4 ms·

I've come to realize that I liked believing that there was something special about the human mental ability to use our mind's eye and visual imagination to pict

I've come to realize that I liked believing that there was something special about the human mental ability to use our mind's eye and visual imagination to picture something, such as how we would look with a different hairstyle. It's uncomfortable seeing that skill reproduced by machinery at the same level as my own imagination, or even better. It makes me feel like my ability to use my imagination is no more remarkable than my ability to hold a coat off the ground like a coat hook would.

m3kw9 1y ago
To be fair, the model's ability came from us generating the training data.
- quantummagic 1y ago
  To be fair, we're the beneficiaries of nature generating the data we trained on ourselves. Our ability came from being exposed to training in school, and in the world, and from examples from all of human history. Ie. if you locked a child in a dark room for their entire lives, and gave them no education or social interaction, they wouldn't have a very impressive imagination or artistic ability either. We're reliant on training data too.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    Gonna try use this one instead of paying the next time i visit a restaurant.
    - Terretta 1y ago
      At a restaurant you pay for what they no longer have when you're done. You don't have to pay to look at food in a grocery, or a recipe in a library you go home and cook. You do pay for ingredients you use up. Unless the book you looked at, or YouTube video you aped, trained you to garden.
FuckButtons 1y ago
I have aphantasia, I’m glad we’re all on a level playing field now.
- Revisional_Sin 1y ago
  Aphantasia gang!
- yoz-y 1y ago
  I always thought I had a vivid imagination. But then the aphantasia was mentioned in Hello Internet once, I looked it up, see comments like these and honestly… I’ve no idea how to even check. According to various tests I believe I have aphantasia. But mostly I’ve got not even a slightest idea on how not having it is supposed to work. I guess this is one of those mysteries when a missing sense cannot be described in any manner.
  - jmcphers 1y ago
    A simple test for aphantasia that I gave my kids when they asked about it is to picture an apple with three blue dots on it. Once you have it, describe where the dots are on the apple. Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.
    - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
      After reading your first sentence, I immediately saw an apple with three dots in a triangle pointing downwards on the side. Interestingly, the 3 dots in my image were flat, as if merely superimposed on an image of an apple, rather than actually being on an apple. How do people with aphantasia answer the question?
      - foofoo12 1y ago
        I found out recently that I have aphantasia, based on everything I've read. When you tell me to visualize, I imagine. I don't see it. An apple, I can imagine that. I can describe it in incomprehensibly sparse details. But when you ask details I have to fill them in. I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.
kylebenzle 1y ago
[flagged]
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >We get it, your dumb. You're
micromacrofoot 1y ago
it can only do this because it's been trained on millions of human works
- echelon 1y ago
  This argument that hints at appropriation isn't going to be very useful or true, going forward. There are now dozens of copyright safe image and video models: Adobe, MoonValley, etc. We technically never need human works again. We can generate everything synthetically (unreal engine, cameras on a turn table, etc.) The physics of optics is just incredibly easy to evolve.
  - lawlessone 1y ago
    >We technically never need human works again. Not sure about that. Humans are doing almost all the work now still.
    - echelon 1y ago
      I'm sorry, but in the context of image gen, this is also deeply biased. Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours. It's easy to hate on LLMs and AI hype, but image models are changing the world and impacting every visual industry.
      - filoeleven 1y ago
        > Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours. At the low, low cost of burning incredible amounts of energy! This is also he same logic as “lost sale” software piracy calculations. 90% of those claimed hours would not have been spent if the tool did not exist. Most of the generated images are idle throwaways that no human would bother with creating.
        echelon 1y ago
        I work in media. I edit images frequently. These models are incredibly useful. Your arguments sound to me as if you're saying the cotton gin is a bad idea because 90% of that cotton wouldn't have been picked. Lay people have been starved from being able to visually articulate themselves. We're entering into a world where everyone will have spatial articulation. That's a good thing. Don't be the latin clergy arguing the populace shouldn't be able to read or have books.
echelon 1y ago
Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom. Conscious intelligence has not. As another argument, we've had mathematical descriptions of optics, drawing algorithms, fixed function pipeline, ray tracing, and so much more rich math for drawing and animating. Smart, thinking machines? We haven't the faintest idea. Progress on Generative Images >> LLMs
- Animats 1y ago
  > Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom. Conscious intelligence has not. Three times, something like intelligence has evolved - in mammals, octopuses, and corvids. Completely different neural architectures in those unrelated speces.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I won't judge our distant relatives, the cephalopods and chicken theropods, but we big apes are pretty dumb. Even with what we've got, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to invent indoor plumbing. Vision, I still submit, is much simpler than "intelligence". It's evolved independently almost a hundred times. It's also hypothesized that it takes as few as a hundred thousand years to evolve advanced eye optics: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.0048 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.004... Even plants can sense the visual and physical world. Three dimensional spatial relationships and paths and rays through them are not hard.
