One year ago this week, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT into a largely unsuspecting world where generative AI was nowhere in the popular lexicon. Now 14 billion ChatGPT visits later, AI plays such an elevated role in our global consciousness that it properly became one of the central issues in the recently settled writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Players across media and entertainment — no matter what role they play — don’t know what to make of it all, which is understandable when even the company behind ChatGPT can’t seem to figure out what it all means. We’ve all witnessed the drama these past two weeks in Silicon Valley’s version of “Game of Thrones” as OpenAI’s board first fired CEO Sam Altman, then nearly hired him back (but didn’t), then enabled Microsoft to hire him (but couldn’t), and then returned him to his CEO role.