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Asking robots to design stained glass windows
- dfee 4y agoAs an aside, how is the SSC community? Rewarding like HN? I accommodate irreverence well, but I don’t have a field guide for what this community might actually be about. Any tips from long time participants?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- h-w 4y agoThere can be a good number of opinionated armchair know it all‘s, but, like HN, if you’re willing to sift through comments there’s lots of great insight and references you might not come across on your own.
- astrange 4y ago> I don’t have a field guide for what this community might actually be about. It's part of "online rationalism" which is supposedly a community based around lesswrong where they practice thinking about things logically, with some techniques that work and some that don't. More accurately it's a new religion that ascribes untrue magical powers to Bayes' theorem, probability theory, computers and AI research, gives people a life mission called "effective altruism", thinks if you program computers really well they'll become "superintelligences" and take over the world which needs to be stopped, and so on. This is why he says things about "rationality" in the post and is so approving about that Yudkowsky guy. SSC years ago had some undeserved drama where the kind of online humanities-degree activist types who call you "tech bros" yelled at him, so I think the community also has people intentionally trying to make themselves into their image of a "tech bro" as a reaction to that. (nb "religion" is not meant as an insult or a metaphor, starting new religions is what people do in Berkeley and this is just another one of them.)
- Tenoke 4y ago>untrue magical powers to Bayes' theorem, probability theory, computers Untrue magical powers? Just because people appreciate those things it doesn't mean they ascribe magical powers to them. That's like saying that HN ascribes magical powers to startups or chip architectures.
- astrange 4y agoWell they're rationalists, so they ascribe it magical rationality powers. They invoke Bayes' theorem for its property of being optimal, but it's optimal (and trivial) when you know the priors. The hard part is knowing those, and they don't, so they just use it in a metaphorical/mindset way that doesn't actually mean anything, pretend they don't have actual beliefs so they don't need to take responsibility for them, and say "prior" a lot. (https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating) In general, using probability theory as a way of thinking doesn't work because it can't reject infinitesimally likely but infinitely bad futures, which is why they're overly concerned with imaginary future AIs torturing them, and it ignores "unknown unknowns" and can only handle enumerated futures you already thought of, which is why they have that odd tendency to start polycules because it seems logical and then their girlfriends unexpectedly leave them. (That's also how you know it's a Berkeley new religion - weird sex practices.)
- Tenoke 4y agoYou are the only person ascribing it magical powers. The majority definitely do not and are well aware of the limitations, the problem with priors is talked about all the time in the community in much more detail. >In general, using probability theory as a way of thinking doesn't work because it can't reject infinitesimally likely but infinitely bad futures Another thing frequently discussed in those circles. >(That's also how you know it's a Berkeley new religion - weird sex practices.) Some people being sexually adventurous in California, the horror.
- astrange 4y ago
- mattcwilson 4y agoInteresting that you know it as the SSC community, because Scott (TFA’s author)’s original site was Slate Star Codex. The new Substack where this was posted is Astral Codex Ten. Both are (near)anagrams for his nom de plume, Scott Alexander. Anyway - I’ve lurked both for ~6-7 years. The best summary I can give is that Scott is an excellent and insightful author at his best, prone to certain idiosyncrasies, but who attracts a pretty thoughtful and generally pleasant commenter community. The bias in astrange’s position is grounded in some factual truth, but I would argue that Scott’s commenter community is not entirely in the “rationality” camp, even if that’s a big part of how Scott reached his audience. The bigger part, imo, are the incredible series of articles he wrote circa 2014-2016 on a breadth of topics, many that still hold up. I’d say check it out for the articles and see how you feel about the comments. Take astrange for what it’s worth, with a liberal dose of salt
- jefftk 4y agoI wonder if anyone yet has the job title "Query Engineer"? [EDIT: "Prompt Engineer"?] Also: if ML tech stalled now I expect we'd grow to have many Query Engineers, but if it doesn't do we still? For how long is this sort of experimentation what getting the best performance out of an AI will look like?
- ot 4y ago"Prompt Engineering" already got some traction [1], so should be Prompt Engineer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
- ImprobableTruth 4y agoI'm not sure if I believe that we'll have dedicated positions for query engineers because it's so hard to validate. Programming may seem like wizardry, but it's the rule-bound, alchemy version of wizardry, this on the other hand is more like communing with spirits. All the conjecture in this post could be right on the money, or total bunk. I don't see how anybody could reasonably hire someone for this position under this condition. How would one possibly discern between someone who can truly suss out what's going on and a techpriest who just recites learned dogma? I imagine it will definitely be an important skill, but I imagine that just like 'knowing how to google', it will be something that's just implicitly attached to a normal job.