  - nick__m 1y ago
    Why carve out the corvid from the other birds ? Some parots and parakeets species are playing in the same league as the corvids.
    - Animats 1y ago
      Paper on this:[1] Corvids show problem-solving ability comparable to apes but lack a cortex. [1] https://homepage.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/Nieder%20(2021)%20CurrOpNeurobiol.pdf https://homepage.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/Nieder%20(2...
stuckkeys 1y ago
that was deep.
lemonberry 1y ago
But you can find joy at things you envision, or laugh, or be horrified. The mental ability is surely impressive, but having a reason to do it and feeling something at the result is special. "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower..." We - humans - have reasons to be. We get to look at a sunset and think about the scattering of light and different frequencies and how it causes the different colors. But we can also just enjoy the beauty of it. For me, every moment is magical when I take the time to let it be so. Heck, for there to even be a me responding to a you and all of the things that had to happen for Hacker News to be here. It's pretty incredible. To me anyway.
al_borland 1y ago
As someone who can’t visualize things like this in my head, and can only think about them intellectually, your own imagination is still special. When I heard people can do that, it sounded like a super power. AI is like Batman, useless without his money and utility belt. Your own abilities are more like Superman, part of who you are and always with you, ready for use.
- HeartStrings 1y ago
  Look everybody, this mfa can’t rotate an Apple in his head
EGreg 1y ago
Seriously? One could always cut-and-paste (not the computer term) a hairstyle over a photo of a person. You are now marvelling at someone taking the collective output of humans around the world, then training a model on it with massive, massive compute… and then having a single human compete with that model. Without the human output on the Internet, none of this would be possible. ImageNet was positively small compared to this. But yeah, what you call “imagination” is basically perturbations and exploration across a model that you have in your head, which imposes constraints (eg gravity etc) that you learned. Obviously we can remix things now that they’re on the Internet. Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim.
- cma 1y ago
  >Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim. I know you're probably talking about analog clocks, but people when dreaming have trouble representing stable digits on clocks. It's one of the methods to tell if you are dreaming.
layer8 1y ago
The proof in the pudding will be if machines will be able to develop new art styles. For example, there is a progression in comic/manga/anime art styles over the decades. If humans would stop (they probably won't) that kind of progression, would machines be able to continue it? In principle yes (we are biological machines of sorts), but likely not with the current AI architecture.
- krapp 1y ago
  I think it's a mistake to look at developing new art styles as simply continuing a linear progression. More often than not art styles are unique to the artist - you couldn't, for instance, put Eichiro Oda, Tsutomu Nihei and Rumiko Takahashi on the same number line. And trends tend to develop in reaction to existing trends, usually started by a single artist, as often as they do as an evolution of a norm. Arguably, if creating an art style is simply a matter of novel mechanics and uniqueness, LLMs could already do that simply by adding artists to the prompts ("X" in the style of "A" and "B") and plenty of people did (and do) argue that this is no different than what human artists do (I would disagree.) I personally want to argue that intentionally matters more than raw technique, but Hacker News would require a strict proof for the definition of intentionality that they would argue humans don't possess, but somehow LLMs do, and that of course I can't provide. I guess I have no argument besides "it means more to me that a person does it than a machine." It matters to me that a human artist cares. A machine doesn't care. And yes, in a strictly materialist sense we are nothing but black boxes of neurons receiving stimuli and there is no fundamental difference between a green field and a cold steel rail, it's all just math and meat, but I still don't care if a machine makes X in the style of (Jack Kirby AND Frank Miller.)
  - autoexec 1y ago
    > More often than not art styles are unique to the artist I'd disagree. Art styles are a category of many similar works in relation to others or a way of bringing about similar works. They usually build off of or are influenced by prior work and previous methods, even in cases where there is a effort to avoid or subvert them. Even with novel techniques or new mediums. "Great Artists Steal" and all that. Some people become known for certain mediums or the inclusion of specific elements, but few of them were the first or only artists to use them. "Art in the style of X" just comes down to familiarity/marketing. Art develops the way food does with fads, standards, cycles, and with technology and circumstance enabling new things. I think evolution is a pretty good analogy although it's driven by a certain amount of creativity, personal preference, and intent in addition to randomness and natural selection. Computers could output random noise and in the process eventually end up creating an art style, but it'd take a human to recognize anything valuable and artists to incorporate it into other works. Right now what passes for AI is just remixing existing art created by humans which makes it more likely to blindly stumble into creating some output we like, but inspiration can come from anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the "AI Slop" art style wasn't already inspiring human artists. Maybe there are already painters out there doing portraits of people with the wrong number of fingers. As AI is increasingly consuming it's own slop things could get weird enough to inspire new styles, or alternately homogenized into nothing but blandness.

