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OP: Forgive me if this is out of place. Also, please know that my question is genuine, not at all a reflection on the author/their project, and most certainly b

OP: Forgive me if this is out of place. Also, please know that my question is genuine, not at all a reflection on the author/their project, and most certainly born out of my own ignorance: Why are these kinds of things impressive? I think part of my issue is that I don't really "get" these ML projects ("This X does not exist" or perhaps ML in general). My understanding is that, in layman's terms, workers are shown many, many examples of X and then are asked to "draw"/create X, which they then do. The corollary I can think of is if I were to draw over and over for a billion, billion years and each time a drawing "failed" to capture the essence of a prompt (as deemed by some outside entity), both my drawing, and my memory of it was erased. At the end of that time, my skill in drawing X would be amazing. _If_ that understanding is correct, it would seem unimpressive? It's not as though I can pass a prompt of "cookie" to an untrained generator and, it pops out a drawing of one. And likewise, any cookie "drawing" generated by a trained model is simply an amalgam of every example cookie. What am I missing?

bee_rider 4y ago
For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say "I don't get why it is impressive, I could draw these images too" is actually indicative of the wild change that has occurred over these last couple years. I guess it is true that more than a couple demos like this have been shown, so some of the awe might have worn off, but it is still pretty shocking to lots of us that you can describe the general idea of something to a computer and it can figure out and produce "what you mean," fuzzy as that is.
- JadoJodo 4y ago
  > The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say ... To be clear, I'm not trying to devalue this at all; In fact, as I noted above, I am certain I'm missing something and that was what my comment was aimed at. In any case, thank you for taking the time to reply (seriously).
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Probably expression "with a straight face" has been used sarcastically too often, so maybe it looks sarcastic in my comment too. In this case I should have picked a phrase more unambiguous phrase. I wasn't using it sarcastically or anything, "with a straight face" = in good faith/honest in this case.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I will say that the images included have not show to be particularly creative, unless I missed a wider galaxy of non-existent food items. It's not entirely convincing that the generated images aren't just glued together pieces of other images with some fading between them.
- Tomis02 4y ago
  > For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say "I don't get why it is impressive, I could draw these images too" is actually indicative of the wild change that has occurred over these last couple years. It's not creativity though. It's a program that arranges pixels in a way that is statistically similar to some training data set. It doesn't "draw" anything, it doesn't "figure out" anything. There is no thought or idea behind it. The output is mildly interesting but there is no creative act at work, and there's certainly no revolution in the artistic world. > For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. Maybe by some people. This is a human-centric perspective, a form of speciesm if I can call it that. Various primates have shown creativity, and various animals have shown the ability to solve problems creatively. Heck, even my cat figured out how to open doors by pulling down on the handle. Humans are likely not more creative than other animals with similar brain size, it's just that there's other factors at play that make it seem like that (such as opposable thumbs and the passing down of knowledge between generations using speech).
  - krageon 4y ago
    > This is a human-centric perspective [...] So is your perspective :) You essentially take a process we don't understand and can't quantify and say "because I can understand this, this can't be it". You don't know, claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
    - Tomis02 4y ago
      :) Yes, I haven't defined "creativity" and I haven't quantified anything. My assertion was empirical, based on the observation that what society usually considers creative comes into being due to a logical train of thought, such as "if X, then what if Y", or an impulse to do something that hasn't been done before. Imitation on its own would not be considered particularly creative. Yes, you are right, I could be wrong, perhaps this form of statistical imitation is at the core of greater creativity, and not another hype wave in software development. Time will tell.
  - chii 4y ago
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staticassertion 4y ago
It's a computer. That's the impressive bit.
woojoo666 4y ago
Regardless of what people think as impressive, or creative, or sentient, or intelligent, there is one thing that cannot be disputed: stock photos have value in the current economy. There are people being paid to produce these stock photos. And it now looks like AI can do it for cheaper. That's the most important thing to realize imo, is that the value of human production is getting lower and lower relative to AI.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  And think about on demand ML, where a stock photo on a website might change based on characteristics it knows of you. Let's say a website knows you love chocolate cake, well the website is now going to show you a chocolate cake instead and has generated a unique image of that for you.
- Smoosh 4y ago
  I think the real value is that it can combine items. I can easily find a stock image of a cake. I can probably find a stock image of a circular saw. But a decent stock image of a cake in the shape of a circular saw maybe doesn't exist anywhere. But this could generate several for me to choose from. And then there's the "in the style of Salvador Dali" aspect.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Even for something simple like a cake, if you want to use that image and perhaps license it exclusively so no one else has it, that would cost you a lot more than an ML generated cake photo. Even just an image of whatever with a very specific color would be a huge benefit for designers. Because almost all stock photography is trying to appeal to the broadest audience as possible, they all have a similar muted pallette of colors. Which makes stock photography kind of look like stock photography. ML generated images or even ML manipulated images could change that.
  - krater23 4y ago
    Correct. But I just see simplistic pictures that could just be copied from any stock. And maybee they are(from the software). They don't demnostrated what you say. It would be really impressive to see exactly this!
XCSme 4y ago
The process is not important, the idea is that a computer is able to generate new, never seen before, content that a human can understand. This allows for incredible things, like having a world-class artist create a song drawing based on your prompt (i.e. DALL-E) in one second.

