4 ms·

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 ca

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 4y 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.
- native_samples 4y ago
  The point I'm driving at is that most illustrators, given a commission like "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses", would reply not with art but with something like "I have no idea what this means or what you want". Cottagecore is not exactly a common term after all, it wasn't even clear to me until your reply that it's meant to be an aesthetic at all. For the curious, "Cottagecore, also known as farmcore and countrycore, is inspired by a romanticized interpretation of western agricultural life" [1]. That would be hard enough to draw because it's such an obscure term and even the Aesthetics Wiki doesn't seem to actually give many examples of it. But here it's being asked to modify the style to include "tech adjacency", and also a "young robert moses". Again, most artists would have no idea what this means without looking it up. Even I don't know what it means and I just did look it up (seems to have been some US public official in New York who was involved with centralised urban planning). DALL-E by its nature can't refuse to draw a picture and so it came up with a looming besuited man with inviting looking cottages in his hands, in a sort of vaguely modern art style that de-emphasises photo realism. That seems pretty astoundingly on target. I don't think I could do better. Edit: seems this next section is invalid because - indeed - the tweeter was giving DALL-E more than just the prompts he claimed to be giving it, sigh ... leaving it in for posterity What's amazing about it, is that DALL-E seems able to pick up on very subtle social cues here. Hyper liberal types tend to dislike classical Renaissance style art that's very precise and realistic, much preferring more abstracted styles. Although nothing in the quote asks for a specific style - and assuming the tweeter didn't give more guidance than he claimed - it seems to have picked up that terms like "cottagecore" are only used by a very specific subset of the internet. The linked wiki page starts with a trigger warning, then goes on to explain that "Cottagecore has been also criticized for its romanticism of eurocentric farming life" and being "an inadvertent celebration of the aesthetics of colonialism". "The use of Cottagecore aesthetics has been adopted by the TradWives community and members of the far-right as forms of propaganda". Again, this use of language is totally bizarre and weird. Maybe the people who use it don't realize how far from normal English they've drifted but DALL-E is clearly able to make the link between "this word appears mostly in web pages that also contain phrases like 'celebration of colonialism'" and "the sort of people who use this type of language like this type of art style". Which is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect it to be able to do given how it works and what else it's capable of, but it's still astounding. [1] https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore

boppo1 4y 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.

native_samples 4y ago
The point I'm driving at is that most illustrators, given a commission like "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses", would reply not with art but with something like "I have no idea what this means or what you want". Cottagecore is not exactly a common term after all, it wasn't even clear to me until your reply that it's meant to be an aesthetic at all. For the curious, "Cottagecore, also known as farmcore and countrycore, is inspired by a romanticized interpretation of western agricultural life" [1]. That would be hard enough to draw because it's such an obscure term and even the Aesthetics Wiki doesn't seem to actually give many examples of it. But here it's being asked to modify the style to include "tech adjacency", and also a "young robert moses". Again, most artists would have no idea what this means without looking it up. Even I don't know what it means and I just did look it up (seems to have been some US public official in New York who was involved with centralised urban planning). DALL-E by its nature can't refuse to draw a picture and so it came up with a looming besuited man with inviting looking cottages in his hands, in a sort of vaguely modern art style that de-emphasises photo realism. That seems pretty astoundingly on target. I don't think I could do better. Edit: seems this next section is invalid because - indeed - the tweeter was giving DALL-E more than just the prompts he claimed to be giving it, sigh ... leaving it in for posterity What's amazing about it, is that DALL-E seems able to pick up on very subtle social cues here. Hyper liberal types tend to dislike classical Renaissance style art that's very precise and realistic, much preferring more abstracted styles. Although nothing in the quote asks for a specific style - and assuming the tweeter didn't give more guidance than he claimed - it seems to have picked up that terms like "cottagecore" are only used by a very specific subset of the internet. The linked wiki page starts with a trigger warning, then goes on to explain that "Cottagecore has been also criticized for its romanticism of eurocentric farming life" and being "an inadvertent celebration of the aesthetics of colonialism". "The use of Cottagecore aesthetics has been adopted by the TradWives community and members of the far-right as forms of propaganda". Again, this use of language is totally bizarre and weird. Maybe the people who use it don't realize how far from normal English they've drifted but DALL-E is clearly able to make the link between "this word appears mostly in web pages that also contain phrases like 'celebration of colonialism'" and "the sort of people who use this type of language like this type of art style". Which is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect it to be able to do given how it works and what else it's capable of, but it's still astounding. [1] https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore