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I concur that the tweeter is being pedantic. This is largely some embedding of semantics that we currently do not fully have a mapping for, precisely because i

I concur that the tweeter is being pedantic. This is largely some embedding of semantics that we currently do not fully have a mapping for, precisely because it was generated stochastically. Saying it was "not true" seems like clickbait.

koboll 4y ago
Especially since his results confirm most of what the original thread claimed. A couple of the inputs did not reliably replicate, but "for the most part, they're not true" seems straightforwardly false. He even seems to deliberately ignore this sometimes, such as when he says "I don't see any bugs" when there is very obviously a bug in the beak of all but two or three of the birds.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Lower in the same thread he accepts that his main tweet was clickbaity, and that actually there's consistency in some of the results.
  - Jweb_Guru 4y ago
    Not really, he afterwards says that he was more trying to inject some humility. He really doesn't think this is measuring anything of interest. For the birds result in particular, see https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1531736708903051265 https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1531736708903051265.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      If I read what that tweet says properly, the system ended up outputting things that were almost scientific nomenclature for the general class of items it was being asked to draw. There are probably many examples of "bird is an instance of class X" in the text but they are not consistent, and the resulting token vector is a point near the center of "birdspace".
      - Jweb_Guru 4y ago
        Yes. Indeed, it seems to interpret a lot of nonsense tokens it doesn't recognize as though it's probably the Latin / scientific term for some sort of species it doesn't remember very well (keeping in mind that all these systems are attempting to compress a large corpus into a relatively small space). I think https://twitter.com/realmeatyhuman/status/1531739046489341952 https://twitter.com/realmeatyhuman/status/153173904648934195... is best illustrative of this phenomenon. So, it's certainly an "interesting" result in the sense that it shows how these kinds of systems work, but it's definitely not a language.
        dekhn 4y ago
        Why is it important if it's "a language" or not? What we're talking about are concept representations (nouns), not languages. But I think most people who read "DALL-E has a secret language" probably picked up on that because we're accustomed to the hype in machine learning naming things to sound like they are more profound and powerful than they really are.
        Jweb_Guru 4y ago
        It's important if it's a "language" because the original thread claimed that it was one (and indeed, a number of comments in responses to this article are still making that claim). You may argue that discovering how DALL-E tries to map nonsense words to nouns is independently interesting, and that's fine (I don't find it interesting personally though--considering it has to pick something, and the evidence that these spaces are not particularly robust when confronted with far out of sample input, I don't even think calling it a secret vocabulary would be accurate), but the authors should reasonably expect some pushback if they argue that this is linguistics.
        dekhn 4y ago
        It didn't pick "something"- it chose scientific nomenclature as a basis, and synthesized new classes from that basis. They're not nonsense words, they're words with high probability which are not seen in the dataset.
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      When questioned about the change of tone, he answers "Well... a little bit of twitter hype makes a thread go a long way". https://twitter.com/emnode/status/1531852124501553153 https://twitter.com/emnode/status/1531852124501553153
- mannykannot 4y ago
  When I zoomed in, I felt only four in ten birds clearly had anything in their beaks, and in each case it looked like vegetable matter. In the original set, only one clearly has an insect in its beak. Are there higher-resolution images to be had?
ASalazarMX 4y ago
If DALL-E had a choice to output "Command not understood", maybe we wouldn't be discussing this. Like those AIs that guess what you draw, and recognize random doodling as "clouds", DALL-E is probably using the least unlikely route. That a gibberish word is drawn as a bird is maybe because it was "bird (2%), goat (1%), radish (1%)". 1. https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com
- superjan 4y ago
  This is a good point. The fact that DALL-E will try to render something, no matter how meaningless the input, is a trait it has in common with many neural networks. If you want to use them for actual work, they should be able to fail rather than freestyle.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  That's extremely optimisic. When faced with gibberish, the "confidences" are routinely 90%+ as with "meaningful" input. It's almost as-if its an illusion designed to fool, we, the users.. by only providing inputs meaningful to us, we come to the foolish idea that it understands these inputs.

