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Of course not. I'm no longer surprised just how eager people are to believe an "AI" will read their minds or has magical qualities and a mind of its own. Even o

Of course not. I'm no longer surprised just how eager people are to believe an "AI" will read their minds or has magical qualities and a mind of its own. Even on HN. Jiggle the imagination just a little bit, dangle some progress, and we're off to the races. This is "I'm feeling lucky" on google image search + style transfer + trial and error. If you think I am being dismissive try a few of these twitter bios as searches and see for yourselves. I guess it fits with the times we live in. Reward shallow plagarism. Outsource your mind. It isn't theft if you can automate it. Autotune for the deaf, Dall-E for the blind.

campground 5y ago
I tried what you suggested for a bunch of the twitter bios and found nothing except links back to this thread. I also reverse image searched a bunch of them to see if DALL-E was just kind of pasting together large chunks of images, but never found anything close. I do think you're being dismissive but please post any examples of what you mean. I'm a skeptic and have been waiting to find out that this is just a glorified parlor trick, but so far it seems like DALL-E is doing everything the authors claim, which is remarkable.
- recuter 5y ago
  I don't want to be dismissive of Dall-E itself or its authors. Just the implications that this changes everything or how it is much more than it really is. https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512123067803344899/photo/2 https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512123067803344899... Prompt: "expressive painting of a man shining rays of justice and transparency on a blue bird twitter logo" You have to break the concepts up apart (which is one of the things Dall-E improved on). As such: "expressive blue bird" In google image search, type clipart, and I even get pill tags to further narrow it down to illustrations for animal paintings and so forth. Google's classifier knows the concept of a "blue bird" and expressionism too. https://www.google.com/search?q=expressive+blue+bird&tbm=isch&hl=en&chips=q:expressive+blue+bird,online_chips:art:n3312CtnDLY%3D,online_chips:illustration:dm7-npZClu4%3D https://www.google.com/search?q=expressive+blue+bird&tbm=isc... The same for "ray of light". In fact the top results there I get pngs of sun beams on a transparent background. Which is perfect. Neither the birds nor the rays of light in the pictures it produced are truly its own creations but lifted from bits of pictures in its training set. I bet you could find the exact bird from the second row online in many places for example. It just won't be blue or stylized. Composite those things together manually and add a style transfer you'll get similar results to DALL-E as that is what it is doing more or less.
  - joshcryer 5y ago
    I think your last line is what stands out more than anything. You've just described creating something without "compositing those things together manually." Note that in that example the "twitter bird logo" is actually expressed in 6 out of all of those images. Look for the small bird, that looks like the Twitter logo. It's there. It's doing the thing.
    - recuter 5y ago
      The prompt is actually "blue bird twitter logo". Nothing is expressed. Find yourself a blue bird in an expressionistic style, go to google image search and give it the url. Click on tools -> visually similar. Enjoy an endless supply of things to plagiarize. In the middle picture of the second row you can clearly see how several pre-existing images are sharply cut off before being re-blended.
      - ShamelessC 5y ago
        Same thing going on here as in your other comments. Tech like CLIP, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc. are indeed nearing the sophistication (w. caveats around outliers and harmful outputs) of Google search. It took a lot of people to create Google search. It took precisely one training run for DALL-E 2 to create this. edit: Removed toxic comment.
        recuter 5y ago
        No, don't get me wrong. I think DALL-E is very interesting and a potentially useful tool and have nothing against the tool makers. The tool wielders however.. I think are overyhyping this to say the least. And focusing on the wrong bits. It isn't sentient and it is not making art. But teasing apart how it is deriving these images might shake out serious advancements.
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        Fair enough I think we are in agreement.
- rndphs 5y ago
  Yeah I just tried google image searching to find something like the pikachu photo from https://mobile.twitter.com/gottapatchemall/status/1511777860180066306 https://mobile.twitter.com/gottapatchemall/status/1511777860... But I can't find anything close to the realism that DALL-E 2 achieved here.
  - recuter 5y ago
    There was an abomination of a live action Pikachu movie some time ago. When I google "realistic pikachu" I get images exactly like this from the movie but not gross. In fact this photo is exactly what you get when you photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a cape. Literally that is what you're looking at. It understood your prompt and amalgamated the right source photos into this nightmare fuel. Jesus wept.
    - rndphs 5y ago
      Well to my eye it's realism beyond anything that I could find. Mind you I didn't search for that long so there might be something there if I was to delve deeper. I am pretty familiar with photoshop, and while I'm not an expert, I would find making something like this really difficult. Anything is possible with photoshop, but some things are very hard.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      > In fact this photo is exactly what you get when you photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a cape. Literally that is what you're looking at. i guess some people are overhyped, but it's cool that this can do that. Previously, it took a trained human.
      - recuter 5y ago
