

The Roots of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Generation Z was brought up to believe that words and pictures they find distasteful are violent and can cause harm. Any idea or image that challenges them and provokes some form of original thought or “triggers” them, must be censored so the snowflake generation can live in their frictionless, globalist-approved, rainbow-colored echo chambers.

Let’s look at the text of the announcement in more detail. As a creative, I have much to say about this:

A Focus on Safety

Like previous versions, we’ve taken steps to limit DALL·E 3’s ability to generate violent, adult, or hateful content.

Much of the content in video games is violent. Forget about using DALL-E 3 to make battle scenes for video games. Forget about using this platform to recreate famous battle scenes in history. Forget using it to recreate Venus D’Milo. Forget about Hollywood storyboard artists using DALL-E 3 to make storyboards for action films.

What is hateful content and who decides? The United Nations, the EC, the WEF, the ADL, the HRC, GLAAD, and the SLPC?

You can be sure that each of these odious organizations will want to have their thumbs in the AI pie. If we don’t wake up, they will attempt to control everything that we are allowed to create. You can bet on it.

Preventing Harmful Generation

DALL·E 3 has mitigations to decline requests that ask for a public figure by name. We improved safety performance in risk areas like generation of public figures and harmful biases related to visual over/under-representation, in partnership with red teamers—domain experts who stress-test the model—to help inform our risk assessment and mitigation efforts in areas like propaganda and misinformation.

Forget creating an image of Jesus, George Washington, or President Trump. Forget using DALL-E 3 for purposes of comedy, satire, and parody. Big Brother OpenAI knows best and will not allow this.

It has been often said that art imitates life. But life is complex. Life presents you with both the good and the bad, on its own terms. You adapt or you die. Life is also full of bias and inequality. Life is full of over and under-representation as well. But this will not be the case if Big AI is allowed to have its way. Asking these AI companies to regulate what art and images users are allowed to create is totalitarian, blatant censorship, and diametrically opposed to the time-tested human rights of freedom of expression and artistic integrity.

It is reasonable to assume that the social engineers who code DALL-E 3 will also ensure that people in their generative art output will be racially diverse with the exact amount of representation that they deem necessary. At worst, I’m afraid that art created by DALL-E 3 will end up looking like cheery Soviet propaganda posters. At best, they’ll end up looking or any TV or magazine ad these days that is brimming with forced diversity and very few white faces.

Then there is a mention of OpenAI having a team of busybody censors that will do all they can to mitigate propaganda and misinformation. Of course, the only images they will censor are ones that do not support the far-left globohomo narrative of the Regime. They even have the chutzpa to call them “red teamers”. For policies that look like they came from Red China, this name seems quite appropriate.

Internal Testing

We’re also researching the best ways to help people identify when an image was created with AI. We’re experimenting with a provenance classifier—a new internal tool that can help us identify whether or not an image was generated by DALL·E 3—and hope to use this tool to better understand the ways generated images might be used. We’ll share more soon.

This means that any image you create with DALL-E 3, will be trackable and traceable with some form of hidden watermark. So if you violate the rules and get past the filters, OpenAI can find you, ban your account, and report you to various federal agencies. While I can think of many ways to circumvent this, for me DALL-E 3 is a hard pass.

Creative control

DALL·E 3 is designed to decline requests that ask for an image in the style of a living artist. Creators can now also opt their images out from training of our future image generation models.

This feature isn’t a bad idea. It will help appease many of the zealots in the anti-AI community. But the title is misleading. AI artists will not have creative control, OpenAI will.

Conclusion

In the past 10 years, a concept known as trust and safety has emerged from Big Tech. This is a direct result of the growing moral panic of safetyism. The term was coined by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, who discuss it in depth in their 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”

In the book, they describe safetyism as the belief or culture in which emotional safety is given excessive priority, potentially at the expense of other values or rights, like free expression. They argue that this culture can be harmful, particularly in educational settings, as it might limit exposure to challenging ideas and hinder the development of resilience in young people.

