14 ms·

Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

103 points by webmaven 3y ago

webmaven 3y ago
> “Mental images fill our daydreams, fuel our fancies, and color our memories. People often experience these images as richly detailed, making the imagination seem like a talented artist quickly painting a lifelike scene before our mind’s eye. Our results suggest that while the imagination may indeed be a good artist, it’s on a deadline, and stingy about paint.”
- gabereiser 3y ago
  Reminds me of those videos where a comic book artist draws a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes (sped up of course). Cool stuff but also hilarious at the 1 min sketches.
  - webmaven 3y ago
    Also "How to Draw an Owl": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > Reminds me of those videos where a comic book artist draws a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes (sped up of course). Cool stuff but also hilarious at the 1 min sketches. I'd love to see one of those. Google is returning useless results for a video search on "video of sketches done by an artist with different time constraints."
    - heinrich5991 3y ago
      "a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes" (without quotes) gives acceptable Google results for me.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      Here’s an example from YT: https://youtu.be/dvpEuEkj4ZM https://youtu.be/dvpEuEkj4ZM
interroboink 3y ago
This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- jumploops 3y ago
  I have aphantasia and didn’t realize it until adulthood. Both my brother and I have it (or lack it), though neither of our parents have aphantasia. When people spoke of “daydreaming” I always assumed it was just a metaphor for being deep in thought, as it would be clearly impossible for people to visualize things without dreaming or hallucinating… boy was I wrong! Apparently some folk can even look at a wall and imagine a scene playing out like a movie. Blows my mind every time I think about it!
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    I am fairly sure I don’t have aphantasia, but for me there’s no visual component to daydreaming - it’s purely just zoning out and later realizing I’d lost track of time. It’s so interesting to hear about how other people’s minds work totally differently from that.
  - smokel 3y ago
    Don't believe everything people say. It is very hard for people to report their inner processes correctly.
    - jumploops 3y ago
      I completely agree — all of our minds work slightly differently and thus using language to describe one’s internal loop is necessarily fraught with translation error. With that said, this report came from a close relative who had no idea that aphantasia was a thing. We started with the experiment: “imagine a barn, what color is it and how many windows does it have?” and then proceeded to dive into the limits of their capabilities (e.g. detail is often absent or brushed over, while some things are quite vivid like people’s faces). Her report was quite different from others I’ve spoken with, so it certainly seems like there’s a spectrum to the experience of phantasia.
hooverd 3y ago
Jokes on them, I'm rotating a fleet of high quality shapes in my head.
robobro 3y ago
Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different. When I imagine a scenario like the one the paper talks about, the person coming into the room and knocking a ball off a table, I feel like I can see it happening from all angles all at once; if I try to repeat the scene in my mind, my perspective keeps jumping around. I can force myself to watch it from a single angle but it's trippy being able to watch something from multiple angles. I don't generally visualize colors, but for some reason it's easy for me to imagine textures. Maybe this is in line with how early empiricist philosophers described vision as being a combination of sight and touch?
- mistermann 3y ago
  > Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different. Now consider what's going on under the covers when each individual contemplates "the (simulation of the) events of January 6" or various other culture war issues, without having any knowledge of the magic that's going on under the covers, a state of mind for which there seems to be no way out of, for most (including "standard" intellectuals). To me, this is highly similar to cultural beliefs before and after the first enlightenment and rise of science, hopefully the second one gets here before we destroy ourselves with our delusions of understanding due to insufficient fundamentalist cognitive ideologies.
DarkSucker 3y ago
I did my own experiment on starting to read the article, and, as the author describes, I got the ball color, but not the persons hair color. On thinking about my experience, I likened my mental image to my normal visual image with a fixed gaze (no eye motion), where the vast majority of color and detail is in the foveal field of view (a few degrees). Outside that region, detail and color drop off rapidly. The ball is what I'm looking at, and the person (and their hair color) is outside the foveal region and vague/less detailed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
interstice 3y ago
I struggle to imagine a fixed image or object on demand, but when falling asleep or in certain situations its like something gets unplugged and then everything becomes way more vivid and detailed to the point of becoming a flood. I've often wondered if artists can naturally get into that state much more easily.
- paragraft 3y ago
  Similar here. It's like I suddenly have access to an instant MidJourney that I can prompt with any suggestion. Sometimes a late night whisky before bed seems to help the process. Find myself wondering "is this what visually creative people get to do all the time?".
- FeteCommuniste 3y ago
  Reminds me of the anecdote about Dali staying awake in a chair with a spoon in his hand, then trying to sketch the hypnagogic imagery that came to him in the brief moment between when he fell asleep and when the spoon hit the floor and woke him up. https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-creative-sweet-spot https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-...
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Amateur artist here. I rely on imagining images with lots of detail. Then drawing/painting it out is almost a matter of tracing the mental projection onto the canvas. Often the image in my mind is more clear to me than whatever is physically in front of me. It is a lot like intentional dreaming.
  - akomtu 3y ago
    In such cases it's useful to occasionally direct all your imagination to the highest ideal known to you, better if it's abstract. This can be compared with trying to hear the finest sound in your surroundings, and making it crystal clear to you.
- ctur 3y ago
  Sounds like hypnogogic hallucinations and/or the hypnogogic stare. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali (an)used this state for creativity supposedly.
derbOac 3y ago