        If this is the exact image you wanted and are entirely satisfied for it, great. But what people are reacting to is that it is outputting interesting images at all. What are you going to do with this cape wearing realistic Pikachu that is actually a picture of a hamster? Typically the trained human has something specific in mind. And if the client isn't satisfied they will torture them with countless requests for adjustments. So right now this is of limited use. To me what is far far far more interesting is that Dall-E possibly understands the concept of what a Pikachu is supposed to be. That is downright creepy, and fascinating. I suspect that this visual aspect to things after people get over the clipart generation might find more functional utility as a way to see through the "model eyes" so to speak. To visualize the model itself. That could unlock a lot of doors in how training is done. Maybe in the future you could train it on textbooks and prompt it for a picture of a molecule. Now that would be something. Especially if you start feeding it data from experiments.
- joshcryer 5y ago
  It's fascinating how in our hubris we were thinking that art would be the last thing for AI to tackle, but it appears to be the first (Sam Altman made a similar statement on the launch of DALL-E). Which makes art more meaningful to me, for some reason. There's something in the billion parameters and exabytes of data that this neural net had to process and it was so ... easy. Natural. Because it is us. It is our expression. Our creativity. Our outpouring of data, and all it is doing is reflecting us. It's beautiful.
  - recuter 5y ago
    There is something about clouds. Facial recognition software frequently finds faces in clouds just like we do. This thing will kill art dead.
    - boppo1 5y ago
      Check my post prior to this one. Art will be fine. Well, representational art. I'd like to say post-abstract expressionists are at risk, but they still have their admirers convinced they're wearing clothes, and there's no indication those idiots will ever change their minds.
      - recuter 5y ago
        I agree with your post. Good luck convincing every child with a big Dall-E button on their iPad that they are not in fact Picasso. I mean, just look at this thread. And these are supposed to be adults.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    That’s because the entire corpus of art is stored in the neural network weightings as memory. It’s built to imitate human art by optimizing towards these weightings.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    I'm an amateur painter and AI hasn't even kissed high art yet IMO, although it's nominally good at amateur illustration. I'm going to have to write up a piece on this sometime, my argument is a little too involved for an HN post. But the gist is that the heart of what a fully trained painter does is make personal choices. A quick and dirty example of the difference: Suppose you train an AI on Picasso's pre-1901 pieces. It's not going to decide it's time for a blue period.
gfodor 5y ago
A proposition for your consideration: what if you’re wrong?
- recuter 5y ago
  What if you're in a cult? Two more papers down the line who knows what Dall-E 4 will be capable of. It is a step in the right direction that the image output is now "stable", which is what this is demonstrating. But it can't read your mind despite the eerie feeling you get, that is an illusion. Kismet in api form. The next steps is to open this black box up and actually make its internal pipeline tweak able so it can become a useful tool. It may end up an amazing super useful tool or a clipart plagiarisor/generator on steroids. You can't even use it yet and you're already so eager to believe.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    You don’t even know what I believe, but one thing is clear: you also haven’t used it yet, and are far more certain of its capabilities than I am. (I have, incidentally, had two of my personal requests generated by the kind folks at OpenAI, and I was impressed.)
    - recuter 5y ago
      I was responding to this: "They weren’t just copying/pasting prompts there was human creativity involved as well" I'm simply certain that whatever its capabilities they are short of mind reading. You'd be equally impressed if you asked me to perform a google image search. That does not mean that Dall-E is unimpressive or the results are fake. What I'm saying is that the hype and mysticism around this is unwarranted. Elsewhere in the thread somebody else wrote that we are on the cusp of it producing convincing fake footage from the Kennedy assassination from a single text prompt. The image output now being stable and pleasing to the eye is enough of a result even if it requires trial and error. You wouldn't lose your mind over a wallpaper generator even though no machine learning is necessary to produce infinite variations of interesting patterns. This thing is spewing out "art" and people are ascribing magical capabilities to it as if it taped a banana to a canvas. Anything is possible. Maybe Dall-E is capable of even more incredible things. Who knows where this all ends up. Sure. But not quite that much follows from what has been presented so far.
andybak 5y ago
I've coincidentally just been watching Rick and Morty and this really fit read in Rick's voice. Is yawning at everything astonishing not just exhausting? Everything is "just" made up of less impressive things. But is this really not worthy of a little wonderment?
- girvo 5y ago
  Middle-brow dismissal of everything seems so exhausting. I find it much easier to be moderately impressed by things, personally!
  - recuter 5y ago
    It is more like uni-brow dismissal of the eagerly impressed rather than the impressive work in progress. It is very good to keep an open mind, just make sure your brain doesn't fall out.
manigandham 5y ago
Side note: Those last 3 lines would make fantastic lyrics
- recuter 5y ago
  :) They call me the Hip-Hopapotamus My lyrics are bottomless
fastball 5y ago
I dunno, I really like the "happy sisyphus" one and I'm not seeing anything remotely as nice (or similar really) on Google Images[1]... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+sisyphus https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+sisyphus

