4 ms·

Let's not play word games. Do you know what a giraffe is? No, you just know what a giraffe looks like, where it lives, and maybe that it's vaguely related to

Let's not play word games. Do you know what a giraffe is? No, you just know what a giraffe looks like, where it lives, and maybe that it's vaguely related to a horse.

shafoshaf 4y ago
That last bit about the horse is pretty loaded. Knowing what a giraffe is means knowing that it is a mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain ways to certain stimuli, etc... That is a lot more than just knowing what it looks like. Image recognition is not the same a relationships or knowledge.
- influxmoment 4y ago
  > mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain DALL-E likely can map all those concepts to a giraffe also.
- orlp 4y ago
  Now ask DALL-E "giraffe feeding young", "giraffe organs", "giraffe eating", etc, I think you'd find most knowledge is there.
  - teolandon 4y ago
    What about ,"giraffe laying eggs"?
- karatinversion 4y ago
  By your criteria, no human before the 18th century (when Carl Linnaeus invented the class “mammalia”) knew what a giraffe was.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    And in the 25th century, if we manage keep technology alive, the dall-es of the day will be trained in more computer depictions of long extinct animals that accidentally made it into the training set than pictures of real animals. It will be Dürer's rhinoceros all over again.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
That's not a word game at all. To know what a giraffe is is to be able to understand the implications of being informed that something is a giraffe. Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  > Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe. Are you sure? (Can someone run down those prompts?) Dall-e might be able to make those relationships in the latent space
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    > Are you sure? Considering Dall-e has problems painting "a red cube on top of a blue cube" [1] and all kind of simple spatial relations, I'd say it's a fair shot. [1] As reported by OpenAI, but there are also some prompts by Gary Marcus et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807) showing this, and it's trivially simple to find other very simple cases like these
leereeves 4y ago
You know a lot more than that. You know that it eats, sleeps, runs, mates. You know that there are male and female giraffes and what that means. You know that it dies if it gets too hot, too cold, if it falls off a cliff. You know that it has legs, a head, neck, etc and you probably know that it has a heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, etc inside. You know, vaguely, how it interacts with other things and what it's likely to do around a fruit tree, or a lion, or fire. Even if you've never been close to a giraffe, you can probably imagine what it looks like from close enough to see individual hairs in its fur. A lot of knowledge is still missing from ML systems that don't interact with the world.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  It's even deeper than that. Humans and giraffes are mammals, very close cousins in terms of evolutionary biology. The very nature of your experience of reality is essentially shared with the giraffe. Part of our brains are lizard, both yours and the giraffes. Tech so ancient that it uses the same circuits and chemicals with crustaceans. You can imagine what existence is like for a giraffe with pretty much 99% accuracy without consciously knowing a single thing about it. A word-based image generator cannot.
kilroy123 4y ago
What do you mean by "is"? I've spent a fair amount of time with giraffes in real life. Does that mean I know what one is?
- mym1990 4y ago
  I would really hope so. All of this conversation is devolving into a philosophical argument about 2 letter words. To know what something is relates to understanding some of its properties, and how it might interact with the world around it. Whether DALL-E knows what something is, is debatable. Whether you know what something is should be pretty clear.
axus 4y ago
I do not grok a giraffe in the same way I do the things I work on.
Earw0rm 4y ago
Not really close to horses at all. It's an even-toed ungulate, closer to deer, cows and sheep. Many, many tens of millions of years from horses.. the even-toed herbivores are closer to dolphins (!!) than they are to horses or rhinos.

Let's not play word games. Do you know what a giraffe is? No, you just know what a giraffe looks like, where it lives, and maybe that it's vaguely related to a horse.

shafoshaf 4y ago

That last bit about the horse is pretty loaded. Knowing what a giraffe is means knowing that it is a mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain ways to certain stimuli, etc... That is a lot more than just knowing what it looks like. Image recognition is not the same a relationships or knowledge.

influxmoment 4y ago
> mammal, has a blood system, eats leaves, reacts certain DALL-E likely can map all those concepts to a giraffe also.
orlp 4y ago
Now ask DALL-E "giraffe feeding young", "giraffe organs", "giraffe eating", etc, I think you'd find most knowledge is there.
- teolandon 4y ago
  What about ,"giraffe laying eggs"?
karatinversion 4y ago
By your criteria, no human before the 18th century (when Carl Linnaeus invented the class “mammalia”) knew what a giraffe was.
- usrusr 4y ago
  And in the 25th century, if we manage keep technology alive, the dall-es of the day will be trained in more computer depictions of long extinct animals that accidentally made it into the training set than pictures of real animals. It will be Dürer's rhinoceros all over again.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

That's not a word game at all. To know what a giraffe is is to be able to understand the implications of being informed that something is a giraffe. Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe.

nextaccountic 4y ago
> Dalle would never assume on its own that "a giraffe close to a low flying helicopter" could be very dangerous for the giraffe, but "a horse close to a low flying helicopter" is safe. Are you sure? (Can someone run down those prompts?) Dall-e might be able to make those relationships in the latent space
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  > Are you sure? Considering Dall-e has problems painting "a red cube on top of a blue cube" [1] and all kind of simple spatial relations, I'd say it's a fair shot. [1] As reported by OpenAI, but there are also some prompts by Gary Marcus et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13807) showing this, and it's trivially simple to find other very simple cases like these

leereeves 4y ago

You know a lot more than that. You know that it eats, sleeps, runs, mates. You know that there are male and female giraffes and what that means. You know that it dies if it gets too hot, too cold, if it falls off a cliff. You know that it has legs, a head, neck, etc and you probably know that it has a heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, etc inside. You know, vaguely, how it interacts with other things and what it's likely to do around a fruit tree, or a lion, or fire. Even if you've never been close to a giraffe, you can probably imagine what it looks like from close enough to see individual hairs in its fur. A lot of knowledge is still missing from ML systems that don't interact with the world.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
It's even deeper than that. Humans and giraffes are mammals, very close cousins in terms of evolutionary biology. The very nature of your experience of reality is essentially shared with the giraffe. Part of our brains are lizard, both yours and the giraffes. Tech so ancient that it uses the same circuits and chemicals with crustaceans. You can imagine what existence is like for a giraffe with pretty much 99% accuracy without consciously knowing a single thing about it. A word-based image generator cannot.

kilroy123 4y ago

What do you mean by "is"? I've spent a fair amount of time with giraffes in real life. Does that mean I know what one is?

mym1990 4y ago
I would really hope so. All of this conversation is devolving into a philosophical argument about 2 letter words. To know what something is relates to understanding some of its properties, and how it might interact with the world around it. Whether DALL-E knows what something is, is debatable. Whether you know what something is should be pretty clear.

axus 4y ago

I do not grok a giraffe in the same way I do the things I work on.

Earw0rm 4y ago

Not really close to horses at all. It's an even-toed ungulate, closer to deer, cows and sheep. Many, many tens of millions of years from horses.. the even-toed herbivores are closer to dolphins (!!) than they are to horses or rhinos.