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I don't want to be overly pessimistic, but I have a strange feeling about AI image or text generators. Who can prove that it actually does what it says? I have

I don't want to be overly pessimistic, but I have a strange feeling about AI image or text generators. Who can prove that it actually does what it says? I have a conspiracy theory: Somebody found a way to quickly generate pictures in this style in a semi-manual fashion, and hired a bunch of people to fake this, mechanical turk style. I have never found an interactive generator that completely convinced me, neither for images nor for text. Either the results are really bad, or the responses take so long that a person could have made it. But why would somebody fake something like this? There is a lot of money in AI. It seems totally plausible that someone invests five or six figures to set up a fake demonstration, in order to raise millions in investments. Now I want to make clear while I get a big Theranos vibe from these kind of demos, I don't want to accuse anybody concretely. I think a lot is technically possible and I do believe a lot of research is real, but I also believe some demos are "fake it till you make it" territory.

micaeked 5y ago
I might be getting whooshed here, but if you're serious, there's a couple colab notebooks floating around, you can look at the code that generates it or run it on your own hardware. Here's one: https://is.gd/artmachine https://is.gd/artmachine
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Thanks! I'm only half joking. I used traditional machine learning in my PhD but never got into modern deep learning techniques. I tried a couple of collab notebooks and tutorials but never succeded with anything more complex than NIST numbers. I think over the holidays I'll give it another shot because I find this stuff really interesting (art generation, style transfer, but also transfer learning in general). The conspiracy theory is more a jab at the fact that we live in a world with Theranos, NFTs, and clones of Dogecoin. There actually have been a couple of high profile AI fraud schemes, like Augustus Intelligence, where people collected investments and government money and probably never had a product.
alecst 5y ago
You can download the code and run it on your computer, without internet. Or maybe you can’t, and I’m just part of the conspiracy. Only one way to find out!
lloyddavis 5y ago
David Weinberger has written here: https://aeon.co/essays/our-world-is-a-black-box-predictable-but-not-understandable https://aeon.co/essays/our-world-is-a-black-box-predictable-... about this difficulty of thinking about such systems - as others say, you can look at the code, but I understand the resistance to just accepting it.

micaeked 5y ago

I might be getting whooshed here, but if you're serious, there's a couple colab notebooks floating around, you can look at the code that generates it or run it on your own hardware. Here's one: https://is.gd/artmachine https://is.gd/artmachine

captainmuon 5y ago
Thanks! I'm only half joking. I used traditional machine learning in my PhD but never got into modern deep learning techniques. I tried a couple of collab notebooks and tutorials but never succeded with anything more complex than NIST numbers. I think over the holidays I'll give it another shot because I find this stuff really interesting (art generation, style transfer, but also transfer learning in general). The conspiracy theory is more a jab at the fact that we live in a world with Theranos, NFTs, and clones of Dogecoin. There actually have been a couple of high profile AI fraud schemes, like Augustus Intelligence, where people collected investments and government money and probably never had a product.

alecst 5y ago

You can download the code and run it on your computer, without internet. Or maybe you can’t, and I’m just part of the conspiracy. Only one way to find out!

lloyddavis 5y ago

David Weinberger has written here: https://aeon.co/essays/our-world-is-a-black-box-predictable-but-not-understandable https://aeon.co/essays/our-world-is-a-black-box-predictable-... about this difficulty of thinking about such systems - as others say, you can look at the code, but I understand the resistance to just accepting it.