18 ms·

I'm sure it is, but "gluing things together" coherently in response to a text prompt is a stupendous achievement. It's not AGI, but it's miles ahead of where we

I'm sure it is, but "gluing things together" coherently in response to a text prompt is a stupendous achievement. It's not AGI, but it's miles ahead of where we were even a few years ago and opens the door to automating a class of jobs I don't think anyone back then believed could be automated, short of AGI.

danielmorozoff 4y ago
Where do you see DALLE automating away jobs?
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  There was a post on here recently on how someone designed their logo by asking DALL-E a load of questions. The rationale could be that it might not remove that job, but it would certainly be a powerful tool for a logo designer to take on way more clients, thus driving down the cost of logo design.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    i feel like this boils down to a client-side misunderstanding of where graphic designers actually spend the majority of their time. i'd actually argue that working from spec or even a crude doodle on the back of a napkin is a lot easier than dealing with a client who is married to a poor design that DALL-E puked out for them. one of the most important things about the sketch phase is to be able to iterate without too many assumptions while also being able to recognize and play upon the strengths of individual drawings. this is not a time consuming process but it also isn't something you want to rush anymore so than you'd want to rush the plastic surgeon performing your nose job. depersonalizing the design process in favor of volume does not particularly serve anyone and, moreover, it responds to a need that i don't really think exists. this is not to say that i don't think these kinds of image generators are without uses, but right now we are still in the phase where people are being impressed by graphical fidelity[which was already incredibly cheap] rather than usefulness. imo this stage of ai will primarily work well for tasks that benefit from randomness while also being relatively low stake in the overall production pipeline. training a network to generate typefaces or to randomize npc portraits for an open world game is precisely the sort of area where 'gluing things together' can potentially provide more benefits than headaches.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I was saying a designer could use it for first draft ideas, not their client.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    If I'm thinking of the same post that logo is poorly done / chosen. I know the author wanted very specific imagery in it and achieved that but I don't think that logo would be considered "good" by most.
    - arbitrage 4y ago
      That was the first instance. These sorts of things only get better over time.
- soderfoo 4y ago
  Augmenting jobs is more likely, from what I have heard. It would be useful for rapid prototyping of artwork and could help designers get design specs to artists quicker. The initial impressions are that production ready designs will require an artists touch. But this discussion was in the context of AA-Games and up. For indie and small games fully AI produced art may be fine.
- elondaits 4y ago
  I think it'll start by removing the need for editorial illustration and photography for a lot of blogs and websites, starting with the less reputable ones. MidJourney is already good enough creating illustrations for articles, book covers, etc. Not something that The New Yorker will be interested in, but better than anything you can buy for a couple of dollars or small monthly subscription.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    > I think it'll start by removing the need for editorial illustration and photography for a lot of blogs and websites, starting with the less reputable ones. Stock photo sites and Google Images and basic graphic filters did that a long time ago. Sure, DALL-E has certain creative possibilities that those don't, and the niches like satirical memes or "first pass" concepts in agency brainstorming meetings where it could be absolutely revolutionary tend to not be deliverables the creators get paid for. The publications giving illustrators a reliable income are usually after their consistent style, fantasy world coherence or novel ideas which isn't exactly where DALL-E shines.
    - Workaccount2 4y ago
