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>I still don't understand the purported difference between "sounds smart" and "is smart". Its easy to see in practice with AI. Look at AI generated images and

>I still don't understand the purported difference between "sounds smart" and "is smart". Its easy to see in practice with AI. Look at AI generated images and how they just cant get human hands right. Everyone knows a human should have 4 fingers and a thumb on each hand. But the AI does not understand that it is drawing a hand with those parameters. It is making something that sort of looks like other things it has been trained with. The same is true for text generation. A common description for Chat GPT I've seen catch on is calling it "confidently wrong". It will string together words that sound good but it doesn't actually have any understanding behind them. Its logic is in stringing words together. This is more akin to a good con man faking knowledge than an expert explaining a topic.

rcme 4y ago
Humans often draw bad human hands, as well. Don’t even try to ask a human to draw a bicycle.
- jfk13 4y ago
  For those who haven't seen this little gem before: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
  - woolion 4y ago
    It's astonishing how recently I saw a thread on Mastodon prompting artists to draw a bicycle and it was not much better than that. What about building a visual library? Now there's a lot of AI results coming up and it's not performing much better in that regard either though. https://mstdn.social/tags/CrabCycle https://mstdn.social/tags/CrabCycle
- bakugo 4y ago
  That's because hands and bycicles are complex 3D shapes and it's hard to picture them in your mind from arbitrary angles. It's not because the artist doesn't understand what a hand is or how many fingers it's supposed to have.
  - rcme 4y ago
    Someone else posted this article about how people draw bicycles: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on... You can see that some people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how bicycles work, and this misunderstanding does not stem from the complex 3D shape of bicycles. Don't you think drawing a hand is a bit of an unfair "gotcha" for an AI that can accurately draw thousands of other things? Humans have hands and they're one of the most important parts of the body; humans use hands for everything. And yet, all but the most artistic humans cannot draw human hands accurately. An AI doesn't have hands. Hands make up a small part of its training data. Why should we consider the hand the standard upon which to judge the quality of the AI?
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Given that there are accurate representations of hands in it's data set, and also given that the AI would have no problem copying or averaging only these accurate representations, it seems the AI doesn't have the evaluative ability to recognize accurate versus inaccurate hand representations.
      - rcme 4y ago
        This seems like a huge leap. Sure, there are hands in the dataset, just like a human artist encounters hands every day of his or her life. Yet there are many artists that cannot draw hands but can easily draw other objects they encounter. Or, going back to bikes, some humans cannot accurately draw a bike despite encountering them frequently. Perhaps hands are simply a complex thing to draw accurately. Perhaps the AI's poor drawing of hands is itself evidence of understanding. Rather than produce an incorrectly oriented hand from its dataset, it "chooses" to draw something less specific as a reflection of its lack of ability to draw hands.
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        And this seems like a huge leap to me. You're imputing a very specific human fallibility to a software that isn't human (or even derived from the same neurological underpinnings). I guess it would take someone who can look at and interpret the code to figure it out.
- thereddaikon 4y ago
  Art is a skill that takes time to master. There are college level classes on mastering the human form. Just because most people are bad at drawing hands doesn't mean they don't understand what a hand is. That's a fundamentally different problem than what AI systems have. As for the bikes, I'm not surprised most people cant recall the exact shape or design of a mechanical object they don't use or work on every day. I'm sure a hobby cyclist could accurately lay out one.
