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How Imagen Works

assemblyai.com

71–80 of 104 posts

Re: How Imagen Works

#71

I have shown imagen (and dalle2) to a number of people now (non-tech, just everyday friends, family, co-workers) and I have been pretty stunned by the response I get from most people: "Meh, that's kinda cool? I guess?" or "What am I looking at?"..."Ok? So a computer made it? That seems neat" To me I am still trying to get my jaw off the floor from 2 months ago. But the responses have been so muted and shoulder shrugg…

Non-techy people understandably don't have a grasp of the difficulty of (programming) tasks. I think that makes it hard for them to get amazed in cases like this.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

Re: How Imagen Works

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, something that's been causing a lotta confusion in AI art is people stand up quick implementations generally matching the general description in the paper, but, they're not really investing in training them. Then people see "imagen-pytorch" on GitHub and get confused, either think it's Imagen itself or a suitable replica of it. There's like 3 projects named DallE, and then the 2 real DallEs...frustrating.

People are really thirsty to play with this tech, you can't blame them. Just search for dataset creators on Hugging Face. I'd link directly to several of them running but it would just overwhelm the creators. If you want to be in early you'll find them. The beautiful thing is open source is going to make this stuff available for everyone and in very short timeframe. It's crazy how fast it moves.

>The beautiful thing

I'm very much looking forward to be able to play with this tech asap. I'm still excited about AIDungeon.

However, OpenAI and creators of the other big name models are restricting the access for good reasons and I'm unsure whether it will be a beautiful thing once it's available for everyone…

Re: How Imagen Works

#74

If Google has something similar or better it definitely makes it look like OpenAI is wasting its time. None of this relates to AGI.

I don't think anyone is saying that humanity is close to AGI, but check out DeepMind's Gato work for a more well-rounded agent: https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent

Lots of people are saying that. I am saying that. OpenAI has it as a foundational mid-term goal.

Re: How Imagen Works

#75

I have shown imagen (and dalle2) to a number of people now (non-tech, just everyday friends, family, co-workers) and I have been pretty stunned by the response I get from most people: "Meh, that's kinda cool? I guess?" or "What am I looking at?"..."Ok? So a computer made it? That seems neat" To me I am still trying to get my jaw off the floor from 2 months ago. But the responses have been so muted and shoulder shrugg…

I think if you've been paying attentiont to the space, this generation of image diffusion is shocking in how quickly it has improved on what we had a year ago. But if you've never considered that a computer can produce an original image, this is just a new thing computers can do. OTOH I think it's also a lack of imagination in how useful this is, so far the output has been kind of random, so it seems a little gimmick…

You can just type a request in the box if you don't particularly care what the result looks like and also don't care that some of the features might be copyrighted (since large models are quite capable of memorizing their training data.)

Asking for two different images in a series that have similar "art styles" is going to be enough work to still need a specialist aka an artist; it'll be most useful in cases you never would've bothered finding one before.

Re: How Imagen Works

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made perhaps overly absolutist statements like "don't you see! this kills artists jobs!" and it was shrugged off as if I was insane. I probably could've phrased it differently, but to me this is game changing in several fields. Granted, it will open up a new field of "generative artists" but, having played with these things, this is a pretty trivial job, and their training nets are only going to get better .

It could also be used for more nefarious reasons like disinformation campaigns though... it will be interesting to see what the next few years have in store

You don't need good-looking pictures for propaganda. Old people (the main targets) believe literally anything they see on Facebook, especially if it confirms their priors aka fits their worldview, and prefer it to look bad because that's more authentic. For anyone else, the point is to make them disbelieve everything, not to believe you specifically.

Re: How Imagen Works

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI achievements will be indistinguishable from human achievements. Humans will try to pass off AI achievements as their own. The line will become so blurred that it will be impossible to tell the difference.

If that happens, all art will simply have no value and art as % of GDP will plummet. Incidentally, this hasn't happened in areas where AI already dominates like chess and go. Magnus Carlsen alone probably generates more "revenue" than all chess AIs combined.

In general, it's not possible for machines to replace labor - this is the Luddite fallacy. If the machines do exactly what you ask them to do this becomes even more true, because labor has the comparative advantage that they'll do things you don't know to ask for.

It is possible for the labor to quit and find something better to do, as happened to elevator operators, but that's a good thing.

In the case of chess, AIs don't want money and Magnus does, so they're not going to help you find ways to get more of it.

Re: How Imagen Works

#78
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're past a certain threshold, maybe not AGI but some definite qualitative change is happening.

I mean DALL-E 2 was the first time my jaw really hit the floor, although in fairness GPT-3 probably should've done that, but it's easier to do with images. And then for this to drop just a month later? Insane. It makes you wonder if they're actually releasing cutting edge, or Google decided to write this paper just because of the publication of DALL-E 2. Maybe they've had this model in the bag for a year.

It seems you can do a lot by making a really big model, but it'd be more impressive to do a lot with a small model, or build one that can explain itself and its "inspirations" in the training data.

WebGPT can do the last one, and seems more useful than GPT3, but also like less of a magic trick so it might not impress people as much.

Re: How Imagen Works

#79

> is trained on hundreds of millions of images and their associated captions So how do you get access to hundreds of millions of images and use them to create derivative works? Did they get consent from millions of authors? Or is something like that only available to the rich with access to lawyers on tap? I mean I can imagine if a nobody wanted to do something like this, they'd get bankrupted by having to deal with…

This is a real issue, but it's solvable with work.

It's claimed that ML models' output isn't copyrightable because it's fair use, but that's hard to believe; a large model can easily memorise and output exactly one of its inputs again. This is easier to see with text, where GPT and Copilot both do it, but images can do it too.

> So how do you get access to hundreds of millions of images and use them to create derivative works? Did they get consent from millions of authors?

Build the model out of Creative Commons images only. There's a lot of 'em and it's good enough. You may need to exclude CC-BY since they currently can't follow the attribution requirement.

> Or is something like that only available to the rich with access to lawyers on tap?

More likely companies willing to license a stock photography database.

Re: How Imagen Works

#80

I have shown imagen (and dalle2) to a number of people now (non-tech, just everyday friends, family, co-workers) and I have been pretty stunned by the response I get from most people: "Meh, that's kinda cool? I guess?" or "What am I looking at?"..."Ok? So a computer made it? That seems neat" To me I am still trying to get my jaw off the floor from 2 months ago. But the responses have been so muted and shoulder shrugg…

Similarly, when I sometimes talk to people about AI (and AGI) and how it will change the world, people respond, meh, yeah ok, so what?
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