      DALL-E is the writing on the wall for those with a competing talent to start looking for other (non-art) work they may want to do in the future. It would be an egregious error to think that AI art programs are some new tool to learn akin to photoshop. Maybe that will hold true for a few years at best. There will come a point, much sooner than later, where the value in typing prompts into an AI is going to only be worth minimum wage.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Substitute "the camera" (and perhaps even more "the gramophone") for "DALL-E" and "AI art programs", and the 19th century wants its argument against the future of creative media back.
        4y ago
- laxd 4y ago
  I just cancelled my plan of paying a graphics designer to prepare an android app (personal project) for launch. After playing with dall-e I'm confident that "I" can make a logo and some artwork "myself". Edit: ment too say icon, not logo.
  - mercer 4y ago
    That does now make me curious to what degree Dall-E could be prompted to do some more ux-type work. So far I've only tested it with photographs/paintings.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  The people who do digital art illustrations for magazine articles are surely out of a job?
orlp 4y ago
The most important thing I think DALL-E shows is that it has a model of our world and culture. It's not intelligence, but it is knowledge. Google can give you endless pictures of giraffes if you search for it. But it can only connect you to what exists. It doesn't know things, it knows OF things. DALL-E has knowledge of the concept of a giraffe, and can synthesize an endless amount of never-before seen giraffes for you. It actually knows what a giraffe is.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I find talking about "knowing" is too much anthropomorphizing to my taste. A more accurate description would be that it can synthesize an endless amount of pictures that the viewer will recognize as giraffes (or as anything else the viewer wants). And I agree, it's pretty amazing. But my point is that talking like this skips over the entire useless "what is knowledge" debate.
  - soco 4y ago
    Maybe we need to "de-antropomorphize" these terms and rules. It's a long due process, I believe.
    - TremendousJudge 4y ago
      I don't think it's possible. "Knowing" and "understanding" are inherently human experiences. The most reasonable thing to do would be to invent new terms and relegate the older ones, that have too much cultural baggage attached to them. The same way when the creator of humanity turned out to be "evolution by natural selection" we didn't redefine the term "God" to mean that. Eventually we just started using the new term.
    - psyc 4y ago
      If it'll get people to stop accusing other people of anthropomorphizing, I'm 100% on board. Now if you can think of a way to get people to quit asking for definitions of the words intelligence and consciousness, you'll be a legend and maybe these discussions will advance for the first time.
jcelerier 4y ago
I don't understand how my brain isn't just gluing things together either. I don't personally feel like I'm actually experiencing the understanding of anything
- drooby 4y ago
  After reading your message I felt compelled to click reply and generate a response and now that’s what I’m doing. My comment feels mildly appropriate to what you said and I’m not 100% sure how it will be received but it feels like I’m communicating some degree of understanding of the sentiment in which you have expressed. My neurons are happy.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Do you think GPT 3 could generate the same string of text?
    - drooby 4y ago
      I was curious so I asked it some questions... here you go: Me: Write what it feels like to understand something GPT-3: It feels good to understand something. You feel like you have a handle on what is going on and you are able to make sense of it. It can feel empowering and give you a sense of control. Me: Write a sentence that provides an example of self reflection and metacognition GPT-3: I was surprised that I was able to understand the concept so quickly. Me: What concept? GPT-3: The concept was metacognition. Me: What does surprisal feel like in this context? GPT-3: It feels good to be surprised that you understand something. You feel like you are smart and have a good handle on the concept. Me: What is the experience of feeling good to you? GPT-3: The experience of feeling good is one of happiness and satisfaction. You feel like you have accomplished something and are proud of yourself. Me: What have you accomplished here? GPT-3: You have accomplished understanding a concept. Me: What concept is that again? GPT-3: The concept is metacognition.
