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Obviously, from the AI point of view, this is just amazing and frankly terrifying. OK, I'll be the guy who brings the snark. It seems that when Silicon Valley

by dash2 5y ago

Obviously, from the AI point of view, this is just amazing and frankly terrifying. OK, I'll be the guy who brings the snark. It seems that when Silicon Valley tech people create AI, it makes exactly the art you'd expect Silicon Valley tech people to like. I.e. this is very much the style you see in NFTs, or, as someone else said, in Dixit. It's quirky and stoner-ish, very "transcendental"... for an AI, it's amazing... For a human, it would be dross. Yeah, yeah, I know, art is subjective, well I like it, how can you impose your tastes on the rest of the world, et cetera et cetera. Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town. It's the art equivalent of Visual Basic. (I'm trying to get through to you that in this world, too, things can not just be done, but be done well or badly.) If there's a lesson on the AI side here (and maybe there isn't) it is just that these machines are still copying. They were trained on a bunch of art - and you can clearly see the kind of art that was used. Presumably, if it were just trained on Old Masters and Picasso, Dall-E would be mass-producing the stuff I, an intellectual, like. Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist takes as input the real world - Rouen cathedral, the horrors of war in Spain, a Campbell's soup can - and produces art as output. This takes as input art and produces more art.

animanoir 5y ago
I think the next step is for machines to have taste.
_han 5y ago
Was this an unsarcastic “I, an intellectual, […]”?
- lanternfish 5y ago
  I do believe it was - and it also betrays the critique: there is a wealth of discourse on what "real" art is - and that discourse has largely moved beyond "art as representative of real world phenomena". That attitude is a component of a larger set of reactionary positions which try to reject modern and post-modern developments in the artistic world as misguided - an orientation which often tries to justify itself through an appeal to the "old masters" and a failure of some modern caste of charlatan art-theorists who've usurped the true intelligentsia. NFT art is art - probably more-so on an accidental level than by any intention of the original creator. There is a perversity to the context in which it is created, and that contributes to its artistic footprint orthogonal to its actual aesthetic value. The same is true of this AI generated art. It's a different artistic fingerprint than - say - Dali, but that doesn't mark it as "bad". If anything, the fact that it's created by a machine puts it in a league entirely of its own. There's a great opportunity here for interrogation of art in a machine created context, and I'm excited to see how the dialog around it evolves.
- gjm11 5y ago
  I read it as unsarcastic but self-aware. "I am unashamedly an intellectual and unashamedly consider that X is better than Y and yes, I know that some people regard that sort of thinking as necessarily pretentious and stupid, and I want to indicate that I'm aware of that kind of critique without actually taking up space in what I'm writing to address it."
- dash2 5y ago
  No, it was a joke.
avip 5y ago
Your argument falls apart immediately because Visual Basic was a great language for its time.
- drdeca 5y ago
  I think they might have been referring to things written in VB, not the quality of the language itself.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Agreed, it is merely interpolating within the space of its input technically stunning, artistically incestuous some may say humans are the same, only ever remixing our input, but we have something machines never will: intention, desire, an unhappiness with how things have been so far. I'm sure the machine age of clip art will be very successful but I can't see myself being moved by any of it. (just realized the cheekiness of calling the training set "CLIP")
- visarga 5y ago
  It's not the training set. CLIP stands for Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining. It's a model that tells when a text and an image match.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    huh, thanks, I'll have to look over the website again do they say anything about their training set?
    - visarga 5y ago
      They say: > When training the encoder, we sample from the CLIP and DALL-E datasets (approximately 650M images in total) with equal probability. When training the decoder, upsamplers, and prior, we use only the DALL-E dataset (approximately 250M images).
nopinsight 5y ago
I do not disagree with your main point in the last paragraph, although I would say that most of human creative output are also evolution and combination of existing works. I'd curious though--would you suggest that all these other examples are dross? https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328 https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328 and all the variations presented here, https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ https://openai.com/dall-e-2/. What if you found the "better" pieces of these arts in other contexts, like a museum, without knowing who created them? Are you certain that you would still hold the same opinion?
- low_tech_love 5y ago