Interesting although not too surprising when I think about it: as they point out, in the moment perception is sort of lacking in detail too. There's a certain amount of attentional or working memory capacity, so you're not really capturing all of reality even in the moment, it's probably more like you're focusing and defocusing and refocusing on different details depending on demand, in a sort of real-time series of adjustments. For example, if someone asks you "what color is the ball?" even if it is in a room in front of you you might not necessarily process it unless asked, in which case you visually search to find out. In this sense, imagined worlds could be really vivid, because even the most vivid reality is only incompletely processed in the moment (reality will always be more vivid for lots of reasons nonetheless). This also made me wonder about dreams, in that many similar issues related to details and certain kinds of processes seem to surface there. It's pretty common, for example, for my dreams to kind of "short circuit" and for me to wake up when someone in my dream asks me a question like "what color was that ball?" It becomes evident that that detail wasn't there, and I'm sort of filling it in after the fact.
fwlr 3y ago
Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of peoples’ varying experiences of mental imagery. It demonstrated the existence of aphantasic individuals as well as high fidelity and low fidelity individuals! From the very beginning, back in 1880! The paradigm proposed in that paper is more or less that there’s a bell curve of varying vividness of mental imagery, all the way from a few percent who almost completely lack it, up to a few percent with hyper-real “more detailed than reality” mental visualization, with most clustered in between. This new paper fits neatly into that paradigm; they chose a high threshold and (inevitably) discovered that most of the bell curve falls below that high threshold. The paper is Sir Francis Galton’s Statistics of Mental Imagery https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm (incidentally interesting: it was so long ago that the paper notes “There are many who deny to statistics the title of a science”, which is a bemusing thing to read today.)
- spiralx 3y ago
  I only realised that I barely had any ability to visualise in the last few years and I'm over 40, it's something that's never been there and because it's not the same as lacking either visual memory or imagination there's not really much in the way of cues to make it obvious - the last time I was asked to "picture this in your head" was probably at school three decades ago... Given I can replay music in my head on demand (called audiation according to a comment below!) with reasonable fidelity even for songs I don't have strong memories of, it seems likely my aphantasia is the developmental deficit of the connection between visual memory and my executive function due to ADHD in both stability and throughput.
- WaffleIronMaker 3y ago
  Regarding aphantasia, I've had a lot of anecdotal success with this image [1]. I'm personally about a 2, and I've found that this test tends to be quiet understandable and revealing to a variety of audiences. Anecdotally, I gave this chart to my friends in my school's band (N=6), and none of them had aphantasia (excluding me), and two of them reported hyperphantasia, and intensely vivid audiovisual imagination. I also gave this chart to my friends in software engineering and cybersecurity (N=4), and two of them also had aphantasia. I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, given a small sample size, but I'd hypothesize that there is a larger proportion of aphantasic individuals in STEM than in the arts. [1] https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20 https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20
anonzzzies 3y ago
It is my technique for falling asleep quickly; imagining a scene, whatever I feel like, and zooming in every detail to make sure it’s there and correct. Keep focusing on the scene and soon it was just a dream.
- lyu07282 3y ago
  Similar here, it feels like sort of lossy vector graphics of a fractal, brains are weird
lelanthran 3y ago
Weird, I visualised those properties they listed, and more. color of jacket (only visualised top-half), color of glove (glove was not a requirement, but I visualised that for some reason), gender of person, length of hair, hair color, indoors, poor lighting, position of light source, quite a lot in the time it took to read to the next sentence.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
Mental images are like a movie set. They only build the parts that are going to be on screen, and even then accuracy and level of detail is only a concern for the parts that are relevant to the plot. Everything else is just shoddily constructed disposable background, often reused in multiple different movies as though filler detail is provided by a common prop manager. At least there's no product placement.
- kordlessagain 3y ago
  For some this may be true, but for many it won’t. It’s not like thumbs where most people have them and use them to pick things up. Mental imagery is as varied as art itself.
JacobSeated 3y ago
Interesting. I find I visualize concepts more than often irrelevant details, so when asked to visualize a person knocking off a ball from a table, I might emphasize the visual details of the ball rather than the person. E.g. White with black pentagons. This is simply because the person's characteristics are not described, and a person is more complex to visualize than a simple shape like a ball. After all, why waste mental energy picturing a non-existent person knocking of a ball? It has no relevance to anything you need to do in life. But, the ball is easy to visualize given you can have a generic picture of a ball, and the object might be more important than the person interacting with it.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >This is simply because the person's characteristics are not described, and a person is more complex to visualize than a simple shape like a ball. does this mean that when asked to visualize something you exert conscious effort to do the visualization, choosing to not focus on the visualization of the complex person and focusing on the simple ball.
extr 3y ago
I don't quite understand the nature of the study. I recognize the concept of "noncommitment", it's definitely how my visualization (and more generally, my "confabulatory" capability) operates. But as soon as you start asking me questions about it, you're biasing me toward making sure I come up with extra physical details that I think might be salient based on past questions. I don't normally visualize a scene in extreme detail because it's not necessary. So what is the study testing exactly? How much detail they created without any clue/context into what kinds of questions they would later be asked? Or the actual limit/extent of people's visualization capabilities?
LoganDark 3y ago
it's incredibly obvious to me that my mind's eye does not actually create a real picture, but rather reproduces the derived meaning that would result from seeing a real picture. therefore i can reason about it just like i can reason about a sentence that is being spoken out loud by someone else, but the details are indeed not all there. they are made up depending on what i decide to 'render' by focusing on it
aussieguy1234 3y ago
If this is true, is Stable Diffusion already superior to human imagination, at least in terms of vividness rather than the interpretation of the prompt/thought that prompted the imagery?

