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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

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
      Really? Your friend's attempts to draw hands wind up having way too many or too few fingers, or phantom hands disconnected from wrists and arms, or fingers jutting out at odd angles? Maybe this is an artistic choice your friend is making, but I would wager she could paint something more recognizable as a human hand than those, if she wanted to. Edit, to add some context. How many of the hands your friend paints will look like the ones in this link? https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/discussions/6264 https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/d...
      - rcme 4y ago
        No, those are better than what my friend draws, which are more like ghastly appendages. The examples you provided are at least recognizable as hands. But again, I don't understand this focus on hands, specifically. You're looking at this picture and saying: "See, it doesn't understand hands? Look how many fingers there are!" I'm looking at this picture and thinking: "Wow, it perfectly understands fingers. It understands how light subtly diffracts when hitting skin. It perfectly understands how veins peek out beneath the skin and how wrinkles look." I think you're getting way too hung up on the number of fingers. It's clear that the algorithm could do a better job with hands given more training data. There is nothing special about hands. So, if you're right that it doesn't understand hands, then this lack of understanding stems purely from a lack of training data. In which case, I think it's fair to say that it understands the other things it has sufficient training data to draw well.
        Noneofya 4y ago
        No, the number of fingers is absolutely critical, you simply fail to understand what understanding a concept means. ChatGPT is, in this sense (and I know it’s probably a gross simplification, sorry OpenAI), a fancy markov chain. It can sample data that, by sheer correlation in the training data, reflects many features a typical drawing that matches the prompt would have. But it doesn’t understand what a human hand is, it lacks the ability to abstract, so it cannot deduce that there are (almost) always exactly 5 fingers. The probabilities reflected in the model kinda caught the aspect of a human hand being a collecion of these geometric shapes with those shades and whatnot, but they didn’t catch the hand as a coherent concept with a rather strict definition. This is like the joke about training a neural net on arithmetic where you get the wrong answer repeatedly until it remembers to answer 5+5=10. but then, until there are more data, 10+5 is also 10, because it didn’t actually understand arithmetic (to be fair, a human wouldn’t understand it by a single example either). And you can see this in action by making ChatGPT believe 5+3=7. ChatGPT manipulates symbols, and it captured the rules to do that very well. That is one of the abilities of general intelligence, but it’s not the only criterion for intelligence. You can do more than just manipulating symbols, you can also abstract over them, form your own thoughts and questions about them, be curious, reflect on your reasoning and explain it, deduct patterns from very few data because you have all the context from your previous knowledge and the abstractions built on top of it. Besides of the abstractions and functions programmed into it ChatGPT only has probabilities of symbols being related to other symbols (and the rules implied by that), but it cannot reason about these symbols and cannot form creative thought. Its „intelligence“ is limited to a finite order/level of abstraction (the features and parameters that define the model and allow it, for example, to capture shading and geometry, but not the concept of a human hand) while yours is basically limitless. You can always put another abstraction on top of what you just thought or experienced. The magic of deep learning was basically increasing the order of abstraction a neural net can capture, but it’s still limited. On the other hand, I have my pet theory that the weirdness of dreams or psychedelics arises from the brain basically sampling the connections in the brain / piping random noise through its neural net (as a side effect of all the reorganization it’s doing).
  - Noneofya 4y ago
    We actually use tests like that to verify the development of children. I still remember that I had to draw a human and they checked whether I thought of drawing and neck and whatnot when it was time to decide if I’m ready for school.

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
    Really? Your friend's attempts to draw hands wind up having way too many or too few fingers, or phantom hands disconnected from wrists and arms, or fingers jutting out at odd angles? Maybe this is an artistic choice your friend is making, but I would wager she could paint something more recognizable as a human hand than those, if she wanted to. Edit, to add some context. How many of the hands your friend paints will look like the ones in this link? https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/discussions/6264 https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion/d...
    - rcme 4y ago
      No, those are better than what my friend draws, which are more like ghastly appendages. The examples you provided are at least recognizable as hands. But again, I don't understand this focus on hands, specifically. You're looking at this picture and saying: "See, it doesn't understand hands? Look how many fingers there are!" I'm looking at this picture and thinking: "Wow, it perfectly understands fingers. It understands how light subtly diffracts when hitting skin. It perfectly understands how veins peek out beneath the skin and how wrinkles look." I think you're getting way too hung up on the number of fingers. It's clear that the algorithm could do a better job with hands given more training data. There is nothing special about hands. So, if you're right that it doesn't understand hands, then this lack of understanding stems purely from a lack of training data. In which case, I think it's fair to say that it understands the other things it has sufficient training data to draw well.
      - Noneofya 4y ago
        No, the number of fingers is absolutely critical, you simply fail to understand what understanding a concept means. ChatGPT is, in this sense (and I know it’s probably a gross simplification, sorry OpenAI), a fancy markov chain. It can sample data that, by sheer correlation in the training data, reflects many features a typical drawing that matches the prompt would have. But it doesn’t understand what a human hand is, it lacks the ability to abstract, so it cannot deduce that there are (almost) always exactly 5 fingers. The probabilities reflected in the model kinda caught the aspect of a human hand being a collecion of these geometric shapes with those shades and whatnot, but they didn’t catch the hand as a coherent concept with a rather strict definition. This is like the joke about training a neural net on arithmetic where you get the wrong answer repeatedly until it remembers to answer 5+5=10. but then, until there are more data, 10+5 is also 10, because it didn’t actually understand arithmetic (to be fair, a human wouldn’t understand it by a single example either). And you can see this in action by making ChatGPT believe 5+3=7. ChatGPT manipulates symbols, and it captured the rules to do that very well. That is one of the abilities of general intelligence, but it’s not the only criterion for intelligence. You can do more than just manipulating symbols, you can also abstract over them, form your own thoughts and questions about them, be curious, reflect on your reasoning and explain it, deduct patterns from very few data because you have all the context from your previous knowledge and the abstractions built on top of it. Besides of the abstractions and functions programmed into it ChatGPT only has probabilities of symbols being related to other symbols (and the rules implied by that), but it cannot reason about these symbols and cannot form creative thought. Its „intelligence“ is limited to a finite order/level of abstraction (the features and parameters that define the model and allow it, for example, to capture shading and geometry, but not the concept of a human hand) while yours is basically limitless. You can always put another abstraction on top of what you just thought or experienced. The magic of deep learning was basically increasing the order of abstraction a neural net can capture, but it’s still limited. On the other hand, I have my pet theory that the weirdness of dreams or psychedelics arises from the brain basically sampling the connections in the brain / piping random noise through its neural net (as a side effect of all the reorganization it’s doing).
- Noneofya 4y ago
  We actually use tests like that to verify the development of children. I still remember that I had to draw a human and they checked whether I thought of drawing and neck and whatnot when it was time to decide if I’m ready for school.