  - rcme 4y ago
    > That's a fundamentally different problem than what AI systems have. Is it? Humans understand that humans have hands, yet most are incapable of drawing a hand well. The AI also clearly understands that humans have hands. It does put something hand-like where a hand typically goes. But, like most humans, the AI is not good at accurately reproducing a hand.
    - cool_dude85 4y ago
      A human's drawing of a hand will show a clear understanding of what a hand is on an intellectual level. The AI's drawing of a hand will not show such an understanding. "They are both inaccurate at reproducing a hand" flattens out this important difference - in fact, this difference is explicitly what the poster is getting at.
      - rcme 4y ago
        > A human's drawing of a hand will show a clear understanding of what a hand is on an intellectual level. What is the definition of "understanding on an intellectual level?" I have a friend who is an artist. She is doing a series of paintings with figures. She cannot paint hands to save her life. The hands she paints look very similar to the eerie vignettes produced by Stable Diffusion. I fail to see what makes the hands my friend paints somehow superior on an "intellectual level."
        cool_dude85 4y ago
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  But were are talking about an AI whose purpose it art, so it only make sense to compare to humans who are art professionals. A human whose profession is art can draw a hand, or at least get an approx. close number of correct fingers. And attach said fingers to actual hands.
  - rcme 4y ago
    And many profession artists cannot draw hands either. We're talking the distinction between "sounds smart" and "is smart." People here are arguing that the AI not "smart"; it only "sounds smart." The evidence provided is that AI cannot draw hands well. But we don't apply this same standard to people, even professional artists.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      Do humans artist routinely fail to connect hands/fingers to the rest of the body? That draw fingers with finger nails on both ends? Hands that have 12 fingers when doing realism? We are not talking about 'not very good at draws the details of a hand' but not able to understand fundamental details of what a hand is.
      - rcme 4y ago
        > Do humans artist routinely fail to connect hands/fingers to the rest of the body? Children do all the time, and I'm pretty sure children have a rudimentary understanding of hands.
        Noneofya 4y ago
        But they lack the abstraction necessary to call them self-aware (by the current definition). That’s actually a test to check the development of a child. A child is not very intelligent yet. But it is able to become it on its own just by observing. ChatGPT isn’t.
        rcme 4y ago
ryandrake 4y ago
It's funny to watch the bar for what counts as quality AI continually and automatically rise so that the threshold for "good" is always "just a bit better than what we have today." DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT are absolutely astonishing. Ten years ago their outputs would be disbelieved by the entire field of Computer Science. 20 years ago they would have been called sorcery. Upon release they were way better than state-of-the-art, and blew away the previous quality bar. No matter how amazing software gets, there's always someone out there reminding us that it's inadequate because it is not yet perfect.
- Noneofya 4y ago
  No, there’s someone out there reminding you it’s not intelligence, because it’s not. Astonishing results are great, let’s celebrate them without claiming they’re something they are not.
- Calavar 4y ago
  I think the reason the bar keeps shifting is that we're in the middle of the uncanny valley with regards to AI. Diffusion models and LLMs are just convincing enough that their mistakes are starting to evoke a more visceral reaction than they did with simpler models.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  I think drawing hands with 5 fingers is a reasonable ask for anything you want to label "intelligent". Back in the days of Lisp AI hype, you'd have expert systems told that human hands have 5 fingers. If you want to avoid overselling, call it ML. The machine has learned to reproduce and combine patterns in images.