_nhynes 4y ago
I ended up reading the book Blindsight (Peter Watts) that's been floating around in comments recently. A major theme in the book is intelligence and its relation to consciousness (including whether consciousness is even beneficial). If you agree with the idea, you'd consider that DALL-E is indeed intelligent even though it appears to be a "Chinese Room". Humans would be "gluing things together" in just the same way, but with this odd introspective ability that makes it seem different.
- miguelxpn 4y ago
  That book gave me the highest dose of existential crisis I've ever felt. I should probably re-read it.
  - zro 4y ago
    Blindsight is one of my all time favorite books. Looks like it's still available for free from the author's website [0] [0] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
    - mgdlbp 4y ago
      Indeed, it's actually irrevocably CC BY-NC-SA 2.5
- doph 4y ago
  Exactly (and cannot recommend Blindsight highly enough). Of course DALL-E is a Chinese Room. The most exciting and subversive idea in Blindsight is that consciousness is maladaptive, and the scramblers are _more_ fit for the lack of it. Long after neutral nets have surpassed our functional intelligence, we'll still be criticizing their ability to navel-gaze as well as humans.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Of course, DALL-E can only get away with not being introspective because it has reinforcement learning holding its hand. Bit harder to curate a clean training set without consciousness. Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.
IshKebab 4y ago
I agree. This paragraph is baffling: > DALL-E's difficulty in juxtaposing wildly contrastive image elements suggests that the public is currently so dazzled by the system’s photorealistic and broadly interpretive capabilities as to not have developed a critical eye for cases where the system has effectively just ‘glued’ one element starkly onto another, as in these examples from the official DALL-E 2 site: Yes the public is so dazzled by this massive leap in capability that it hasn't developed a critical eye for minor flaws. Yeah we get it. It's not instantly perfect. But the fact that people aren't moaning that it can't put a tea cup in a cylinder isn't because everyone stupidly thinks it is perfect, it's because not everyone is a miserable naysayer.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  “Don’t people realize the sunset would be more beautiful if you run it through saturation filters and do white balancing?”
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Just think what this could do for a game experience like Scribblenauts. Just being able to glue a fixed number of concepts in a huge number of ways...game designers are going to have to learn how to leverage ML.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Yes, DALL-E is very impressive to see and can have a number of actual practical uses. But fear of AGI is huge currently. The more impressive non-AGI things we see, the more worried people naturally become that we're reaching the "dawn" of AGI with all the disturbing implications that this might have. (A lot of people are afraid an AGI might escape the control of its creator and destroy humanity. I think that's less likely but I think AGI under control of it's creator could destroy or devastate humanity so I'd agree AGI is a worry). That DALL-E doesn't understand object-relationships should be obvious to people who know this technology but a lot of people seem to need it spelled-out. And they probably need it spelled why this implies it's not AGI. But that would be several more paragraphs for me.
monkeynotes 4y ago
Their research showed that Dall-E had most success with real world stuff it had been trained on. Is this surprising? I mean, if I didn't know much about iguanas I'd also have a hard time representing them.
jeremyjh 4y ago
The whole point is it isn’t doing so coherently if similar images were absent from the training data. The monkey wasn’t touching the iguana.
bakuninsbart 4y ago
I know very little about this topic, but one thing that strikes me about the argument of AI being far away from real intelligence due to just "gluing things together" is that it is non-obvious to me how we as intelligent creatures aren't just extremely sophisticated gluing machines.