103 points by webmaven 3y ago

> “Mental images fill our daydreams, fuel our fancies, and color our memories. People often experience these images as richly detailed, making the imagination seem like a talented artist quickly painting a lifelike scene before our mind’s eye. Our results suggest that while the imagination may indeed be a good artist, it’s on a deadline, and stingy about paint.”

gabereiser 3y ago
Reminds me of those videos where a comic book artist draws a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes (sped up of course). Cool stuff but also hilarious at the 1 min sketches.
- webmaven 3y ago
  Also "How to Draw an Owl": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Reminds me of those videos where a comic book artist draws a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes (sped up of course). Cool stuff but also hilarious at the 1 min sketches. I'd love to see one of those. Google is returning useless results for a video search on "video of sketches done by an artist with different time constraints."
  - heinrich5991 3y ago
    "a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes" (without quotes) gives acceptable Google results for me.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    Here’s an example from YT: https://youtu.be/dvpEuEkj4ZM https://youtu.be/dvpEuEkj4ZM

interroboink 3y ago

This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

jumploops 3y ago
I have aphantasia and didn’t realize it until adulthood. Both my brother and I have it (or lack it), though neither of our parents have aphantasia. When people spoke of “daydreaming” I always assumed it was just a metaphor for being deep in thought, as it would be clearly impossible for people to visualize things without dreaming or hallucinating… boy was I wrong! Apparently some folk can even look at a wall and imagine a scene playing out like a movie. Blows my mind every time I think about it!
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I am fairly sure I don’t have aphantasia, but for me there’s no visual component to daydreaming - it’s purely just zoning out and later realizing I’d lost track of time. It’s so interesting to hear about how other people’s minds work totally differently from that.
- smokel 3y ago
  Don't believe everything people say. It is very hard for people to report their inner processes correctly.
  - jumploops 3y ago
    I completely agree — all of our minds work slightly differently and thus using language to describe one’s internal loop is necessarily fraught with translation error. With that said, this report came from a close relative who had no idea that aphantasia was a thing. We started with the experiment: “imagine a barn, what color is it and how many windows does it have?” and then proceeded to dive into the limits of their capabilities (e.g. detail is often absent or brushed over, while some things are quite vivid like people’s faces). Her report was quite different from others I’ve spoken with, so it certainly seems like there’s a spectrum to the experience of phantasia.