rcme 4y ago

Humans often draw bad human hands, as well. Don’t even try to ask a human to draw a bicycle.

jfk13 4y ago
For those who haven't seen this little gem before: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
- woolion 4y ago
  It's astonishing how recently I saw a thread on Mastodon prompting artists to draw a bicycle and it was not much better than that. What about building a visual library? Now there's a lot of AI results coming up and it's not performing much better in that regard either though. https://mstdn.social/tags/CrabCycle https://mstdn.social/tags/CrabCycle
bakugo 4y ago
That's because hands and bycicles are complex 3D shapes and it's hard to picture them in your mind from arbitrary angles. It's not because the artist doesn't understand what a hand is or how many fingers it's supposed to have.
- rcme 4y ago
  Someone else posted this article about how people draw bicycles: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on... You can see that some people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how bicycles work, and this misunderstanding does not stem from the complex 3D shape of bicycles. Don't you think drawing a hand is a bit of an unfair "gotcha" for an AI that can accurately draw thousands of other things? Humans have hands and they're one of the most important parts of the body; humans use hands for everything. And yet, all but the most artistic humans cannot draw human hands accurately. An AI doesn't have hands. Hands make up a small part of its training data. Why should we consider the hand the standard upon which to judge the quality of the AI?
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Given that there are accurate representations of hands in it's data set, and also given that the AI would have no problem copying or averaging only these accurate representations, it seems the AI doesn't have the evaluative ability to recognize accurate versus inaccurate hand representations.
    - rcme 4y ago
      This seems like a huge leap. Sure, there are hands in the dataset, just like a human artist encounters hands every day of his or her life. Yet there are many artists that cannot draw hands but can easily draw other objects they encounter. Or, going back to bikes, some humans cannot accurately draw a bike despite encountering them frequently. Perhaps hands are simply a complex thing to draw accurately. Perhaps the AI's poor drawing of hands is itself evidence of understanding. Rather than produce an incorrectly oriented hand from its dataset, it "chooses" to draw something less specific as a reflection of its lack of ability to draw hands.
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        And this seems like a huge leap to me. You're imputing a very specific human fallibility to a software that isn't human (or even derived from the same neurological underpinnings). I guess it would take someone who can look at and interpret the code to figure it out.
thereddaikon 4y ago
Art is a skill that takes time to master. There are college level classes on mastering the human form. Just because most people are bad at drawing hands doesn't mean they don't understand what a hand is. That's a fundamentally different problem than what AI systems have. As for the bikes, I'm not surprised most people cant recall the exact shape or design of a mechanical object they don't use or work on every day. I'm sure a hobby cyclist could accurately lay out one.
- rcme 4y ago
  > That's a fundamentally different problem than what AI systems have. Is it? Humans understand that humans have hands, yet most are incapable of drawing a hand well. The AI also clearly understands that humans have hands. It does put something hand-like where a hand typically goes. But, like most humans, the AI is not good at accurately reproducing a hand.
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    A human's drawing of a hand will show a clear understanding of what a hand is on an intellectual level. The AI's drawing of a hand will not show such an understanding. "They are both inaccurate at reproducing a hand" flattens out this important difference - in fact, this difference is explicitly what the poster is getting at.
    - rcme 4y ago
      > A human's drawing of a hand will show a clear understanding of what a hand is on an intellectual level. What is the definition of "understanding on an intellectual level?" I have a friend who is an artist. She is doing a series of paintings with figures. She cannot paint hands to save her life. The hands she paints look very similar to the eerie vignettes produced by Stable Diffusion. I fail to see what makes the hands my friend paints somehow superior on an "intellectual level."
      - cool_dude85 4y ago
ROTMetro 4y ago
But were are talking about an AI whose purpose it art, so it only make sense to compare to humans who are art professionals. A human whose profession is art can draw a hand, or at least get an approx. close number of correct fingers. And attach said fingers to actual hands.
- rcme 4y ago
  And many profession artists cannot draw hands either. We're talking the distinction between "sounds smart" and "is smart." People here are arguing that the AI not "smart"; it only "sounds smart." The evidence provided is that AI cannot draw hands well. But we don't apply this same standard to people, even professional artists.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Do humans artist routinely fail to connect hands/fingers to the rest of the body? That draw fingers with finger nails on both ends? Hands that have 12 fingers when doing realism? We are not talking about 'not very good at draws the details of a hand' but not able to understand fundamental details of what a hand is.
    - rcme 4y ago
      > Do humans artist routinely fail to connect hands/fingers to the rest of the body? Children do all the time, and I'm pretty sure children have a rudimentary understanding of hands.
      - Noneofya 4y ago
        But they lack the abstraction necessary to call them self-aware (by the current definition). That’s actually a test to check the development of a child. A child is not very intelligent yet. But it is able to become it on its own just by observing. ChatGPT isn’t.
        rcme 4y ago

ryandrake 4y ago

It's funny to watch the bar for what counts as quality AI continually and automatically rise so that the threshold for "good" is always "just a bit better than what we have today." DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT are absolutely astonishing. Ten years ago their outputs would be disbelieved by the entire field of Computer Science. 20 years ago they would have been called sorcery. Upon release they were way better than state-of-the-art, and blew away the previous quality bar. No matter how amazing software gets, there's always someone out there reminding us that it's inadequate because it is not yet perfect.

Noneofya 4y ago
No, there’s someone out there reminding you it’s not intelligence, because it’s not. Astonishing results are great, let’s celebrate them without claiming they’re something they are not.
Calavar 4y ago
I think the reason the bar keeps shifting is that we're in the middle of the uncanny valley with regards to AI. Diffusion models and LLMs are just convincing enough that their mistakes are starting to evoke a more visceral reaction than they did with simpler models.
yencabulator 4y ago
I think drawing hands with 5 fingers is a reasonable ask for anything you want to label "intelligent". Back in the days of Lisp AI hype, you'd have expert systems told that human hands have 5 fingers. If you want to avoid overselling, call it ML. The machine has learned to reproduce and combine patterns in images.