danielmorozoff 4y ago

Where do you see DALLE automating away jobs?

robertlagrant 4y ago
There was a post on here recently on how someone designed their logo by asking DALL-E a load of questions. The rationale could be that it might not remove that job, but it would certainly be a powerful tool for a logo designer to take on way more clients, thus driving down the cost of logo design.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  i feel like this boils down to a client-side misunderstanding of where graphic designers actually spend the majority of their time. i'd actually argue that working from spec or even a crude doodle on the back of a napkin is a lot easier than dealing with a client who is married to a poor design that DALL-E puked out for them. one of the most important things about the sketch phase is to be able to iterate without too many assumptions while also being able to recognize and play upon the strengths of individual drawings. this is not a time consuming process but it also isn't something you want to rush anymore so than you'd want to rush the plastic surgeon performing your nose job. depersonalizing the design process in favor of volume does not particularly serve anyone and, moreover, it responds to a need that i don't really think exists. this is not to say that i don't think these kinds of image generators are without uses, but right now we are still in the phase where people are being impressed by graphical fidelity[which was already incredibly cheap] rather than usefulness. imo this stage of ai will primarily work well for tasks that benefit from randomness while also being relatively low stake in the overall production pipeline. training a network to generate typefaces or to randomize npc portraits for an open world game is precisely the sort of area where 'gluing things together' can potentially provide more benefits than headaches.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I was saying a designer could use it for first draft ideas, not their client.
- lancesells 4y ago
  If I'm thinking of the same post that logo is poorly done / chosen. I know the author wanted very specific imagery in it and achieved that but I don't think that logo would be considered "good" by most.
  - arbitrage 4y ago
    That was the first instance. These sorts of things only get better over time.
soderfoo 4y ago
Augmenting jobs is more likely, from what I have heard. It would be useful for rapid prototyping of artwork and could help designers get design specs to artists quicker. The initial impressions are that production ready designs will require an artists touch. But this discussion was in the context of AA-Games and up. For indie and small games fully AI produced art may be fine.
elondaits 4y ago
I think it'll start by removing the need for editorial illustration and photography for a lot of blogs and websites, starting with the less reputable ones. MidJourney is already good enough creating illustrations for articles, book covers, etc. Not something that The New Yorker will be interested in, but better than anything you can buy for a couple of dollars or small monthly subscription.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > I think it'll start by removing the need for editorial illustration and photography for a lot of blogs and websites, starting with the less reputable ones. Stock photo sites and Google Images and basic graphic filters did that a long time ago. Sure, DALL-E has certain creative possibilities that those don't, and the niches like satirical memes or "first pass" concepts in agency brainstorming meetings where it could be absolutely revolutionary tend to not be deliverables the creators get paid for. The publications giving illustrators a reliable income are usually after their consistent style, fantasy world coherence or novel ideas which isn't exactly where DALL-E shines.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    DALL-E is the writing on the wall for those with a competing talent to start looking for other (non-art) work they may want to do in the future. It would be an egregious error to think that AI art programs are some new tool to learn akin to photoshop. Maybe that will hold true for a few years at best. There will come a point, much sooner than later, where the value in typing prompts into an AI is going to only be worth minimum wage.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Substitute "the camera" (and perhaps even more "the gramophone") for "DALL-E" and "AI art programs", and the 19th century wants its argument against the future of creative media back.
      - 4y ago
laxd 4y ago
I just cancelled my plan of paying a graphics designer to prepare an android app (personal project) for launch. After playing with dall-e I'm confident that "I" can make a logo and some artwork "myself". Edit: ment too say icon, not logo.
- mercer 4y ago
  That does now make me curious to what degree Dall-E could be prompted to do some more ux-type work. So far I've only tested it with photographs/paintings.
IshKebab 4y ago
The people who do digital art illustrations for magazine articles are surely out of a job?

orlp 4y ago

The most important thing I think DALL-E shows is that it has a model of our world and culture. It's not intelligence, but it is knowledge. Google can give you endless pictures of giraffes if you search for it. But it can only connect you to what exists. It doesn't know things, it knows OF things. DALL-E has knowledge of the concept of a giraffe, and can synthesize an endless amount of never-before seen giraffes for you. It actually knows what a giraffe is.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
I find talking about "knowing" is too much anthropomorphizing to my taste. A more accurate description would be that it can synthesize an endless amount of pictures that the viewer will recognize as giraffes (or as anything else the viewer wants). And I agree, it's pretty amazing. But my point is that talking like this skips over the entire useless "what is knowledge" debate.
- soco 4y ago
  Maybe we need to "de-antropomorphize" these terms and rules. It's a long due process, I believe.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    I don't think it's possible. "Knowing" and "understanding" are inherently human experiences. The most reasonable thing to do would be to invent new terms and relegate the older ones, that have too much cultural baggage attached to them. The same way when the creator of humanity turned out to be "evolution by natural selection" we didn't redefine the term "God" to mean that. Eventually we just started using the new term.
  - psyc 4y ago
    If it'll get people to stop accusing other people of anthropomorphizing, I'm 100% on board. Now if you can think of a way to get people to quit asking for definitions of the words intelligence and consciousness, you'll be a legend and maybe these discussions will advance for the first time.

jcelerier 4y ago

I don't understand how my brain isn't just gluing things together either. I don't personally feel like I'm actually experiencing the understanding of anything