- visarga 4y ago
- Metacelsus 4y agoAmazing images, but Tycho Brahe was famous for not using telescopes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Career:_observing_the_heavens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Career:_observing_...
- pvg 4y agoNot completely obvious from that wikipedia section but one important reason he didn't use them is that he died a few years before the first telescope was invented. Edit: replacing 'Tycho Brahe' with 'Zombie Tycho Brahe' in the prompts could be one effective way to fix this
- bombcar 4y agoSlightly surprised that query wasn’t thrown off by decades of Penny Arcade but maybe the character’s name isn’t that clear.
- raverbashing 4y agoFunny how they mention the pet moose, but Tycho Brahe had another, more well known, salient problem
- oefnak 4y agoI read the entire article but the only stranger thing I found was his chopped-off-nose.
- HKH2 4y agoThe other day someone was saying that DALL-E's work is not creative enough to be art, and now this article is saying it's not accurate enough. Should DALL-E play around with interpretations or not?
- Geonode 4y agoArt is using the qualities of a medium to enrich your message. Dall-E and it's training data are a medium with qualities that we can use to enrich a text based message.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoIt's not creative in the sense that it's clearly an automaton and has no awareness of culture, history, or context. It seems to operate like a huge multidimensional map of an image space with some verbal tags stuck into it rather randomly, and with style transfer applied as an operator to merge different features in the results. What it needs is an equivalent map for the concepts behind the signposts, and also a mapping between concepts and images. The concept map would be very hard to train because a concept space that includes all of culture and history would be huge and messy. A large concept map with a huge set of associations is one of the features of educated humans. But the concept mesh is grounded in subjective experience, so it would need an equivalent layer for that.
- visarga 4y ago> What it needs is an equivalent map for the concepts behind the signposts, It's the CLIP text and image encoders of DALL-E 2. > and also a mapping between concepts and images. It's the "prior" module. You guessed right but DALL-E 2 already has these functionalities in its design. https://i0.wp.com/bdtechtalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/DALL-E-2-architecture.jpg https://i0.wp.com/bdtechtalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04...
- astrange 4y agoIt seems like it'd be easier to use if you could see the intermediate steps, i.e. what the CLIP encoder "thought" the text prompt meant, and how it "thought" to turn that into an image prior. That could be done by decoding both into text again. Also, if you could feed it some kind of "knowledge graph" of words and images rather than a sentence, you wouldn't be misunderstood the same way, but you'd presumably run into the limit of what its embeddings can contain.
- aaron695 4y agoThat's very amazing. I'd prefer a real world stained glass robot though. Even if it can't do the physical work (which can't be too hard), where a program told you what colors to buy, or you told it what you have, and it designed using that and printed/projected out a numbered tracing where to cut. There's a Dall-E value add, turn it into a stained glass pattern and sell them. When people talk about UBI and artists doing stuff... we have the tech now to tell a computer what we want and have a stained glass window come out of a factory. Maybe more expensive than humans today.
- dom96 4y agoThis is really awesome. I'm very excited to get access to DALL-E 2, is there any way to speed that up? Surprised someone hasn't used their access already to provide a "slow" community edition.
- sigstoat 4y agoif the terms of use even remotely resemble those of the rest of openai, that probably violates them in about three different ways. it would be trivial for them to track down.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago>some of the pictures could only be described as “disastrous” I dunno, I think a stained glass window of a finch with Charles Darwin's head is pretty great, personally
- AgentME 4y agoIt seems like DALL-E is exceptional if you're willing to go with what it wants to make, and a total slog if you have very specific requirements.
- cageface 4y agoI’ve come to similar conclusions with midjourney. The most interesting outputs come from giving it very vague prompts and then doing a lot of manual curation of the results.
- minikomi 4y agoInteresting how you can apply this method to many other creative pursuits .. start wide, abstract and loose; refine with taste and purpose.
- samstave 4y ago>...is exceptional if you're willing to go with what it wants to make, and a total slog if you have very specific requirements. The same can be said with respect to how a great many treat most of their relationships, both personally, professionally, politically...
- gerdesj 4y ago"I think DALL-E assumes that anybody in the vicinity of a raven must be a Goth, and anybody in a library must be at least sort of Hermione Granger (I bet its corpus included a lot of Harry Potter fan art)" You get what you pay for.
- wnkrshm 4y agoI've spent 10 minutes trying to find a description of the training data for DALLE-2. The most I could find was that it was taken from 'publically-available' sources among others.