hooverd 3y ago

Jokes on them, I'm rotating a fleet of high quality shapes in my head.

robobro 3y ago

Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different. When I imagine a scenario like the one the paper talks about, the person coming into the room and knocking a ball off a table, I feel like I can see it happening from all angles all at once; if I try to repeat the scene in my mind, my perspective keeps jumping around. I can force myself to watch it from a single angle but it's trippy being able to watch something from multiple angles. I don't generally visualize colors, but for some reason it's easy for me to imagine textures. Maybe this is in line with how early empiricist philosophers described vision as being a combination of sight and touch?

mistermann 3y ago
> Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different. Now consider what's going on under the covers when each individual contemplates "the (simulation of the) events of January 6" or various other culture war issues, without having any knowledge of the magic that's going on under the covers, a state of mind for which there seems to be no way out of, for most (including "standard" intellectuals). To me, this is highly similar to cultural beliefs before and after the first enlightenment and rise of science, hopefully the second one gets here before we destroy ourselves with our delusions of understanding due to insufficient fundamentalist cognitive ideologies.

DarkSucker 3y ago

I did my own experiment on starting to read the article, and, as the author describes, I got the ball color, but not the persons hair color. On thinking about my experience, I likened my mental image to my normal visual image with a fixed gaze (no eye motion), where the vast majority of color and detail is in the foveal field of view (a few degrees). Outside that region, detail and color drop off rapidly. The ball is what I'm looking at, and the person (and their hair color) is outside the foveal region and vague/less detailed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

interstice 3y ago

I struggle to imagine a fixed image or object on demand, but when falling asleep or in certain situations its like something gets unplugged and then everything becomes way more vivid and detailed to the point of becoming a flood. I've often wondered if artists can naturally get into that state much more easily.

paragraft 3y ago
Similar here. It's like I suddenly have access to an instant MidJourney that I can prompt with any suggestion. Sometimes a late night whisky before bed seems to help the process. Find myself wondering "is this what visually creative people get to do all the time?".
FeteCommuniste 3y ago
Reminds me of the anecdote about Dali staying awake in a chair with a spoon in his hand, then trying to sketch the hypnagogic imagery that came to him in the brief moment between when he fell asleep and when the spoon hit the floor and woke him up. https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-creative-sweet-spot https://www.livescience.com/little-known-sleep-stage-may-be-...
escapedmoose 3y ago
Amateur artist here. I rely on imagining images with lots of detail. Then drawing/painting it out is almost a matter of tracing the mental projection onto the canvas. Often the image in my mind is more clear to me than whatever is physically in front of me. It is a lot like intentional dreaming.
- akomtu 3y ago
  In such cases it's useful to occasionally direct all your imagination to the highest ideal known to you, better if it's abstract. This can be compared with trying to hear the finest sound in your surroundings, and making it crystal clear to you.
ctur 3y ago
Sounds like hypnogogic hallucinations and/or the hypnogogic stare. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali (an)used this state for creativity supposedly.

derbOac 3y ago

Interesting although not too surprising when I think about it: as they point out, in the moment perception is sort of lacking in detail too. There's a certain amount of attentional or working memory capacity, so you're not really capturing all of reality even in the moment, it's probably more like you're focusing and defocusing and refocusing on different details depending on demand, in a sort of real-time series of adjustments. For example, if someone asks you "what color is the ball?" even if it is in a room in front of you you might not necessarily process it unless asked, in which case you visually search to find out. In this sense, imagined worlds could be really vivid, because even the most vivid reality is only incompletely processed in the moment (reality will always be more vivid for lots of reasons nonetheless). This also made me wonder about dreams, in that many similar issues related to details and certain kinds of processes seem to surface there. It's pretty common, for example, for my dreams to kind of "short circuit" and for me to wake up when someone in my dream asks me a question like "what color was that ball?" It becomes evident that that detail wasn't there, and I'm sort of filling it in after the fact.