drooby 4y ago
After reading your message I felt compelled to click reply and generate a response and now that’s what I’m doing. My comment feels mildly appropriate to what you said and I’m not 100% sure how it will be received but it feels like I’m communicating some degree of understanding of the sentiment in which you have expressed. My neurons are happy.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Do you think GPT 3 could generate the same string of text?
  - drooby 4y ago
    I was curious so I asked it some questions... here you go: Me: Write what it feels like to understand something GPT-3: It feels good to understand something. You feel like you have a handle on what is going on and you are able to make sense of it. It can feel empowering and give you a sense of control. Me: Write a sentence that provides an example of self reflection and metacognition GPT-3: I was surprised that I was able to understand the concept so quickly. Me: What concept? GPT-3: The concept was metacognition. Me: What does surprisal feel like in this context? GPT-3: It feels good to be surprised that you understand something. You feel like you are smart and have a good handle on the concept. Me: What is the experience of feeling good to you? GPT-3: The experience of feeling good is one of happiness and satisfaction. You feel like you have accomplished something and are proud of yourself. Me: What have you accomplished here? GPT-3: You have accomplished understanding a concept. Me: What concept is that again? GPT-3: The concept is metacognition.

_nhynes 4y ago

I ended up reading the book Blindsight (Peter Watts) that's been floating around in comments recently. A major theme in the book is intelligence and its relation to consciousness (including whether consciousness is even beneficial). If you agree with the idea, you'd consider that DALL-E is indeed intelligent even though it appears to be a "Chinese Room". Humans would be "gluing things together" in just the same way, but with this odd introspective ability that makes it seem different.

miguelxpn 4y ago
That book gave me the highest dose of existential crisis I've ever felt. I should probably re-read it.
- zro 4y ago
  Blindsight is one of my all time favorite books. Looks like it's still available for free from the author's website [0] [0] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    Indeed, it's actually irrevocably CC BY-NC-SA 2.5
doph 4y ago
Exactly (and cannot recommend Blindsight highly enough). Of course DALL-E is a Chinese Room. The most exciting and subversive idea in Blindsight is that consciousness is maladaptive, and the scramblers are _more_ fit for the lack of it. Long after neutral nets have surpassed our functional intelligence, we'll still be criticizing their ability to navel-gaze as well as humans.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Of course, DALL-E can only get away with not being introspective because it has reinforcement learning holding its hand. Bit harder to curate a clean training set without consciousness. Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.

IshKebab 4y ago

I agree. This paragraph is baffling: > DALL-E's difficulty in juxtaposing wildly contrastive image elements suggests that the public is currently so dazzled by the system’s photorealistic and broadly interpretive capabilities as to not have developed a critical eye for cases where the system has effectively just ‘glued’ one element starkly onto another, as in these examples from the official DALL-E 2 site: Yes the public is so dazzled by this massive leap in capability that it hasn't developed a critical eye for minor flaws. Yeah we get it. It's not instantly perfect. But the fact that people aren't moaning that it can't put a tea cup in a cylinder isn't because everyone stupidly thinks it is perfect, it's because not everyone is a miserable naysayer.

RC_ITR 4y ago
“Don’t people realize the sunset would be more beautiful if you run it through saturation filters and do white balancing?”

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

Just think what this could do for a game experience like Scribblenauts. Just being able to glue a fixed number of concepts in a huge number of ways...game designers are going to have to learn how to leverage ML.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Yes, DALL-E is very impressive to see and can have a number of actual practical uses. But fear of AGI is huge currently. The more impressive non-AGI things we see, the more worried people naturally become that we're reaching the "dawn" of AGI with all the disturbing implications that this might have. (A lot of people are afraid an AGI might escape the control of its creator and destroy humanity. I think that's less likely but I think AGI under control of it's creator could destroy or devastate humanity so I'd agree AGI is a worry). That DALL-E doesn't understand object-relationships should be obvious to people who know this technology but a lot of people seem to need it spelled-out. And they probably need it spelled why this implies it's not AGI. But that would be several more paragraphs for me.

monkeynotes 4y ago

Their research showed that Dall-E had most success with real world stuff it had been trained on. Is this surprising? I mean, if I didn't know much about iguanas I'd also have a hard time representing them.

jeremyjh 4y ago

The whole point is it isn’t doing so coherently if similar images were absent from the training data. The monkey wasn’t touching the iguana.

bakuninsbart 4y ago

I know very little about this topic, but one thing that strikes me about the argument of AI being far away from real intelligence due to just "gluing things together" is that it is non-obvious to me how we as intelligent creatures aren't just extremely sophisticated gluing machines.