koboll 4y ago

Especially since his results confirm most of what the original thread claimed. A couple of the inputs did not reliably replicate, but "for the most part, they're not true" seems straightforwardly false. He even seems to deliberately ignore this sometimes, such as when he says "I don't see any bugs" when there is very obviously a bug in the beak of all but two or three of the birds.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
Lower in the same thread he accepts that his main tweet was clickbaity, and that actually there's consistency in some of the results.
- Jweb_Guru 4y ago
  Not really, he afterwards says that he was more trying to inject some humility. He really doesn't think this is measuring anything of interest. For the birds result in particular, see https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1531736708903051265 https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1531736708903051265.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    If I read what that tweet says properly, the system ended up outputting things that were almost scientific nomenclature for the general class of items it was being asked to draw. There are probably many examples of "bird is an instance of class X" in the text but they are not consistent, and the resulting token vector is a point near the center of "birdspace".
    - Jweb_Guru 4y ago
      Yes. Indeed, it seems to interpret a lot of nonsense tokens it doesn't recognize as though it's probably the Latin / scientific term for some sort of species it doesn't remember very well (keeping in mind that all these systems are attempting to compress a large corpus into a relatively small space). I think https://twitter.com/realmeatyhuman/status/1531739046489341952 https://twitter.com/realmeatyhuman/status/153173904648934195... is best illustrative of this phenomenon. So, it's certainly an "interesting" result in the sense that it shows how these kinds of systems work, but it's definitely not a language.
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Why is it important if it's "a language" or not? What we're talking about are concept representations (nouns), not languages. But I think most people who read "DALL-E has a secret language" probably picked up on that because we're accustomed to the hype in machine learning naming things to sound like they are more profound and powerful than they really are.
        Jweb_Guru 4y ago
        It's important if it's a "language" because the original thread claimed that it was one (and indeed, a number of comments in responses to this article are still making that claim). You may argue that discovering how DALL-E tries to map nonsense words to nouns is independently interesting, and that's fine (I don't find it interesting personally though--considering it has to pick something, and the evidence that these spaces are not particularly robust when confronted with far out of sample input, I don't even think calling it a secret vocabulary would be accurate), but the authors should reasonably expect some pushback if they argue that this is linguistics.
        dekhn 4y ago
        It didn't pick "something"- it chose scientific nomenclature as a basis, and synthesized new classes from that basis. They're not nonsense words, they're words with high probability which are not seen in the dataset.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    When questioned about the change of tone, he answers "Well... a little bit of twitter hype makes a thread go a long way". https://twitter.com/emnode/status/1531852124501553153 https://twitter.com/emnode/status/1531852124501553153
mannykannot 4y ago
When I zoomed in, I felt only four in ten birds clearly had anything in their beaks, and in each case it looked like vegetable matter. In the original set, only one clearly has an insect in its beak. Are there higher-resolution images to be had?

ASalazarMX 4y ago

If DALL-E had a choice to output "Command not understood", maybe we wouldn't be discussing this. Like those AIs that guess what you draw, and recognize random doodling as "clouds", DALL-E is probably using the least unlikely route. That a gibberish word is drawn as a bird is maybe because it was "bird (2%), goat (1%), radish (1%)". 1. https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com

superjan 4y ago
This is a good point. The fact that DALL-E will try to render something, no matter how meaningless the input, is a trait it has in common with many neural networks. If you want to use them for actual work, they should be able to fail rather than freestyle.
mjburgess 4y ago
That's extremely optimisic. When faced with gibberish, the "confidences" are routinely 90%+ as with "meaningful" input. It's almost as-if its an illusion designed to fool, we, the users.. by only providing inputs meaningful to us, we come to the foolish idea that it understands these inputs.