m3kw9 1y ago

To be fair, the model's ability came from us generating the training data.

quantummagic 1y ago
To be fair, we're the beneficiaries of nature generating the data we trained on ourselves. Our ability came from being exposed to training in school, and in the world, and from examples from all of human history. Ie. if you locked a child in a dark room for their entire lives, and gave them no education or social interaction, they wouldn't have a very impressive imagination or artistic ability either. We're reliant on training data too.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  Gonna try use this one instead of paying the next time i visit a restaurant.
  - Terretta 1y ago
    At a restaurant you pay for what they no longer have when you're done. You don't have to pay to look at food in a grocery, or a recipe in a library you go home and cook. You do pay for ingredients you use up. Unless the book you looked at, or YouTube video you aped, trained you to garden.

FuckButtons 1y ago

I have aphantasia, I’m glad we’re all on a level playing field now.

Revisional_Sin 1y ago
Aphantasia gang!
yoz-y 1y ago
I always thought I had a vivid imagination. But then the aphantasia was mentioned in Hello Internet once, I looked it up, see comments like these and honestly… I’ve no idea how to even check. According to various tests I believe I have aphantasia. But mostly I’ve got not even a slightest idea on how not having it is supposed to work. I guess this is one of those mysteries when a missing sense cannot be described in any manner.
- jmcphers 1y ago
  A simple test for aphantasia that I gave my kids when they asked about it is to picture an apple with three blue dots on it. Once you have it, describe where the dots are on the apple. Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    After reading your first sentence, I immediately saw an apple with three dots in a triangle pointing downwards on the side. Interestingly, the 3 dots in my image were flat, as if merely superimposed on an image of an apple, rather than actually being on an apple. How do people with aphantasia answer the question?
    - foofoo12 1y ago
      I found out recently that I have aphantasia, based on everything I've read. When you tell me to visualize, I imagine. I don't see it. An apple, I can imagine that. I can describe it in incomprehensibly sparse details. But when you ask details I have to fill them in. I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.

kylebenzle 1y ago

[flagged]

lawlessone 1y ago
>We get it, your dumb. You're

micromacrofoot 1y ago

it can only do this because it's been trained on millions of human works

echelon 1y ago
This argument that hints at appropriation isn't going to be very useful or true, going forward. There are now dozens of copyright safe image and video models: Adobe, MoonValley, etc. We technically never need human works again. We can generate everything synthetically (unreal engine, cameras on a turn table, etc.) The physics of optics is just incredibly easy to evolve.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  >We technically never need human works again. Not sure about that. Humans are doing almost all the work now still.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I'm sorry, but in the context of image gen, this is also deeply biased. Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours. It's easy to hate on LLMs and AI hype, but image models are changing the world and impacting every visual industry.
    - filoeleven 1y ago
      > Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours. At the low, low cost of burning incredible amounts of energy! This is also he same logic as “lost sale” software piracy calculations. 90% of those claimed hours would not have been spent if the tool did not exist. Most of the generated images are idle throwaways that no human would bother with creating.
      - echelon 1y ago
        I work in media. I edit images frequently. These models are incredibly useful. Your arguments sound to me as if you're saying the cotton gin is a bad idea because 90% of that cotton wouldn't have been picked. Lay people have been starved from being able to visually articulate themselves. We're entering into a world where everyone will have spatial articulation. That's a good thing. Don't be the latin clergy arguing the populace shouldn't be able to read or have books.

echelon 1y ago

Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom. Conscious intelligence has not. As another argument, we've had mathematical descriptions of optics, drawing algorithms, fixed function pipeline, ray tracing, and so much more rich math for drawing and animating. Smart, thinking machines? We haven't the faintest idea. Progress on Generative Images >> LLMs

Animats 1y ago
> Vision has evolved frequently and quickly in the animal kingdom. Conscious intelligence has not. Three times, something like intelligence has evolved - in mammals, octopuses, and corvids. Completely different neural architectures in those unrelated speces.
- echelon 1y ago
  I won't judge our distant relatives, the cephalopods and chicken theropods, but we big apes are pretty dumb. Even with what we've got, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to invent indoor plumbing. Vision, I still submit, is much simpler than "intelligence". It's evolved independently almost a hundred times. It's also hypothesized that it takes as few as a hundred thousand years to evolve advanced eye optics: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.0048 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.004... Even plants can sense the visual and physical world. Three dimensional spatial relationships and paths and rays through them are not hard.
- nick__m 1y ago
  Why carve out the corvid from the other birds ? Some parots and parakeets species are playing in the same league as the corvids.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Paper on this:[1] Corvids show problem-solving ability comparable to apes but lack a cortex. [1] https://homepage.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/Nieder%20(2021)%20CurrOpNeurobiol.pdf https://homepage.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/Nieder%20(2...

