Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82. (credit: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University)

World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was our friend and a colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)

Stunned reactions to Dennett's unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. "Wrenching news. He's been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career," the Santa Fe Institute's Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. "I will miss him enormously."

Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt "A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style." (credit: AI Pictures That Go Hard / X)

When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a lot of people off guard. The launch began an innovative and tumultuous period in AI history, marked by a sense of wonder and a polarizing ethical debate that reverberates in the AI space to this day.

Last week, OpenAI turned off the ability for new customers to purchase generation credits for the web version of DALL-E 2, effectively killing it. From a technological point of view, it's not too surprising that OpenAI recently began winding down support for the service. The 2-year-old image generation model was groundbreaking for its time, but it has since been surpassed by DALL-E 3's higher level of detail, and OpenAI has recently begun rolling out DALL-E 3 editing capabilities.

But for a tight-knit group of artists and tech enthusiasts who were there at the start of DALL-E 2, the service's sunset marks the bittersweet end of a period where AI technology briefly felt like a magical portal to boundless creativity. "The arrival of DALL-E 2 was truly mind-blowing," illustrator Douglas Bonneville told Ars in an interview. "There was an exhilarating sense of unlimited freedom in those first days that we all suspected AI was going to unleash. It felt like a liberation from something into something else, but it was never clear exactly what."

Enlarge / Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News Media Alliance; Professor Jeff Jarvis, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism; Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of National Association of Broadcasters; and Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, are sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hearing on “Artificial Intelligence and The Future Of Journalism.” (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, news industry executives urged Congress for legal clarification that using journalism to train AI assistants like ChatGPT is not fair use, as claimed by companies such as OpenAI. Instead, they would prefer a licensing regime for AI training content that would force Big Tech companies to pay for content in a method similar to rights clearinghouses for music.

The plea for action came during a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Oversight of A.I.: The Future of Journalism," chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri also playing a large role in the proceedings. Last year, the pair of senators introduced a bipartisan framework for AI legislation and held a series of hearings on the impact of AI.

Blumenthal described the situation as an "existential crisis" for the news industry and cited social media as a cautionary tale for legislative inaction about AI. "We need to move more quickly than we did on social media and learn from our mistakes in the delay there," he said.