4 ms·

I too have zero qualifications, but I think “text” is slightly more complicated - from an information theoretical perspective - than we give it credit for. A l

I too have zero qualifications, but I think “text” is slightly more complicated - from an information theoretical perspective - than we give it credit for. A letter carries significantly more information than a pixel. One word can change the meaning of the rest of the text. (“joke:”) I don’t think images have the same property.

chrisco255 4y ago
So you're saying a word is worth 1000 pictures? How did we get this so wrong?
- uoaei 4y ago
  In a sense, language is a clumsy facsimile of the concepts we mean to express, in that we search for words to express the ideas in our minds rather than the other way around. By contrast, an image represents precisely the concept it depicts, by definition. We forgot this about language by about the time of the Enlightenment era, when the intellectuals of the time thought that forcing everything to inhabit the structures of language (i.e., "rationality") represented the highest moral good one could achieve.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  Non-verbal experiences are easier to communicate non-verbally. (Breaking news!) But, I'd like to see someone try to communicate the Bhagavad Gita or the history of F=ma in visuals using the same amount of bits as text.
- v01dlight 4y ago
  They're categorically different media, it's not just a matter of quantity. You could sum up 1000 pictures of bananas with the word "bananas", or you could spend 1000 different words describing nuances and context in just one of those pictures. Something is lost (and something is gained) either way.
NovaDudely 4y ago
Possibly it is because with things like Stable diffusion we give it a lot of passes when things don't exactly right. Images just have to be close enough. Text however if it is only a single word out, the whole meaning and readability can change. It needs a significantly larger data set to ensure clearer readability. Just a shot from the hip response on this one.
hgsgm 4y ago
LLM text is token based not pixel based. And LLM output is ~1K tokens, while a picture is ~1M pixels. And pictures aren't necessarily made of pixels. They are modelled as a collection waves (JPEG), and displayed as pixels. I don't know how LLM/whatever image models represent images, though. Images are more global: changing the color pallette changes the tone (ha!) like a descriptive word in text.

chrisco255 4y ago

So you're saying a word is worth 1000 pictures? How did we get this so wrong?

uoaei 4y ago
In a sense, language is a clumsy facsimile of the concepts we mean to express, in that we search for words to express the ideas in our minds rather than the other way around. By contrast, an image represents precisely the concept it depicts, by definition. We forgot this about language by about the time of the Enlightenment era, when the intellectuals of the time thought that forcing everything to inhabit the structures of language (i.e., "rationality") represented the highest moral good one could achieve.
SanderNL 4y ago
Non-verbal experiences are easier to communicate non-verbally. (Breaking news!) But, I'd like to see someone try to communicate the Bhagavad Gita or the history of F=ma in visuals using the same amount of bits as text.
v01dlight 4y ago
They're categorically different media, it's not just a matter of quantity. You could sum up 1000 pictures of bananas with the word "bananas", or you could spend 1000 different words describing nuances and context in just one of those pictures. Something is lost (and something is gained) either way.

NovaDudely 4y ago

Possibly it is because with things like Stable diffusion we give it a lot of passes when things don't exactly right. Images just have to be close enough. Text however if it is only a single word out, the whole meaning and readability can change. It needs a significantly larger data set to ensure clearer readability. Just a shot from the hip response on this one.

hgsgm 4y ago

LLM text is token based not pixel based. And LLM output is ~1K tokens, while a picture is ~1M pixels. And pictures aren't necessarily made of pixels. They are modelled as a collection waves (JPEG), and displayed as pixels. I don't know how LLM/whatever image models represent images, though. Images are more global: changing the color pallette changes the tone (ha!) like a descriptive word in text.