stuckkeys 1y ago

that was deep.

lemonberry 1y ago

But you can find joy at things you envision, or laugh, or be horrified. The mental ability is surely impressive, but having a reason to do it and feeling something at the result is special. "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower..." We - humans - have reasons to be. We get to look at a sunset and think about the scattering of light and different frequencies and how it causes the different colors. But we can also just enjoy the beauty of it. For me, every moment is magical when I take the time to let it be so. Heck, for there to even be a me responding to a you and all of the things that had to happen for Hacker News to be here. It's pretty incredible. To me anyway.

al_borland 1y ago

As someone who can’t visualize things like this in my head, and can only think about them intellectually, your own imagination is still special. When I heard people can do that, it sounded like a super power. AI is like Batman, useless without his money and utility belt. Your own abilities are more like Superman, part of who you are and always with you, ready for use.

HeartStrings 1y ago
Look everybody, this mfa can’t rotate an Apple in his head

EGreg 1y ago

Seriously? One could always cut-and-paste (not the computer term) a hairstyle over a photo of a person. You are now marvelling at someone taking the collective output of humans around the world, then training a model on it with massive, massive compute… and then having a single human compete with that model. Without the human output on the Internet, none of this would be possible. ImageNet was positively small compared to this. But yeah, what you call “imagination” is basically perturbations and exploration across a model that you have in your head, which imposes constraints (eg gravity etc) that you learned. Obviously we can remix things now that they’re on the Internet. Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim.

cma 1y ago
>Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim. I know you're probably talking about analog clocks, but people when dreaming have trouble representing stable digits on clocks. It's one of the methods to tell if you are dreaming.

layer8 1y ago

The proof in the pudding will be if machines will be able to develop new art styles. For example, there is a progression in comic/manga/anime art styles over the decades. If humans would stop (they probably won't) that kind of progression, would machines be able to continue it? In principle yes (we are biological machines of sorts), but likely not with the current AI architecture.

krapp 1y ago
I think it's a mistake to look at developing new art styles as simply continuing a linear progression. More often than not art styles are unique to the artist - you couldn't, for instance, put Eichiro Oda, Tsutomu Nihei and Rumiko Takahashi on the same number line. And trends tend to develop in reaction to existing trends, usually started by a single artist, as often as they do as an evolution of a norm. Arguably, if creating an art style is simply a matter of novel mechanics and uniqueness, LLMs could already do that simply by adding artists to the prompts ("X" in the style of "A" and "B") and plenty of people did (and do) argue that this is no different than what human artists do (I would disagree.) I personally want to argue that intentionally matters more than raw technique, but Hacker News would require a strict proof for the definition of intentionality that they would argue humans don't possess, but somehow LLMs do, and that of course I can't provide. I guess I have no argument besides "it means more to me that a person does it than a machine." It matters to me that a human artist cares. A machine doesn't care. And yes, in a strictly materialist sense we are nothing but black boxes of neurons receiving stimuli and there is no fundamental difference between a green field and a cold steel rail, it's all just math and meat, but I still don't care if a machine makes X in the style of (Jack Kirby AND Frank Miller.)
- autoexec 1y ago
  > More often than not art styles are unique to the artist I'd disagree. Art styles are a category of many similar works in relation to others or a way of bringing about similar works. They usually build off of or are influenced by prior work and previous methods, even in cases where there is a effort to avoid or subvert them. Even with novel techniques or new mediums. "Great Artists Steal" and all that. Some people become known for certain mediums or the inclusion of specific elements, but few of them were the first or only artists to use them. "Art in the style of X" just comes down to familiarity/marketing. Art develops the way food does with fads, standards, cycles, and with technology and circumstance enabling new things. I think evolution is a pretty good analogy although it's driven by a certain amount of creativity, personal preference, and intent in addition to randomness and natural selection. Computers could output random noise and in the process eventually end up creating an art style, but it'd take a human to recognize anything valuable and artists to incorporate it into other works. Right now what passes for AI is just remixing existing art created by humans which makes it more likely to blindly stumble into creating some output we like, but inspiration can come from anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the "AI Slop" art style wasn't already inspiring human artists. Maybe there are already painters out there doing portraits of people with the wrong number of fingers. As AI is increasingly consuming it's own slop things could get weird enough to inspire new styles, or alternately homogenized into nothing but blandness.