bee_rider 4y ago

For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say "I don't get why it is impressive, I could draw these images too" is actually indicative of the wild change that has occurred over these last couple years. I guess it is true that more than a couple demos like this have been shown, so some of the awe might have worn off, but it is still pretty shocking to lots of us that you can describe the general idea of something to a computer and it can figure out and produce "what you mean," fuzzy as that is.

JadoJodo 4y ago
> The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say ... To be clear, I'm not trying to devalue this at all; In fact, as I noted above, I am certain I'm missing something and that was what my comment was aimed at. In any case, thank you for taking the time to reply (seriously).
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Probably expression "with a straight face" has been used sarcastically too often, so maybe it looks sarcastic in my comment too. In this case I should have picked a phrase more unambiguous phrase. I wasn't using it sarcastically or anything, "with a straight face" = in good faith/honest in this case.
mikkergp 4y ago
I will say that the images included have not show to be particularly creative, unless I missed a wider galaxy of non-existent food items. It's not entirely convincing that the generated images aren't just glued together pieces of other images with some fading between them.
Tomis02 4y ago
> For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say "I don't get why it is impressive, I could draw these images too" is actually indicative of the wild change that has occurred over these last couple years. It's not creativity though. It's a program that arranges pixels in a way that is statistically similar to some training data set. It doesn't "draw" anything, it doesn't "figure out" anything. There is no thought or idea behind it. The output is mildly interesting but there is no creative act at work, and there's certainly no revolution in the artistic world. > For the longest time it was assumed that creativity was an almost magically human trait. Maybe by some people. This is a human-centric perspective, a form of speciesm if I can call it that. Various primates have shown creativity, and various animals have shown the ability to solve problems creatively. Heck, even my cat figured out how to open doors by pulling down on the handle. Humans are likely not more creative than other animals with similar brain size, it's just that there's other factors at play that make it seem like that (such as opposable thumbs and the passing down of knowledge between generations using speech).
- krageon 4y ago
  > This is a human-centric perspective [...] So is your perspective :) You essentially take a process we don't understand and can't quantify and say "because I can understand this, this can't be it". You don't know, claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
  - Tomis02 4y ago
    :) Yes, I haven't defined "creativity" and I haven't quantified anything. My assertion was empirical, based on the observation that what society usually considers creative comes into being due to a logical train of thought, such as "if X, then what if Y", or an impulse to do something that hasn't been done before. Imitation on its own would not be considered particularly creative. Yes, you are right, I could be wrong, perhaps this form of statistical imitation is at the core of greater creativity, and not another hype wave in software development. Time will tell.
- chii 4y ago

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staticassertion 4y ago

It's a computer. That's the impressive bit.

woojoo666 4y ago

Regardless of what people think as impressive, or creative, or sentient, or intelligent, there is one thing that cannot be disputed: stock photos have value in the current economy. There are people being paid to produce these stock photos. And it now looks like AI can do it for cheaper. That's the most important thing to realize imo, is that the value of human production is getting lower and lower relative to AI.

NoPicklez 4y ago
And think about on demand ML, where a stock photo on a website might change based on characteristics it knows of you. Let's say a website knows you love chocolate cake, well the website is now going to show you a chocolate cake instead and has generated a unique image of that for you.
Smoosh 4y ago
I think the real value is that it can combine items. I can easily find a stock image of a cake. I can probably find a stock image of a circular saw. But a decent stock image of a cake in the shape of a circular saw maybe doesn't exist anywhere. But this could generate several for me to choose from. And then there's the "in the style of Salvador Dali" aspect.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Even for something simple like a cake, if you want to use that image and perhaps license it exclusively so no one else has it, that would cost you a lot more than an ML generated cake photo. Even just an image of whatever with a very specific color would be a huge benefit for designers. Because almost all stock photography is trying to appeal to the broadest audience as possible, they all have a similar muted pallette of colors. Which makes stock photography kind of look like stock photography. ML generated images or even ML manipulated images could change that.
- krater23 4y ago
  Correct. But I just see simplistic pictures that could just be copied from any stock. And maybee they are(from the software). They don't demnostrated what you say. It would be really impressive to see exactly this!

XCSme 4y ago

The process is not important, the idea is that a computer is able to generate new, never seen before, content that a human can understand. This allows for incredible things, like having a world-class artist create a song drawing based on your prompt (i.e. DALL-E) in one second.