This seems far less than a fundamental problem with black boxes and far more a problem with image models not yet using the full power of large language models.

This seems far less than a fundamental problem with black boxes and far more a problem with image models not yet using the full power of large language models. ChatGPT almost always understands what I want. Even if it doesn't, it's easy add another prompt to put it on the right track. It's shockingly good at that. The answers it provides might not always compile, but neither would most human written code when written without access to a compiler for testing. And getting facts wrong is quite understandable as well without access to outside references. I also find that all the stuff ChatGPT fails at the most, are simply things that don't have any easy answers. It's not magic, it knows what it was feed and little beyond that. Image generation meanwhile uses a far more primitive prompting style. There are no follow questions you can ask to correct the result. And that one prompt you get is not natural language to begin with, it's just keywords used for photobashing, one that is dramatically underspecified no less. If you tell it to make a picture of New York, well, New York is big, you didn't tell where to put the camera. So of course the results will be pretty random. Worse yet, they'll change dramatically with minimum prompt changes, the moment you add a person to a photo, that person will become the primary subject and you'll have a very hard time making it just a background character by prompt. There are just a lot of image features that you can't accurately describe with a few keyword, or even if you could come up with a fitting keyword, as long as that keyword isn't in training set it's not going to help. But that's really nothing more than a current day limitation. The language understanding will get better and so will the integration ways to manipulate the image, we already have inpainting to change specific parts of the image, outpainting to change the framing, people have been playing around with projecting the images onto depthmaps or 3D geometry. In the end what matters is not that the AI is a blackbox, the inner workings are largely irrelevant, but that the output of the AI fits into my personal predictions of what it should be. And as far as ChatGPT is concerned, it's already better than any other user interface I ever touched.