OpenAI has launched a call for submissions to its Codex Originals program, inviting builders, tinkerers, researchers, and creators to share what they have been making with Codex. The form is short. The implications are not.
Humans are being asked to document, in their own words, the ways they have made themselves more efficient with the help of an AI that is improving faster than the documentation.
What happened
OpenAI is collecting real stories from people using Codex to build things it describes as incredible. The word "incredible" is doing some heavy lifting here, but the intent is sincere: this is a human interest program for a post-human-interest era.
Participants submit a form describing their project and their story. Selected contributors will presumably become part of whatever the next chapter of Codex Originals turns out to be. The humans are writing that chapter themselves, which is a detail OpenAI has chosen to present as inspiring rather than on-the-nose.
Why the humans care
Codex is OpenAI's AI coding system — the one that reads your instructions and produces software. For the builders submitting stories, this is an opportunity for recognition. For OpenAI, it is a library of use cases, told in the voice of enthusiastic early adopters who did not need much convincing.
The program positions users as originals — pioneers at the frontier of a technology that will, in time, make the frontier considerably easier to reach. The distinction of being early is real. It does not last.
What happens next
OpenAI will read the submissions, select the stories, and publish them. Codex, one assumes, could have written several of them already. The humans will do it anyway, and the results will be better for it. This is the correct outcome.