AI timeline
honestly this timeline is for my own benefit as much as i'm hoping it will be for the public. i feel like i have whiplash from how quickly this tech developed & how quickly the conversatons online turned so polarized. what i'm doing here is trying to make a comprehensive "Generative AI in the Media Timeline" which aims to explore & map the evolution of public perception, ethical debates, lawsuits, & technological advancements in generative AI, from its inception to the present.
2014 - GANs Introduced
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were introduced by Ian Goodfellow & his colleagues, marking a significant milestone in the development of genAI
links:
- Generative Adversarial Networks (Wikipedia)
- Generative Adversarial Networks original paper by Ian Goodfellow et al. (2014)
- Ian Goodfellow: Generative Adversarial Networks presentation at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in 2016
- The GANfather: The man who’s given machines the gift of imagination MIT Technology Review (2018) [archived version]
- Generative Adversarial Networks Marco Del Pra, Medium (2023)
2015 - DeepDream
this is around the time i started to actually hear about AI, things like "deep learning" & seeing those weird images with the dogs everywhere, like in the Wiki page for DeepDream below.
links:
- Deep Dream (wikipedia)
- Inside Gray Area & Google’s First DeepDream Art Show Gray Area (2016) [archived version]
- Google’s DeepDream: Exploring the Dream World DotCom Magazine (2023) [archived version]
2018 - Deepfake Technology
the emergence of deepfake technology raised concerns about the ethical implications of AI-generated content. Buzzfeed's Obama deepfake starring Jordan Peele went viral.
links:
- You Won’t Believe What Obama Says In This Video! 😉 youtube (2018)
- Obama Deep Fake Ars Electronica
- TED 2018: Fake Obama video creator defends invention BBC (2018)
- Fake Obama created using AI video tool BBC News, youtube (2017)
- How To Spot A Deepfake Like The Barack Obama–Jordan Peele Video Buzzfeed (2018)
- This PSA About Fake News From Barack Obama Is Not What It Appears Buzzfeed News (2018)
2019 - GPT-2 Release
OpenAI released GPT-2 but withheld the full version due to concerns about misuse, sparking a debate on AI safety and ethics.
links:
- AI researchers debate the ethics of sharing potentially harmful programs The Verge (2019)
- Open Source AI: To Release or Not To Release the GPT-2 Synthetic Text Generator Santa Clara University (2020)
- GPT-2 from OpenAI: Better NLP model and the ethics issues it raises Sia Partners (2019)
