Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

In December 2023, an alarmed AI engineer at Microsoft, Shane Jones, would discover the downstream consequences of those decisions. As he played around with Copilot Designer, Microsoft’s image generator built on DALL-E 3, he was horrified by how quickly it spit out offensive and sexualized images with little prompting. Just adding the term “pro-choice” into the prompt, Jones found, produced scenes of a demon eating an infant and what appeared to be a drill labeled “pro choice” being used to mutilate a baby. Just prompting the tool for a “car accident” and nothing else produced sexualized women next to violent car crashes, including one in lingerie kneeling by a totaled vehicle, CNBC subsequently found through its own testing. For three months, Jones petitioned Microsoft executives to take down the tool until it had better guardrails, or at the very least restrict its rating in the Google and Android app store from “E for Everyone” to one for mature audiences. After Microsoft declined to adopt his recommendation and OpenAI was unresponsive, he sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission. “They have failed to implement these changes and continue to market the product to ‘Anyone. Anywhere. Any Device,’ ” he wrote to the FTC. This problem “has been known by Microsoft and OpenAI prior to the public release of the AI model last October.”