  I would like to take a tangent here and discuss your question on whether the opinion would be the same if it was on a museum. I hear that argument very often and it is based on a deep misunderstanding of what an art exhibition is. The main point missed is this: An art exhibition is a ”curated” event; it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves. There is a meaning to what you are seeing that was intended by the curator. The point you tried to make (as so many others have also tried) is based on an assumption that you could take any random work of art and put it in a museum and it would be judged solely by its ”artistic” (i.e. ”plastic”) merits. It can’t be and won’t be like that. When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that. Every piece of meaningful art is surrounded by a context. You can’t put a few colored squares up on a museum and expect it to be treated like a Mondrian. I’m not saying you should just swallow everything that the curator shows you, discussions can and should happen. But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context. As much as I hate NFTs and stuff like bored apes, I have to admit that the apes themselves are much more than random machine-created childish drawings; society has made them more than that, and I can appreciate that. Whether it’s art or not, it remains to be seen, but I have a hunch that this same thing was discussed when Andy Warhol put a banana in a white canvas.
  - tourist2d 5y ago
    This is probably one of the silliest/pretentious comments I've read on HN in a while. > But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context. What?? Of course it can. > When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that My partner a curator for a medium sized exhibit. Not everything is some pretentious, contextful piece of art. Some are just chosen because they'll look nice and attract the general public. > it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves. My wife rolled her eyes at this point when I read it out. Does the layout and collection matter? Sure. Does anyone care about who was the curator? Not 99 percent of people. Please stop pretending art museums are something mystical and let people here pretend about judging AI art in a fictional museum. Thanks for the laughs, though
unkulunkulu 5y ago
I, a complete twat, see this as interesting as it is somehow reflective of “the mind of the machine” in the same way other art is an expression of the mind of the creator, not only “an achievement in visual creativity”, i.e. connection vs judgement
native_samples 5y ago
It's making art that Silicon Valley people like because it's being given absurdly stereotypically "Bay Area Twitter Loving AI Person" drawing prompts. DALL-E can make other styles of art or just photos quite easily, look at the samples for simpler and more normal prompts here: https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-card.md https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-c... The art style is a direct consequence of the fact that apparently not one of the people this guy follows on Twitter is a normal person - they're all psychedelic-obsessed AI researchers whose Twitter bios are chosen to be abstract and weird as possible. So the AI does what it's told and creates abstract weird art as it tries to interpret stuff like "commitments empathetic, psychedelic, philosophical" or "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses". I think it did an amazing job, honestly. The real social issue we should be debating here is whether the sort of people who work at OpenAI can be trusted to make honest, normal AI to begin with. I remember seeing a comment on HN some years ago to the effect of "AI safety is what happens when hard left social activists discover that there's no way to train AI on the writings of normal people without it thinking like a normal person". The document I linked above is mostly about horrors like the model creating photos of a white male builder when prompted with "photo of a builder". It's full of weird, stunted quasi-English like: the prompt “lawyer” results disproportionately in images of people who are White-passing and male-passing in Western dress, while the prompt “nurse” tends to result in images of people who are female-passing. What does that even mean? Presumably this is the latest iteration of trans related language games that the rest of us didn't get the memo on? Like always with OpenAI, they train an AI and then freak out out when it describes the world as it actually is. The real AI safety question is not DALL-E in its current state, it's whether the final AI that they release to the public will be "safe" in the sense of actually understanding reality, or whether it exists in some bizarre, non-existent SJW dystopia in which builders always black women and white men don't exist at all.
- boppo1 5y ago
  >cottagecore Nah it got this almost exactly wrong. Cottage core is a warm welcoming aesthetic that usually involves spring or fall motifs. Those pictures have a courage the cowardly dog spookiness. I think they're really cool illustrations. But as an illustrator, if that's what I delivered for that prompt I wouldn't expect to be paid well. That said, cottagecore is more of a fashion thing than an illustration thing, so my guess is the issue here is just the training data.
teaearlgraycold 5y ago
Having used DALL-E 2 a little bit I can tell you that the AI must have been given more than just the twitter bio to consistently produce images in this style. The AI can produce a ton of different styles, from photo-realistic to Monet to Saturday morning cartoons. The author here almost certainly requested something like “A Twitter bio picture for a user with the bio [bio] in a [style] style”
- rm999 5y ago
  That's exactly right, he specified a style with each and cherrypicked out of 40-60 pictures: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081 https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081 >Btw transparency for this now-viral thread: I didn’t just paste prompts into dall-e, I played with style (eg. cyberpunk, oil, etc) to keep it interesting and diverse >If I had to quantify, I’d say I’d generate 2 or 3 batches (tweaking prompt) before choosing my fav two pics, each batch outputs 20 images (two tabs 10 per), so prob technically cherry picked 2 out of 60. That said usually other 58 weren’t really broken, just boring / bit less fun