fwlr 3y ago

Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of peoples’ varying experiences of mental imagery. It demonstrated the existence of aphantasic individuals as well as high fidelity and low fidelity individuals! From the very beginning, back in 1880! The paradigm proposed in that paper is more or less that there’s a bell curve of varying vividness of mental imagery, all the way from a few percent who almost completely lack it, up to a few percent with hyper-real “more detailed than reality” mental visualization, with most clustered in between. This new paper fits neatly into that paradigm; they chose a high threshold and (inevitably) discovered that most of the bell curve falls below that high threshold. The paper is Sir Francis Galton’s Statistics of Mental Imagery https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm (incidentally interesting: it was so long ago that the paper notes “There are many who deny to statistics the title of a science”, which is a bemusing thing to read today.)

spiralx 3y ago
I only realised that I barely had any ability to visualise in the last few years and I'm over 40, it's something that's never been there and because it's not the same as lacking either visual memory or imagination there's not really much in the way of cues to make it obvious - the last time I was asked to "picture this in your head" was probably at school three decades ago... Given I can replay music in my head on demand (called audiation according to a comment below!) with reasonable fidelity even for songs I don't have strong memories of, it seems likely my aphantasia is the developmental deficit of the connection between visual memory and my executive function due to ADHD in both stability and throughput.
WaffleIronMaker 3y ago
Regarding aphantasia, I've had a lot of anecdotal success with this image [1]. I'm personally about a 2, and I've found that this test tends to be quiet understandable and revealing to a variety of audiences. Anecdotally, I gave this chart to my friends in my school's band (N=6), and none of them had aphantasia (excluding me), and two of them reported hyperphantasia, and intensely vivid audiovisual imagination. I also gave this chart to my friends in software engineering and cybersecurity (N=4), and two of them also had aphantasia. I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, given a small sample size, but I'd hypothesize that there is a larger proportion of aphantasic individuals in STEM than in the arts. [1] https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20 https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20

anonzzzies 3y ago

It is my technique for falling asleep quickly; imagining a scene, whatever I feel like, and zooming in every detail to make sure it’s there and correct. Keep focusing on the scene and soon it was just a dream.

lyu07282 3y ago
Similar here, it feels like sort of lossy vector graphics of a fractal, brains are weird

lelanthran 3y ago

Weird, I visualised those properties they listed, and more. color of jacket (only visualised top-half), color of glove (glove was not a requirement, but I visualised that for some reason), gender of person, length of hair, hair color, indoors, poor lighting, position of light source, quite a lot in the time it took to read to the next sentence.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

Mental images are like a movie set. They only build the parts that are going to be on screen, and even then accuracy and level of detail is only a concern for the parts that are relevant to the plot. Everything else is just shoddily constructed disposable background, often reused in multiple different movies as though filler detail is provided by a common prop manager. At least there's no product placement.

kordlessagain 3y ago
For some this may be true, but for many it won’t. It’s not like thumbs where most people have them and use them to pick things up. Mental imagery is as varied as art itself.

JacobSeated 3y ago

Interesting. I find I visualize concepts more than often irrelevant details, so when asked to visualize a person knocking off a ball from a table, I might emphasize the visual details of the ball rather than the person. E.g. White with black pentagons. This is simply because the person's characteristics are not described, and a person is more complex to visualize than a simple shape like a ball. After all, why waste mental energy picturing a non-existent person knocking of a ball? It has no relevance to anything you need to do in life. But, the ball is easy to visualize given you can have a generic picture of a ball, and the object might be more important than the person interacting with it.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>This is simply because the person's characteristics are not described, and a person is more complex to visualize than a simple shape like a ball. does this mean that when asked to visualize something you exert conscious effort to do the visualization, choosing to not focus on the visualization of the complex person and focusing on the simple ball.

extr 3y ago

I don't quite understand the nature of the study. I recognize the concept of "noncommitment", it's definitely how my visualization (and more generally, my "confabulatory" capability) operates. But as soon as you start asking me questions about it, you're biasing me toward making sure I come up with extra physical details that I think might be salient based on past questions. I don't normally visualize a scene in extreme detail because it's not necessary. So what is the study testing exactly? How much detail they created without any clue/context into what kinds of questions they would later be asked? Or the actual limit/extent of people's visualization capabilities?

LoganDark 3y ago

it's incredibly obvious to me that my mind's eye does not actually create a real picture, but rather reproduces the derived meaning that would result from seeing a real picture. therefore i can reason about it just like i can reason about a sentence that is being spoken out loud by someone else, but the details are indeed not all there. they are made up depending on what i decide to 'render' by focusing on it

aussieguy1234 3y ago

If this is true, is Stable Diffusion already superior to human imagination, at least in terms of vividness rather than the interpretation of the prompt/thought that prompted the imagery?