- sacrosancty 4y agoI found this explanation pretty post-hoc: "nobody depicts a moose in stained glass. A man scrying the heavens through a telescope is exactly the sort of dignified thing people make stained glass windows about. A moose isn’t. So DALL-E loses confidence and decides you don’t really mean it should be stained glass style." If the styles of the moose and the man were reversed, you could use the exact same explanation but end with "So DALL-E decides you don't really want the moose to be in stained glass style.".
- pvg 4y agoA google image search turns up endless flocks of stained glass meese as well.
- quickthrower2 4y agoFlocks of stained glass moose
- gspr 4y agoNo. This is a bug in English. The parent post just fixes it. It should clearly be meese.
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhy not mooses then?
- gspr 4y agoClearly then it also has to be gooses instead of geese ;-)
- quickthrower2 4y agoIf we are fixing it all… Logically you can distinguish between one, two, etc… and many with the word one, two, etc… and many. So there is no need for pluralised word. And we are back to moose!
- JetAlone 4y agoWhen a human's head ends up on the body of the bird, such as with Darwin or Alexandra I have to imagine a game of telephone where a transcription error in a chain of tradition led to the emergence of an apocryphal figure and they rolled with it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y agoNitpick – robot implies a physical form. This was a bot/AI/software.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dvh 4y agoIf it's doing useful work it's a machine, if not it's a robot
- astrange 4y agoYou could send them to Fracture (https://fractureme.com https://fractureme.com) and while it wouldn't be stained glass, printing a picture of stained glass on actual glass is at least modern art.
- tluyben2 4y agoI like this a lot, however, it would be great if he had created and actual robot that created the windows for real. My great grandfather was an expert at these and restored them for many churches; to see a robot learning and practicing this skill would be very cool.
- photochemsyn 4y agoAsk it to make a stained glass image of M.C. Escher working in his studio in non-Euclidean space, please.
- fho 4y agoYes please!
- rickard 4y agoNot DALL-E 2, but Disco Diffusion (https://colab.research.google.com/github/alembics/disco-diffusion/blob/main/Disco_Diffusion.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/alembics/disco-diff...): * https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_0.png https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_0.png * https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_1.png https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_1.png * https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_2.png https://jossi.avkrok.net/Escher_2.png The prompt was "A stained glass image of M.C. Escher working in his studio in non-Euclidean space", 600 iterations, 1024x768, and these are the first three ones it came up with. It's not perfect, but it definitely knows who he was!
- fho 4y agoNice! Although I somehow expected there to be more stairs :-)
- zimpenfish 4y agoI don't have any of the DALL-Es but I do have a couple from github [1], [2] which gave these outputs[3] [1] https://github.com/nerdyrodent/VQGAN-CLIP https://github.com/nerdyrodent/VQGAN-CLIP [2] https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion [3] https://imgur.com/a/DjQYLUz https://imgur.com/a/DjQYLUz
- photochemsyn 4y agoThat's pretty astonishing, no doubt about it. Thanks!
- jejones3141 4y agoAbout Tycho: it might help to give him his golden nose.
- ncmncm 4y ago"Tycho, the silver-nosed astrographer, had a very shiny moose..."
- johncalvinyoung 4y agoI thought it was bronze. Points for the parody though.
- fastball 4y agoIsn't one of the rules of using DALL-E 2 that you're not supposed to ask for real people (at least living people like Alexandra Elbakyan)?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoNot supposed to share photorealistic depictions of humans, cartoons are fine. I.e. no deepfakes…
- a_t48 4y agoI wonder - could you get better results asking for a more realistic depiction, then stuffing it through one of those style transfer nets?
- tmnvix 4y agoUnfortunately some of these designs aren't feasible because the cuts won't work. It isn't possible to cut 'into' a piece of glass (imagine the 'mouth' of pacman) when making leadlights. You can see something like this in the first image where the flowers overlap the blue pane in the middle of the image. That blue pane is an example of an 'impossible' shape. At least this is according to an uncle of mine that has decades of professional experience designing, creating, and repairing stained glass and leadlights.
- hoseja 4y agoWell then you can just break the concave (?) piece into two, without altering the design too much, no?
- tmnvix 4y agoThat's generally what is done I think. You do often see this where the shape is split in two. The disadvantage is that you end up with a line in a sometimes incongruous place, so a good designer would avoid it where possible.
- mmmmmbop 4y agoInteresting. So why is something like this [0] possible, but the one in the first picture not? [0] https://theglassroom.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/23f059d5c7f20251118ad7a0062fff26_fill_100_800_600.jpg https://theglassroom.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/23f059...