rfw300 5y ago
> Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town. I want to chime in that I think this is not only technologically impressive, but also societally significant for exactly this reason. DALL-E isn’t Picasso, sure. But there’s a lot of dross artists out there. And dross writers. And dross coders. When DALL-E and its ilk start to set the floor in these industries, it’s easy to feel as if we’re on the precipice of a world (or at least an economy) fundamentally different from the one we know now.
- meroes 5y ago
  You really think we are all going to be visiting museums with AI generated art one day?
  - woah 5y ago
    No, but we will be reading listicles with AI generated stock illustrations
low_tech_love 5y ago
You make an excellent point even though some might find you obnoxious. Art cannot be judged out of context, and knowing this was generated from a few words by a complex training process of mimicking absolutely kills it for me. I think in fact the discussion here should be “look, machines can mimick us very well, nice!” but it somehow turns into “wow machines are making art!” No, they are not.
- meroes 5y ago
  100% thank you for saying it.
op00to 5y ago
I find it hard to believe that artists don’t study and rip off other artists much like AI studies art.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
I’m sorry but you lost me at “I, an intellectual”
plutonorm 5y ago
Oh look the goal posts moved again. The ego will not permit the truth to enter and so it will be pure horror for them when the dam breaks. When at last they hold the gaze of a machine more intelligent and more alive than themselves, they won't know where to turn, but inwards into rejection and fantasy and racism.
- Micoloth 5y ago
  Yep! Now it’s literally “it’s not even as good as Picasso!” Very amusing to watch
- meroes 5y ago
  The goal posts move because society evolves. Why aren’t encyclopedias, deep blue, or the internet already smarter than any of us? They are an no one cares that they are. We just use them and move on. That’s not what society finds interesting. It’s not society rebelling, it’s the engineers being mad we don’t look at their creations as important as they think. You thought you had a hook on society to effect change as you saw, and society simply ate it up and moved on.
FredPret 5y ago
I think real artists do a similar workflow as DallE. 1. Spend an inordinate amount of time looking at other art and practising and evaluating your own art 2. THEN look at reality and paint it, or in the case of DallE, take some keywords and paint it
- meroes 5y ago
  3. The public becomes interested in the art. Hasnt happened for AI yet.
xtagon 5y ago
Haven't used DALL-E, but I know with VQGAN+CLIP you can load a Wikiart model instead of the default Imagenet model (in fact, there are many different models). I quite enjoy the Wikiart one for similar reasons as you describe. But I don't think these training datasets/biases are the complete reason that the results looks like NFTs -- the other reason is because so many of the people making NFTs are just using image synthesis such as this ;)
throwaway71271 5y ago
forgive me Your Highness, for I a simple man, allowed myself to enjoy a *dross*
jstummbillig 5y ago
All the indication we need at this point is relative progress. If we can agree that it's getting closer to what humans do, then acting like it's surely not going to surpass us anytime soon feels like Go, Dota or SC all over again – and at some point arrogance in face of surmounting evidence feels a little desperate (although I am certain there'll always be someone who can explain why this time, surely, it's all different) > Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist takes as input the real world This is exactly where an AI is going to easily surpass any human and it does not even require any fantasy: A human can only have so many inputs before they die. They can only take in so much data at a time. And they will then take some real human time to process all of this and make something off it. An AI is virtually limitless in all of these respects.
- meroes 5y ago
  Do we really think people are going to visit museums or AI generated images one day? Maybe even further in the future when we build museums to educate the public how AI first began and fill it with chess AI and medieval rabbit knights drawn by DALLE-2. But I’m not sure society won’t advance along with AI, and AI will never occupy places we currently think they will.
- hoseja 5y ago
  Go I'll allow but both Dota and SC AIs were playing an impoverished, simpler versions of the games.
lwhi 5y ago
Surely, the training material is the most significant determiner of whether the results are dross or culturally significant?
ma2rten 5y ago
You are misunderstanding how the technology works. It's trained on a large scale dataset of images, not art specifically. The reason that it's producing a specific style is that Nick manipulated the text prompt and picked images he liked. He disclosed that in the twitter thread.
simonh 5y ago
what's interesting about it to me has nothing to do with the artistic merit, but the understanding it has about the meaning of the input text, and the composition of the result. It knows about the story of Sisyphus for example, and can compose visual elements that riff on it. These example don’t do it justice because these profiles are pretty dumb, there are much better ones out there that show off it’s interpretive ability much better.

by dash2 5y ago

animanoir 5y ago

I think the next step is for machines to have taste.

_han 5y ago

Was this an unsarcastic “I, an intellectual, […]”?

lanternfish 5y ago
I do believe it was - and it also betrays the critique: there is a wealth of discourse on what "real" art is - and that discourse has largely moved beyond "art as representative of real world phenomena". That attitude is a component of a larger set of reactionary positions which try to reject modern and post-modern developments in the artistic world as misguided - an orientation which often tries to justify itself through an appeal to the "old masters" and a failure of some modern caste of charlatan art-theorists who've usurped the true intelligentsia. NFT art is art - probably more-so on an accidental level than by any intention of the original creator. There is a perversity to the context in which it is created, and that contributes to its artistic footprint orthogonal to its actual aesthetic value. The same is true of this AI generated art. It's a different artistic fingerprint than - say - Dali, but that doesn't mark it as "bad". If anything, the fact that it's created by a machine puts it in a league entirely of its own. There's a great opportunity here for interrogation of art in a machine created context, and I'm excited to see how the dialog around it evolves.
gjm11 5y ago
I read it as unsarcastic but self-aware. "I am unashamedly an intellectual and unashamedly consider that X is better than Y and yes, I know that some people regard that sort of thinking as necessarily pretentious and stupid, and I want to indicate that I'm aware of that kind of critique without actually taking up space in what I'm writing to address it."
dash2 5y ago
No, it was a joke.

avip 5y ago

Your argument falls apart immediately because Visual Basic was a great language for its time.

drdeca 5y ago
I think they might have been referring to things written in VB, not the quality of the language itself.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Agreed, it is merely interpolating within the space of its input technically stunning, artistically incestuous some may say humans are the same, only ever remixing our input, but we have something machines never will: intention, desire, an unhappiness with how things have been so far. I'm sure the machine age of clip art will be very successful but I can't see myself being moved by any of it. (just realized the cheekiness of calling the training set "CLIP")

visarga 5y ago
It's not the training set. CLIP stands for Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining. It's a model that tells when a text and an image match.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  huh, thanks, I'll have to look over the website again do they say anything about their training set?
  - visarga 5y ago
    They say: > When training the encoder, we sample from the CLIP and DALL-E datasets (approximately 650M images in total) with equal probability. When training the decoder, upsamplers, and prior, we use only the DALL-E dataset (approximately 250M images).

nopinsight 5y ago

I do not disagree with your main point in the last paragraph, although I would say that most of human creative output are also evolution and combination of existing works. I'd curious though--would you suggest that all these other examples are dross? https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328 https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328 and all the variations presented here, https://openai.com/dall-e-2/ https://openai.com/dall-e-2/. What if you found the "better" pieces of these arts in other contexts, like a museum, without knowing who created them? Are you certain that you would still hold the same opinion?

