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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#101

Post by planetsprite »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

You say that and yet every year billions in box office revenues go to movies that are aesthetically equivalent to the image of the astronaut riding a horse.

It also seems silly to compare billion parameter AI models to polyester and try to reduce their value to the trite "artificial is bad" argument which has plagued human thinking for centuries.

Re: The AI Battle

#102

Post by TaupeRanger »

thorum wrote: post #92
TaupeRanger wrote: post #37

I'm not sure how the author could be so blind to the simple fact that computer generated articles and images are not useful. I mean if you want to replicate low quality blog spam and poorly written local news blurbs, maybe you could con a few companies into using your service. Or if you want to destroy the stock image market or the album art market (maybe that kind of "disruption" is somehow beneficial to you?) I gue…

OpenAI published an article about some of the things people are using DALL-E for: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-extending-creativity/ I thought this quote was particularly insightful: > “Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world,” Kamp says. “Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by t…

I don't follow any of that. If I have an idea about a new type of toaster...how does DALL-E help me by giving me a bunch of computer generated toaster images? If I want to make a painting of a solar system floating in front of a nebula, I could ask DALL-E to do it, and maybe I'll get some ideas on composition/style, but is that really such a "gatekept" process? And does it even matter? Is my art better or more meaningful after DALL-E gives me some random references?

Re: The AI Battle

#103

Post by planetsprite »

bsenftner wrote: post #19

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable comp…

What makes human behavior distinct from "personality theater"? What makes human comprehension different than advanced layers of mimicry and cross-functional adaption of learned experiences? Is this not what AI does?

Re: The AI Battle

#104

Post by ShamelessC »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #80
jaggirs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure how you can be so derogatory yet apparently so ignorant. Have you even seen what DALLE-2 (or imagen) can generate? DALLE-2 does not have to 'prove itself' it is clearly on-par with human designers in terms of quality and price. There even is a product on the market right now called Midjourney that is worse in quality than DALLE-2 yet is growing incredibly fast and already breaks even economically. If NL…

DALLE-2 is not in any way "on par" with human designers, unless they are designers of the things I already mentioned like album art or stock photos. Even with the latter it's not particularly good unless the subject involves something that doesn't require fine detail to look decent. Midjourney is not breaking even because it creates useful, high quality art. It is breaking even because of the novelty of DALL-E and I…

Midjourney != DALLE2

One has a much smaller customer base than the other and effectively amounts to, as you suggest, a hype club that finetunes open works and monetizes by giving early access to members.

The other is backed by Microsoft and currently scales to 100,000 users.

To answer your question - not everyone spent their time learning to master art and design. The idea that this is stuff is trivial and devoid of value for a beginner is non-sense. It is useful anytime a coder is in need of custom assets matching an English description. Will it offend some artistic sensibilities? Probably, but have you looked around lately? Nobody cares about that anyway, unfortunately.

Re: The AI Battle

#105

Post by magusdei »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #99
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

Agree, this is like those AI anime character generator game startups that YC seems to enjoy investing in so much. They think they can leverage AI face generation to "somehow" make a game/experience/show/app/nft/whatever when that is the extent of their tech. With no consideration at all of any of the actual work that goes into making anything actually valuable. But I mean, who's the idiot - the company that boasts th…

>AI anime character generator game startups that YC seems to enjoy investing in

Wait, YC invests in this space? If it isn't any trouble, could you point me to a few?

Re: The AI Battle

#106

Post by trop »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84

It's not going to happen for a very simple reason, the personal identity of the artist in the age of mass produced crap (not just by machines, but also by other people) is gaining importance. (Today) consuming music or art isn't just about the work itself, it's even more about the person and culture surrounding it, and there is no culture or interesting narrative in machine produced art. AI art is not authentic, it h…

Indeed. And the artist/creative who can guide DALL-E or GPT-3 will be as exciting as the composer who can make a room dance with music from a synthesizer...or the artist who can make compelling images with a camera.

Re: The AI Battle

#107

Post by dougabug »

carapace wrote: post #53
ajafari1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

Here's me almost exactly six years ago, predicting "most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718300 If we count GitHub Copilot as the tip of the spear then I was too optimistic. > GitHub Copilot ... was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot

A wise old inventor told me, early in my career, that “people always significantly overestimate the rate of progress in the short run, and greatly underestimate it in the long run.”

Text conditional image generation is still a fairly new thing, we don’t know what its upper limits will prove to be. Also, it seems likely that, whatever level of capability they reach, humans will learn how to use them effectively as tools for their own purposes. Some people might use them for quickly preflighting ideas, others to create boilerplate, some people may use them to speed up their workflow or scale up productivity. People didn’t know what all the use cases for personal computers would be when they were introduced in the mid-70’s, or what capabilities they would possess decades later.

Re: The AI Battle

#108

Post by dougabug »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #70
janalsncm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made an account so I could mention David Levy’s infamous bet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_(chess_player)#Co... That’s the way it is with AI: first people say X is impossible for computers, then they say X is hard, then they say X doesn’t work for certain edge cases, then they say we’ve known all along that computers could do X.

Why "infamous"? In any case, Levy did win his bet when there had been no computer chess engine that could beat him in ten years after betting against McCarthy and Michie [1]. Despite that he acknowledge that chess engines had improved further than he had thought: >> Levy wrote, "I had proved that my 1968 assessment had been correct, but on the other hand my opponent in this match was very, very much stronger than I h…

Well, Levy won the bet, but just barely. More importantly, his dismissive attitude towards AI mastering chess (“[…] the idea of an electronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book.”) was deeply shaken.

Re: The AI Battle

#109

Post by [deleted] »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #102
thorum wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI published an article about some of the things people are using DALL-E for: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-extending-creativity/ I thought this quote was particularly insightful: > “Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world,” Kamp says. “Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by t…

I don't follow any of that. If I have an idea about a new type of toaster...how does DALL-E help me by giving me a bunch of computer generated toaster images? If I want to make a painting of a solar system floating in front of a nebula, I could ask DALL-E to do it, and maybe I'll get some ideas on composition/style, but is that really such a "gatekept" process? And does it even matter? Is my art better or more meanin…

[deleted]

Re: The AI Battle

#110

Post by thorum »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #102
thorum wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI published an article about some of the things people are using DALL-E for: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-extending-creativity/ I thought this quote was particularly insightful: > “Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world,” Kamp says. “Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by t…

I don't follow any of that. If I have an idea about a new type of toaster...how does DALL-E help me by giving me a bunch of computer generated toaster images? If I want to make a painting of a solar system floating in front of a nebula, I could ask DALL-E to do it, and maybe I'll get some ideas on composition/style, but is that really such a "gatekept" process? And does it even matter? Is my art better or more meanin…

Toasters are probably not a great example, but concept art is a big deal in most product development / creative industries. Tech, cars, Hollywood, fashion, anime, etc.

The process usually involves finding and hiring an artist and working with them as they create lots and lots of designs until you find one you like, and then more sketches until the design is refined. So you either need to have a significant amount of money to hire artists for an extended project, or the artistic ability to do it yourself.

Using DALL-E instead, you get 4 high quality images in 20 seconds. If you don't like what it comes up with, you adjust your prompt, add more detailed instructions, and keep experimenting. And anyone can do this, regardless of artistic ability, and it's free (at least for now).

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