- tmnvix 4y agoAs far as I can see that set of windows doesn't include any of the shapes I described. It does have 'cut outs' but they are curves, which don't have the same problem. Edit: Actually, I see what you were referring to now. The two pieces at the top of each window in the door. I can't say that I know how that was accomplished. I've never seen something like that before. It might be revealing to see an image with a higher resolution.
- Nursie 4y agoHave the OpenAI folks lifted their prohibition on sharing images with faces then?
- idk1 4y ago> "If Darwin had really looked like this, I bet he would have had an easier time convincing people of evolution." I think this comment under The Charles Darwin Finch is one of the funniest things I've read this year.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoOn the way to his lecture he ran into a glass windows pane and died.
- pvillano 4y agohis body mangled, it was replaced with the nearest donor. a finch
- popcube 4y agoauthor let me feel he imply AI "find" these figures somewhere..
- planetsprite 4y agoThe negativity over Dall-e's failures to make perfect images reminds me of the Louis CK stand up about the guy pissed about in-flight wifi not working, basically you're angry about not having this amazing technology you didn't know existed until this very moment.
- deelly 4y agoIf I use state of the art laptop, but funs are noisy, does it really matter how many thousand of thousand of thousand of hours spent to develop it?
- sammorrowdrums 4y agoI frequently reference Louis CK bit. It is so frequently applicable. That said, I think it’s also a compliment to a tool when it does such a good job, that people criticise it for not doing a perfect job. The fact it’s actually doing the job at all is pretty wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the results.
- bongoman37 4y ago
- meheleventyone 4y agoIt depends a lot on what you think a good job actually looks like. This sort of prompt based regurgitation and remixing of data sets is super cool from a technical perspective and will maybe be useful one day but from someone mildly interested in this being an actual tool it needs to bridge that last 10%. That doesn't mean it has to be perfect at all. Which seems like a general summation of a lot of ML.
- Engineering-MD 4y agoI don’t think it’s accurate to say that there is only one image of Thomas Bayes in the training set. A quick image search reveals many duplicates and variations of this photo as well as some artistic interpretations of the image. I don’t know how important that is, but it has a lot more examples of labelled data than just that one photo.
- verisimi 4y agoVery strange that this chap mentions Tychos. I've recently looked into an alternative cosmology (alternative to the Copernican model) based on tychos work: https://www.tychos.space/ https://www.tychos.space/ I'm unfamiliar with this area, but it seems impressive to me that a lot of astronomical quirks are resolved: https://book.tychos.space/chapters/31-list-of-puzzles https://book.tychos.space/chapters/31-list-of-puzzles
- aoeusnth1 4y agoThis is quackery, please don’t waste any time with it. If you’re interested in astronomy, I can recommend the PBS spacetime YouTube channel.
- verisimi 4y agoWhy do you think it's quakery? I honestly want to hear a criticism of it.
- Robin_Message 4y agoI don't have time to read extensively, but an Earth-Sun binary with all the other planets orbiting the sun doesn't make sense given our understanding of gravity. Also, NASA has flown shit to pretty much every planet. You think they could do that if the heliocentric model was wrong?
- pingou 4y agoI find it interesting that it always seem to put the telescope near the mouth, presumably it has seen many more pictures of people drinking from a bottle than using a telescope. The telescopes also look pretty weird.
- stuart78 4y agoWhat I love about this article is that it is exactly the struggle a human commission-based artist goes through with a human patron. The patron says “I want a sculpture of a duck” and the artist shows a sketch of what he or she has in mind. Of course this is all wrong to the Parton. This is not the duck of my dreams, this is a common pond duck. The artist is now more confused. Has the patron ever seen a duck? What other kind of duck is there? Has the patron ever seen my work? And the more the patron tries to specify their ask, the less possible it is for the artist to achieve it. Finally they come to a grudging agreement, the artist delivers a duck statue but neglects to add it to their portfolio. The patron grudgingly writes a check and finds a nice spot in the far back of the garden.
- megraf 4y agoI wish the images in the article were a little larger. I feel like this is a reoccurring trend, where clicking on an image to enlarge it simply presents the same image in a new tab or window
- pvillano 4y agoI'd love to see image generation specialized on the wikiHow style as a data set, and then set loose on all articles lacking images with no moderation
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoIs this (or similar models) able to provide a list of the original input images that led to the output? I assume from the "this X doesn't exist" genre that these are in some sense new creations, but I'm slightly suspicious that they're just a real photo with some very subtle tweaks. Is there a write up that dispells this notion and/or addresses the legal/copyright aspects? How different does a face need to be from an original before you can legally use it in pornography seems like a question that will come up soon if it hasn't already.