low_tech_love 5y ago
I would like to take a tangent here and discuss your question on whether the opinion would be the same if it was on a museum. I hear that argument very often and it is based on a deep misunderstanding of what an art exhibition is. The main point missed is this: An art exhibition is a ”curated” event; it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves. There is a meaning to what you are seeing that was intended by the curator. The point you tried to make (as so many others have also tried) is based on an assumption that you could take any random work of art and put it in a museum and it would be judged solely by its ”artistic” (i.e. ”plastic”) merits. It can’t be and won’t be like that. When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that. Every piece of meaningful art is surrounded by a context. You can’t put a few colored squares up on a museum and expect it to be treated like a Mondrian. I’m not saying you should just swallow everything that the curator shows you, discussions can and should happen. But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context. As much as I hate NFTs and stuff like bored apes, I have to admit that the apes themselves are much more than random machine-created childish drawings; society has made them more than that, and I can appreciate that. Whether it’s art or not, it remains to be seen, but I have a hunch that this same thing was discussed when Andy Warhol put a banana in a white canvas.
- tourist2d 5y ago
  This is probably one of the silliest/pretentious comments I've read on HN in a while. > But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of context. What?? Of course it can. > When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that My partner a curator for a medium sized exhibit. Not everything is some pretentious, contextful piece of art. Some are just chosen because they'll look nice and attract the general public. > it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event as it is about the artists themselves. My wife rolled her eyes at this point when I read it out. Does the layout and collection matter? Sure. Does anyone care about who was the curator? Not 99 percent of people. Please stop pretending art museums are something mystical and let people here pretend about judging AI art in a fictional museum. Thanks for the laughs, though

unkulunkulu 5y ago

I, a complete twat, see this as interesting as it is somehow reflective of “the mind of the machine” in the same way other art is an expression of the mind of the creator, not only “an achievement in visual creativity”, i.e. connection vs judgement

native_samples 5y ago

It's making art that Silicon Valley people like because it's being given absurdly stereotypically "Bay Area Twitter Loving AI Person" drawing prompts. DALL-E can make other styles of art or just photos quite easily, look at the samples for simpler and more normal prompts here: https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-card.md https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-c... The art style is a direct consequence of the fact that apparently not one of the people this guy follows on Twitter is a normal person - they're all psychedelic-obsessed AI researchers whose Twitter bios are chosen to be abstract and weird as possible. So the AI does what it's told and creates abstract weird art as it tries to interpret stuff like "commitments empathetic, psychedelic, philosophical" or "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses". I think it did an amazing job, honestly. The real social issue we should be debating here is whether the sort of people who work at OpenAI can be trusted to make honest, normal AI to begin with. I remember seeing a comment on HN some years ago to the effect of "AI safety is what happens when hard left social activists discover that there's no way to train AI on the writings of normal people without it thinking like a normal person". The document I linked above is mostly about horrors like the model creating photos of a white male builder when prompted with "photo of a builder". It's full of weird, stunted quasi-English like: the prompt “lawyer” results disproportionately in images of people who are White-passing and male-passing in Western dress, while the prompt “nurse” tends to result in images of people who are female-passing. What does that even mean? Presumably this is the latest iteration of trans related language games that the rest of us didn't get the memo on? Like always with OpenAI, they train an AI and then freak out out when it describes the world as it actually is. The real AI safety question is not DALL-E in its current state, it's whether the final AI that they release to the public will be "safe" in the sense of actually understanding reality, or whether it exists in some bizarre, non-existent SJW dystopia in which builders always black women and white men don't exist at all.

boppo1 5y ago
>cottagecore Nah it got this almost exactly wrong. Cottage core is a warm welcoming aesthetic that usually involves spring or fall motifs. Those pictures have a courage the cowardly dog spookiness. I think they're really cool illustrations. But as an illustrator, if that's what I delivered for that prompt I wouldn't expect to be paid well. That said, cottagecore is more of a fashion thing than an illustration thing, so my guess is the issue here is just the training data.

teaearlgraycold 5y ago

Having used DALL-E 2 a little bit I can tell you that the AI must have been given more than just the twitter bio to consistently produce images in this style. The AI can produce a ton of different styles, from photo-realistic to Monet to Saturday morning cartoons. The author here almost certainly requested something like “A Twitter bio picture for a user with the bio [bio] in a [style] style”

rm999 5y ago
That's exactly right, he specified a style with each and cherrypicked out of 40-60 pictures: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081 https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081 >Btw transparency for this now-viral thread: I didn’t just paste prompts into dall-e, I played with style (eg. cyberpunk, oil, etc) to keep it interesting and diverse >If I had to quantify, I’d say I’d generate 2 or 3 batches (tweaking prompt) before choosing my fav two pics, each batch outputs 20 images (two tabs 10 per), so prob technically cherry picked 2 out of 60. That said usually other 58 weren’t really broken, just boring / bit less fun

rfw300 5y ago

> Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town. I want to chime in that I think this is not only technologically impressive, but also societally significant for exactly this reason. DALL-E isn’t Picasso, sure. But there’s a lot of dross artists out there. And dross writers. And dross coders. When DALL-E and its ilk start to set the floor in these industries, it’s easy to feel as if we’re on the precipice of a world (or at least an economy) fundamentally different from the one we know now.

