4 ms·

There’s an ocean of difference to me between ChatGPT and stable diffusion/DallE. Text is fundamentally different from art. For art, I see these not as major di

There’s an ocean of difference to me between ChatGPT and stable diffusion/DallE. Text is fundamentally different from art. For art, I see these not as major disruptions but as new tools. There’s no right or wrong answer in art. If anything, abstract expressionism solidified that point. A drunk with a paintbrush can mint a small fortune if people decide it’s capital A Art. More broadly, ML art models will allow more people to express themselves and more perfectly represent that weird dream they had or that place that doesn’t quite exist. We will all be richer for it. I have less rosy things to say about ChatGPT. I feel like a broken record here but while statistical language models can be amusing (and that’s what I’d classify most of these posts as: amusing, low-impact text where precision and internal consistency isn’t paramount) but they’re not much more than that. They’re not reliable, they’re not oracles, but yeah if you need a poem about SpongeBob in the style of a 1920s mobster they can do that. Maybe I’m a little too harsh on ChatGPT. Maybe I expect too much out of it. It can create mental eye candy and that’s awesome. I don’t know.

rastapasta42 4y ago
Verse 1: In Bikini Bottom town, where the sea folks gather round There's a squarepants wearin' mobster, they call him SpongeBob He's got a face so yellow, and a smile so broad He'll steal your krabby patty and leave you applaud Chorus: Cause SpongeBob, he's the boss, ain't no one gonna cross This cuddly little crook, with his cartoon looks He's got a pineapple for a pad, and a pet for a pal But don't let that fool ya, he'll still give you a squish or a squelch Verse 2: He's got a best friend named Patrick, a starfish of sorts Together they're a pair, of criminal sports They'll rob the Krusty Krab, and run from the law But somehow, they always come out on top, without a flaw
- mcv 4y ago
  I can't help but think of Cyberiad. Has someone tried feeding ChatGPT those prompts?
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    Gwern already did that with regular GPT-3: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad I think my favourite bit is > A few moments later they were rolling on the floor, and Klapaucius was screaming and gesticulating in the hand-to-hand style of the famous master-scout Krool, while Trurl, in spite of his defective voice-box, was giving such excellent imitations of a dingo howling at the rising moon that even the robots—who, of course, must be presumed to have a good deal of sympathy for such primitive forms of expression—gave him an ovation.
bambax 4y ago
Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the point where it could actually drown all form of signal.
- alexklarjr 4y ago
  Hey, this bullshit machine will drive IT profits up - hardware, cloud, development. Imagine MSN news fully rewritten by ChatGPT with ChatGPT articles, chatGPT ads and ChatGPT support! Sll delivered on each Microsoft Windows installation all over the globe! Don’t you want join the train while it is not too late? You know, next .NET will heavy use ChatGPT and ChatGPT AI developers are hot now!
  - danielbln 4y ago
    You may want to peruse the HN comment guidelines, especially the part about not sneering: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- danielbln 4y ago
  Yet it's extremely useful in various usecases. "Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern" "Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up" "Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY" "I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service" "Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week" "Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames" "Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary" And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it. It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.
maxerickson 4y ago
There is a sense in which the person/people who select the training data for a model are the artist. Or at least, a sense in which they can be an artist (models that just train on as much data as possible don't fit).
- college_physics 4y ago
  there are several layers of human artistry and craftmanship involved: * the fundamental algorithm developer is akin to the (usually rare) genious artist that invents a new genre * the people implementing, training and applying the machinery are like the larger numbers of followers of a particular artistic school that apply the basic principles to a wide range of topics * the tool itself is like a brush or a new paint. a technology enabler and nothing more
emursebrian 4y ago
I am late to the party, but I played around with ChatGPT this weekend and found it to be very useful. One of the most useful applications is in the area of language learning, particularly to see how grammar is used. Unlike textbooks, you're getting exposure to language phrasing and sentence structure is similar to what you will encounter in the wild. I also generated an absurdist story and was able to feed ChatGPT additional information to direct the plot where I wanted it to go. In that context, I see it being useful as a catalyst to help overcome writer's block. Finally, I had it write me an "Animated plasma effect using JavaScript and Canvas", which it did albeit one that would have needed a bit of human tweaking to get it animating properly.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
I see DallE as producing similar 'regression to the mean' results. That is, no originality at all, just some center-of-the-road collage of what it's seen. It may product art, but it is derivative art.

rastapasta42 4y ago

Verse 1: In Bikini Bottom town, where the sea folks gather round There's a squarepants wearin' mobster, they call him SpongeBob He's got a face so yellow, and a smile so broad He'll steal your krabby patty and leave you applaud Chorus: Cause SpongeBob, he's the boss, ain't no one gonna cross This cuddly little crook, with his cartoon looks He's got a pineapple for a pad, and a pet for a pal But don't let that fool ya, he'll still give you a squish or a squelch Verse 2: He's got a best friend named Patrick, a starfish of sorts Together they're a pair, of criminal sports They'll rob the Krusty Krab, and run from the law But somehow, they always come out on top, without a flaw

mcv 4y ago
I can't help but think of Cyberiad. Has someone tried feeding ChatGPT those prompts?
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  Gwern already did that with regular GPT-3: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad I think my favourite bit is > A few moments later they were rolling on the floor, and Klapaucius was screaming and gesticulating in the hand-to-hand style of the famous master-scout Krool, while Trurl, in spite of his defective voice-box, was giving such excellent imitations of a dingo howling at the rising moon that even the robots—who, of course, must be presumed to have a good deal of sympathy for such primitive forms of expression—gave him an ovation.

bambax 4y ago

Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the point where it could actually drown all form of signal.

alexklarjr 4y ago
Hey, this bullshit machine will drive IT profits up - hardware, cloud, development. Imagine MSN news fully rewritten by ChatGPT with ChatGPT articles, chatGPT ads and ChatGPT support! Sll delivered on each Microsoft Windows installation all over the globe! Don’t you want join the train while it is not too late? You know, next .NET will heavy use ChatGPT and ChatGPT AI developers are hot now!
- danielbln 4y ago
  You may want to peruse the HN comment guidelines, especially the part about not sneering: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
danielbln 4y ago
Yet it's extremely useful in various usecases. "Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern" "Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up" "Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY" "I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service" "Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week" "Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames" "Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary" And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it. It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.

maxerickson 4y ago

There is a sense in which the person/people who select the training data for a model are the artist. Or at least, a sense in which they can be an artist (models that just train on as much data as possible don't fit).

college_physics 4y ago
there are several layers of human artistry and craftmanship involved: * the fundamental algorithm developer is akin to the (usually rare) genious artist that invents a new genre * the people implementing, training and applying the machinery are like the larger numbers of followers of a particular artistic school that apply the basic principles to a wide range of topics * the tool itself is like a brush or a new paint. a technology enabler and nothing more

emursebrian 4y ago

I am late to the party, but I played around with ChatGPT this weekend and found it to be very useful. One of the most useful applications is in the area of language learning, particularly to see how grammar is used. Unlike textbooks, you're getting exposure to language phrasing and sentence structure is similar to what you will encounter in the wild. I also generated an absurdist story and was able to feed ChatGPT additional information to direct the plot where I wanted it to go. In that context, I see it being useful as a catalyst to help overcome writer's block. Finally, I had it write me an "Animated plasma effect using JavaScript and Canvas", which it did albeit one that would have needed a bit of human tweaking to get it animating properly.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

I see DallE as producing similar 'regression to the mean' results. That is, no originality at all, just some center-of-the-road collage of what it's seen. It may product art, but it is derivative art.