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The Lone Banana Problem in AI

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11–20 of 109 posts

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#11
Humans are in the business of consuming bananas, whereas neural nets are in the business of peddling bananas. They don't get to actually use these bananas so they can't gain deeper insight into what's they for.

This is the classic lamb vs. mutton issue. Wealthy land owners who use one set of idioms vs. servants who use a different one. Happens to neural nets on human chassis as well.

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#12
post #6

I've seen lots of long prompt suggestions, however single words are fascinating, some words are extremely heavy, for example, we might assume 'topic' and 'subject' are somewhat interchangeable, but when I'm talking to an LLM swapping those words cause a huge change. Same with names, if you ask it to act like Dave, it's not some random personality, it's a distillation of every Dave it has encountered! I don't know how…

On /r/midjourney subreddit there are posts like "the most stereotypical person in [state/country]", "what midjourney thinks professors look like based on their department". You can see some interesting biases in the training data.

https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/top/?sort=top&t=year

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#14

Humans are in the business of consuming bananas, whereas neural nets are in the business of peddling bananas. They don't get to actually use these bananas so they can't gain deeper insight into what's they for. This is the classic lamb vs. mutton issue. Wealthy land owners who use one set of idioms vs. servants who use a different one. Happens to neural nets on human chassis as well.

> “Humans are in the business of consuming bananas”

Someone should have told Jean-Paul Sartre this. He didn’t have to be miserable wondering what it’s all about.

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#15

> A single banana casting a shadow on a grey background That prompt works fine in DALL·E 2.

It will likely be fixed in the next iteration of MidJourney as well. But the point isn’t about specific prompts where the error is obvious and relatively easy to fix. This is just a n extremely easy example to understand. The point is about the subtle biases that are much harder to detect, and which will therefore go unfixed.

Text-to-image models have at least two dimensions of performance: Image quality and text understanding. Midjourney is outstanding at image quality, since it is able to make pictures with few "artifacts", like messed up hands. But it isn't so great at understanding text. For example, the new Dall-E version used by Bing is significantly better than Midjourney in producing an "invisible monkey", although far from perfect:

https://www.bing.com/images/create/an-invisible-monkey-with-...

(Adobe Firefly also fails the invisible monkey task, despite usually having better image quality than Bing/Dall-E.)

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#16
post #6

I've seen lots of long prompt suggestions, however single words are fascinating, some words are extremely heavy, for example, we might assume 'topic' and 'subject' are somewhat interchangeable, but when I'm talking to an LLM swapping those words cause a huge change. Same with names, if you ask it to act like Dave, it's not some random personality, it's a distillation of every Dave it has encountered! I don't know how…

On /r/midjourney subreddit there are posts like "the most stereotypical person in [state/country]", "what midjourney thinks professors look like based on their department". You can see some interesting biases in the training data. https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/top/?sort=top&t=year

I wouldn't use "bias" here. It's a very ambiguous term in machine learning.

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#17

I wish this article was just 3 paragraphs. The verbose writing style was a little tiring, I found myself scrolling impatiently to find what the actual "Lone Banana Problem" was.

Agree. I was a couple of pages in before I learned what the "Lone Banana Problem" is. That took two paras, and was followed by a lot of sophomoric philosophical noodling.

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#18

> A single banana casting a shadow on a grey background That prompt works fine in DALL·E 2.

I can understand the logic behind why "a single banana" doesn't prevent two bananas from showing up though: there is a single banana casting a shadow on a grey background in the image. And then there is another one. That's why you have to specify "on its own" to get rid of the second one...

Re: The Lone Banana Problem in AI

#20
post #6

I've seen lots of long prompt suggestions, however single words are fascinating, some words are extremely heavy, for example, we might assume 'topic' and 'subject' are somewhat interchangeable, but when I'm talking to an LLM swapping those words cause a huge change. Same with names, if you ask it to act like Dave, it's not some random personality, it's a distillation of every Dave it has encountered! I don't know how…

On /r/midjourney subreddit there are posts like "the most stereotypical person in [state/country]", "what midjourney thinks professors look like based on their department". You can see some interesting biases in the training data. https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/top/?sort=top&t=year

https://r.nf/r/midjourney/top/?sort=top&t=year

Don't feed the beast.

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