campground 5y ago

I tried what you suggested for a bunch of the twitter bios and found nothing except links back to this thread. I also reverse image searched a bunch of them to see if DALL-E was just kind of pasting together large chunks of images, but never found anything close. I do think you're being dismissive but please post any examples of what you mean. I'm a skeptic and have been waiting to find out that this is just a glorified parlor trick, but so far it seems like DALL-E is doing everything the authors claim, which is remarkable.

recuter 5y ago
I don't want to be dismissive of Dall-E itself or its authors. Just the implications that this changes everything or how it is much more than it really is. https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512123067803344899/photo/2 https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512123067803344899... Prompt: "expressive painting of a man shining rays of justice and transparency on a blue bird twitter logo" You have to break the concepts up apart (which is one of the things Dall-E improved on). As such: "expressive blue bird" In google image search, type clipart, and I even get pill tags to further narrow it down to illustrations for animal paintings and so forth. Google's classifier knows the concept of a "blue bird" and expressionism too. https://www.google.com/search?q=expressive+blue+bird&tbm=isch&hl=en&chips=q:expressive+blue+bird,online_chips:art:n3312CtnDLY%3D,online_chips:illustration:dm7-npZClu4%3D https://www.google.com/search?q=expressive+blue+bird&tbm=isc... The same for "ray of light". In fact the top results there I get pngs of sun beams on a transparent background. Which is perfect. Neither the birds nor the rays of light in the pictures it produced are truly its own creations but lifted from bits of pictures in its training set. I bet you could find the exact bird from the second row online in many places for example. It just won't be blue or stylized. Composite those things together manually and add a style transfer you'll get similar results to DALL-E as that is what it is doing more or less.
- joshcryer 5y ago
  I think your last line is what stands out more than anything. You've just described creating something without "compositing those things together manually." Note that in that example the "twitter bird logo" is actually expressed in 6 out of all of those images. Look for the small bird, that looks like the Twitter logo. It's there. It's doing the thing.
  - recuter 5y ago
    The prompt is actually "blue bird twitter logo". Nothing is expressed. Find yourself a blue bird in an expressionistic style, go to google image search and give it the url. Click on tools -> visually similar. Enjoy an endless supply of things to plagiarize. In the middle picture of the second row you can clearly see how several pre-existing images are sharply cut off before being re-blended.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      Same thing going on here as in your other comments. Tech like CLIP, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc. are indeed nearing the sophistication (w. caveats around outliers and harmful outputs) of Google search. It took a lot of people to create Google search. It took precisely one training run for DALL-E 2 to create this. edit: Removed toxic comment.
      - recuter 5y ago
        No, don't get me wrong. I think DALL-E is very interesting and a potentially useful tool and have nothing against the tool makers. The tool wielders however.. I think are overyhyping this to say the least. And focusing on the wrong bits. It isn't sentient and it is not making art. But teasing apart how it is deriving these images might shake out serious advancements.
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        Fair enough I think we are in agreement.
rndphs 5y ago
Yeah I just tried google image searching to find something like the pikachu photo from https://mobile.twitter.com/gottapatchemall/status/1511777860180066306 https://mobile.twitter.com/gottapatchemall/status/1511777860... But I can't find anything close to the realism that DALL-E 2 achieved here.
- recuter 5y ago
  There was an abomination of a live action Pikachu movie some time ago. When I google "realistic pikachu" I get images exactly like this from the movie but not gross. In fact this photo is exactly what you get when you photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a cape. Literally that is what you're looking at. It understood your prompt and amalgamated the right source photos into this nightmare fuel. Jesus wept.
  - rndphs 5y ago
    Well to my eye it's realism beyond anything that I could find. Mind you I didn't search for that long so there might be something there if I was to delve deeper. I am pretty familiar with photoshop, and while I'm not an expert, I would find making something like this really difficult. Anything is possible with photoshop, but some things are very hard.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    > In fact this photo is exactly what you get when you photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a cape. Literally that is what you're looking at. i guess some people are overhyped, but it's cool that this can do that. Previously, it took a trained human.
    - recuter 5y ago
      If this is the exact image you wanted and are entirely satisfied for it, great. But what people are reacting to is that it is outputting interesting images at all. What are you going to do with this cape wearing realistic Pikachu that is actually a picture of a hamster? Typically the trained human has something specific in mind. And if the client isn't satisfied they will torture them with countless requests for adjustments. So right now this is of limited use. To me what is far far far more interesting is that Dall-E possibly understands the concept of what a Pikachu is supposed to be. That is downright creepy, and fascinating. I suspect that this visual aspect to things after people get over the clipart generation might find more functional utility as a way to see through the "model eyes" so to speak. To visualize the model itself. That could unlock a lot of doors in how training is done. Maybe in the future you could train it on textbooks and prompt it for a picture of a molecule. Now that would be something. Especially if you start feeding it data from experiments.
joshcryer 5y ago
It's fascinating how in our hubris we were thinking that art would be the last thing for AI to tackle, but it appears to be the first (Sam Altman made a similar statement on the launch of DALL-E). Which makes art more meaningful to me, for some reason. There's something in the billion parameters and exabytes of data that this neural net had to process and it was so ... easy. Natural. Because it is us. It is our expression. Our creativity. Our outpouring of data, and all it is doing is reflecting us. It's beautiful.
- recuter 5y ago
  There is something about clouds. Facial recognition software frequently finds faces in clouds just like we do. This thing will kill art dead.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    Check my post prior to this one. Art will be fine. Well, representational art. I'd like to say post-abstract expressionists are at risk, but they still have their admirers convinced they're wearing clothes, and there's no indication those idiots will ever change their minds.
    - recuter 5y ago
      I agree with your post. Good luck convincing every child with a big Dall-E button on their iPad that they are not in fact Picasso. I mean, just look at this thread. And these are supposed to be adults.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  That’s because the entire corpus of art is stored in the neural network weightings as memory. It’s built to imitate human art by optimizing towards these weightings.
- boppo1 5y ago
  I'm an amateur painter and AI hasn't even kissed high art yet IMO, although it's nominally good at amateur illustration. I'm going to have to write up a piece on this sometime, my argument is a little too involved for an HN post. But the gist is that the heart of what a fully trained painter does is make personal choices. A quick and dirty example of the difference: Suppose you train an AI on Picasso's pre-1901 pieces. It's not going to decide it's time for a blue period.