I’m old school. For me, safety used to mean physical safety. As kids, we often heard the maxim: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” That was excellent life advice that has no meaning to Zoomers.

Today safety means being shielded from being challenged or offended. Safety has become a euphemism for censorship. But this censorship only applies to the people on the right. The left has no problem shouting epithets like Nazi, fascist, racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic to people they hate. The hypocritical left are masters of warping language to suit their needs.

Instead of countering the plague of safetyism, Big Tech, and Big AI are making it worse by helping to facilitate this false notion by pledging to combat it at every turn. The titans of Silicon Valley are like drug dealers who are giving their fragile addicts exactly what they want through the growing infantilization of its products and services. This has given rise to the concept of safe spaces, diversity lounges, and racially segregated areas to appease blacks who detest being around whites — yes this is happening.

The problem with pandering to Generation Z is that the rest of us are negatively impacted and brought down to the preferences of the lowest common denominator. Using AI is like having a sensitive Zoomer behind your shoulder. A.I. content must go through filters before we are allowed to create and see it. Even Adobe’s Photoshop has implemented extremely unreasonable and censorial generative fill filters.

I do not trust anything that comes from the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Both areas are teaming with arrogant far-left activists who want to impose their godless dystopian worldview on the rest of us. Just like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin wanted communism to rule the planet, these neo-Marxists desire to spread their religion of wokeness to the entire world. Even after the murder of 100 million innocent people, why have we not learned the lesson that the Marxist obsession with equity is a cancer upon humanity?

The announcement from OpenAI about DALL-E 3 feels very wrong and left a sour taste in my mouth. Instead of being a hopeful message that inspires creativity and artistic freedom, they gave us a few paragraphs laden with fearmongering, buzzwords, and virtue signaling. They are trying to strangle free expression in the name of safety which is essentially preventing people from being exposed to new ideas that might challenge them.

It’s important to point out that the core ideas that Zoomers have been indoctrinated with are all post-modernist and Marxist in nature. Any ideas that challenge or “harm” their worldview are seen as a virus and a threat that must be eliminated. This is why they created the speech is violence mantra. This is why they speedily established trust and safety policies to shield Gen Z’s from any possibility of hearing ideas that might invalidate their own.

The deeper problem is that Zoomers are unable to have civil discussions with people with whom they disagree. This intellectual sloth is why they are only capable of chanting bumper sticker slogans during protests. If an entire generation does not have the ability to evaluate new ideas, utilize reason, and compromise, our civilization is doomed. The rise of safetyism aided and abetted by Big Tech and the censorship industrial complex, is helping to create a generation of adults stuck in a death loop of permanent adolescence.

OpenAI wants to put guardrails on DALL-E 3. They want to put your creativity into a small box and if you behave and do as you are told, they may let your ideas — what’s left of them — emerge from their iron AI cocoon.

Having Silicon Valley and Bay Area companies in charge of the future of AI makes about as much sense as putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. These masters of the universe know absolutely nothing about art but they wish to control it nonetheless. They do not understand the creative spirit and freedom of expression that has shaped Western civilization.

To make matters worse, Big Tech and Big AI are card-carrying members of the censorship industrial complex. They will use any crisis and any pretense as a justification to curtail our God-given right to freedom of expression. When you hear words like conspiracy theory, disinformation, misinformation, trust, safety, and harm peddled as excuses to limit your freedoms, you know you are dealing with servants of the Regime.

As an indie game developer, I have been a big proponent of the remarkable powers of AI. But, I am increasingly worried that this scientific miracle is a Faustian bargain and that the Regime will use AI as a Trojan Horse to spread their globalist woke propaganda into our lives.

As we tip our collective toes into the sparkling waters of this revolutionary technology, we should pause and ponder the possibility that if we are not careful, AI will drown humanity in the uncharted waters of unintended consequences.

–Wolfshead