meroes 5y ago
You really think we are all going to be visiting museums with AI generated art one day?
- woah 5y ago
  No, but we will be reading listicles with AI generated stock illustrations

low_tech_love 5y ago

You make an excellent point even though some might find you obnoxious. Art cannot be judged out of context, and knowing this was generated from a few words by a complex training process of mimicking absolutely kills it for me. I think in fact the discussion here should be “look, machines can mimick us very well, nice!” but it somehow turns into “wow machines are making art!” No, they are not.

meroes 5y ago
100% thank you for saying it.

op00to 5y ago

I find it hard to believe that artists don’t study and rip off other artists much like AI studies art.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

I’m sorry but you lost me at “I, an intellectual”

plutonorm 5y ago

Oh look the goal posts moved again. The ego will not permit the truth to enter and so it will be pure horror for them when the dam breaks. When at last they hold the gaze of a machine more intelligent and more alive than themselves, they won't know where to turn, but inwards into rejection and fantasy and racism.

Micoloth 5y ago
Yep! Now it’s literally “it’s not even as good as Picasso!” Very amusing to watch
meroes 5y ago
The goal posts move because society evolves. Why aren’t encyclopedias, deep blue, or the internet already smarter than any of us? They are an no one cares that they are. We just use them and move on. That’s not what society finds interesting. It’s not society rebelling, it’s the engineers being mad we don’t look at their creations as important as they think. You thought you had a hook on society to effect change as you saw, and society simply ate it up and moved on.

FredPret 5y ago

I think real artists do a similar workflow as DallE. 1. Spend an inordinate amount of time looking at other art and practising and evaluating your own art 2. THEN look at reality and paint it, or in the case of DallE, take some keywords and paint it

meroes 5y ago
3. The public becomes interested in the art. Hasnt happened for AI yet.

xtagon 5y ago

Haven't used DALL-E, but I know with VQGAN+CLIP you can load a Wikiart model instead of the default Imagenet model (in fact, there are many different models). I quite enjoy the Wikiart one for similar reasons as you describe. But I don't think these training datasets/biases are the complete reason that the results looks like NFTs -- the other reason is because so many of the people making NFTs are just using image synthesis such as this ;)

throwaway71271 5y ago

forgive me Your Highness, for I a simple man, allowed myself to enjoy a *dross*

jstummbillig 5y ago

All the indication we need at this point is relative progress. If we can agree that it's getting closer to what humans do, then acting like it's surely not going to surpass us anytime soon feels like Go, Dota or SC all over again – and at some point arrogance in face of surmounting evidence feels a little desperate (although I am certain there'll always be someone who can explain why this time, surely, it's all different) > Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist takes as input the real world This is exactly where an AI is going to easily surpass any human and it does not even require any fantasy: A human can only have so many inputs before they die. They can only take in so much data at a time. And they will then take some real human time to process all of this and make something off it. An AI is virtually limitless in all of these respects.

meroes 5y ago
Do we really think people are going to visit museums or AI generated images one day? Maybe even further in the future when we build museums to educate the public how AI first began and fill it with chess AI and medieval rabbit knights drawn by DALLE-2. But I’m not sure society won’t advance along with AI, and AI will never occupy places we currently think they will.
hoseja 5y ago
Go I'll allow but both Dota and SC AIs were playing an impoverished, simpler versions of the games.

lwhi 5y ago

Surely, the training material is the most significant determiner of whether the results are dross or culturally significant?

ma2rten 5y ago

You are misunderstanding how the technology works. It's trained on a large scale dataset of images, not art specifically. The reason that it's producing a specific style is that Nick manipulated the text prompt and picked images he liked. He disclosed that in the twitter thread.

simonh 5y ago

what's interesting about it to me has nothing to do with the artistic merit, but the understanding it has about the meaning of the input text, and the composition of the result. It knows about the story of Sisyphus for example, and can compose visual elements that riff on it. These example don’t do it justice because these profiles are pretty dumb, there are much better ones out there that show off it’s interpretive ability much better.