gfodor 5y ago

A proposition for your consideration: what if you’re wrong?

recuter 5y ago
What if you're in a cult? Two more papers down the line who knows what Dall-E 4 will be capable of. It is a step in the right direction that the image output is now "stable", which is what this is demonstrating. But it can't read your mind despite the eerie feeling you get, that is an illusion. Kismet in api form. The next steps is to open this black box up and actually make its internal pipeline tweak able so it can become a useful tool. It may end up an amazing super useful tool or a clipart plagiarisor/generator on steroids. You can't even use it yet and you're already so eager to believe.
- gfodor 5y ago
  You don’t even know what I believe, but one thing is clear: you also haven’t used it yet, and are far more certain of its capabilities than I am. (I have, incidentally, had two of my personal requests generated by the kind folks at OpenAI, and I was impressed.)
  - recuter 5y ago
    I was responding to this: "They weren’t just copying/pasting prompts there was human creativity involved as well" I'm simply certain that whatever its capabilities they are short of mind reading. You'd be equally impressed if you asked me to perform a google image search. That does not mean that Dall-E is unimpressive or the results are fake. What I'm saying is that the hype and mysticism around this is unwarranted. Elsewhere in the thread somebody else wrote that we are on the cusp of it producing convincing fake footage from the Kennedy assassination from a single text prompt. The image output now being stable and pleasing to the eye is enough of a result even if it requires trial and error. You wouldn't lose your mind over a wallpaper generator even though no machine learning is necessary to produce infinite variations of interesting patterns. This thing is spewing out "art" and people are ascribing magical capabilities to it as if it taped a banana to a canvas. Anything is possible. Maybe Dall-E is capable of even more incredible things. Who knows where this all ends up. Sure. But not quite that much follows from what has been presented so far.

andybak 5y ago

I've coincidentally just been watching Rick and Morty and this really fit read in Rick's voice. Is yawning at everything astonishing not just exhausting? Everything is "just" made up of less impressive things. But is this really not worthy of a little wonderment?

girvo 5y ago
Middle-brow dismissal of everything seems so exhausting. I find it much easier to be moderately impressed by things, personally!
- recuter 5y ago
  It is more like uni-brow dismissal of the eagerly impressed rather than the impressive work in progress. It is very good to keep an open mind, just make sure your brain doesn't fall out.

manigandham 5y ago

Side note: Those last 3 lines would make fantastic lyrics

recuter 5y ago
:) They call me the Hip-Hopapotamus My lyrics are bottomless

fastball 5y ago

I dunno, I really like the "happy sisyphus" one and I'm not seeing anything remotely as nice (or similar really) on Google Images[1]... [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+sisyphus https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+sisyphus