[HN Gopher] The art of asking nicely
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The art of asking nicely
Author : pcr910303
Score : 310 points
Date : 2021-07-12 11:21 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ai-weirdness.ghost.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ai-weirdness.ghost.io)
| napier wrote:
| Prompt design / learning how to talk to and communicate
| effectively with AIs is going to be the next decade's programming
| superpower.
|
| As an aside, are there any good approaches for producing this
| kind of generative art on a CPU only system that lacks a GPU?
| amelius wrote:
| > Prompt design / learning how to talk to and communicate
| effectively with AIs is going to be the next decade's
| programming superpower.
|
| Just how programming was supposed to be the "new literacy"?
| napier wrote:
| Well, isn't it? Except we're at Middle Ages/ early
| Renaissance rates of computer science and programming
| literacy. "The future is already here, it's just not widely
| distributed yet" and all that.
| amelius wrote:
| You can still make tons of money by being a good
| businessperson and knowing nothing about programming.
|
| I really wouldn't use the term "literacy" for programming-
| skills.
|
| "Literacy" is not about being at an advantage. It is about
| having a disadvantage when you don't have it.
| comicjk wrote:
| I think that's what was meant by "Middle Ages/ early
| Renaissance" in the comment above. In this time period,
| literacy was a rare advantage. For instance, in early
| modern England, literate people were not subject to
| ordinary criminal courts on a first offense.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_of_clergy
| telesilla wrote:
| Just yesterday I was asked if I was worried about losing my job
| because of AI and I smugly replied that us programmers will be
| needed even more, as interpreters. This is an excellent article
| as explanation I'll be sharing!
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If you're still seeing people flipping burgers, you should be
| safe for at least a decade.
| prasenjit_pro wrote:
| Bang on target! It's gonna take more than a decade if you
| count from flipping burgers era because there a downstream
| ongoing. Upstream will take more.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Another perspective may be - similar to how people were
| saying the post will go bust when internet came in with email
| etc. - but it turned out to be the opposite.
|
| Maybe intelligence will simply become commoditized and
| programming/creating things with it will require even more
| programmers.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Very much like the current "being able to google properly"
| skill.
| atupis wrote:
| It is alreay thing, I mean it is not once or twice when people
| have watced in awe when I google some obscure thing.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| This is the precursor of how to talk to and configure a
| holodeck program.
| yosito wrote:
| For those who only read the comments first, this article is about
| writing effective prompts for AI image generation
| himoacs wrote:
| You, sir, are doing God's work.
| qwertox wrote:
| Why effective? This is more of an exploration.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Note that the author indeed asks:
|
| "But the most effective prompt? In terms of producing a
| realistic but dramatically lit landscape with recognizable
| mountains and hills and (okay not sheep)?"
| ourcat wrote:
| Loving "a herd of sheep grazing on a lush green hillside by tim
| burton".
| kevin_young wrote:
| I've asked my son (13) nicely to stop playing games but he just
| won't listen. I even tried to ground him yesterday but he easily
| overpowered me and threatened me. I don't know what to do. I fear
| he will only get stronger and more defiant and something bad will
| happen to me.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'm kind of fascinated how internet hype speech is taking over
| categories of image representation and art styles.
|
| [filed under: "ultra cool comment trending as a meme on reddit"
| ;-) ]
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Would you kindly'... Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase?"
| voiper1 wrote:
| The related blog entry "AI doesn't understand scale" is
| hilarious: https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/ai-doesnt-understand-
| scale/
| sooheon wrote:
| The fork response was genuinely hilarious.
| spinningarrow wrote:
| @dang: would it be possible to add sub domains for ghost.io
| (similar to github.io) in the parens after the title?
| mimsee wrote:
| Is there some reason all subdomains couldn't be shown? Maybe
| with the exclusion for www.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| More generally, it seems that any domain on the Public Suffix
| List [1] should be shown with a third-level domain (or possibly
| more).
|
| [1] https://publicsuffix.org/
| hlasdjlfhalwjk wrote:
| I wasn't aware, such a list existed. Thanks for the link!
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| You can even submit your domain to the list [1]! This is
| useful when your domain has user-alloted subdomains and you
| want to enforce a stronger subdomain isolation. Ghost.io
| for example is there because the Ghost Foundation has sent
| a submission.
|
| [1] https://publicsuffix.org/submit/
| runnerup wrote:
| These are the kind of comments that make me click through to
| the "favorite" feature in HN so that I can find them for
| reference later. Thanks for your effort to share this.
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| The infancy period of this technology is fascinating.
|
| Think about computer graphics 15 years ago. Beowulf came out in
| 2007, and was developed in the preceding years- let's call it 15+
| years old. And it was right there in the uncanny valley where it
| didn't look real, but it looks realistic. It was interesting
| visually, but my brain told me "this isn't correct".
|
| And now some modern game engines are doing more realistic
| rendering than that in real-time.
|
| Now look at these generative models. Some state of the art ones
| with humans helping are pretty convincing, but it's slow work.
| The more general ones like these are making these wonderfully
| interesting images that our brains immediately say "That's not
| correct".
|
| But where will this technology be in another 15 years? I think
| the possibilities for entertainment are really interesting.
| Imagine a D&D game where the GM is vocally telling the AI what to
| generate, then making small tweaks, and the players are seeing
| the results.
| [deleted]
| nazrulmum10 wrote:
| Suach a nice work
| oceanofsolaris wrote:
| The underlying problem these elaborate prompts seem to solve is
| that the internet contains many pictures, few of which look very
| beautiful.
|
| If you look at all internet pictures of sheep, many of them will
| not be very exciting and depict a low contrast sheep in a foggy
| landscape.
|
| So to get a picture with strong saturation and clear lines, it
| helps to put text there that is usually associated with pictures
| that have these ... like "HD wallpaper" or "made with unreal
| engine". Most "wallpapers" might be of dubious artistic quality,
| but muted colors and a lack of saturation will generally not be
| their problem.
|
| This is of course not the only problem with the model. It doesn't
| even produce a clear image of a sheep .... but that will probably
| get better with larger models and more training. Similarly it
| doesn't seem to have a sense of overall composition and tends
| towards fractal or tiling-like images. But those problems are
| probably orthogonal to the fact that the model doesn't per se try
| to make good pictures ... just average ones for the description
| you give it.
| menzoic wrote:
| The title is misleading
| prasenjit_pro wrote:
| Philosophic words have been a part of programmers life
| sometimes but not misleading. Go in depth and you would get the
| meaning. I must say it is cleaver use of words.
| seedless-sensat wrote:
| HN loves contextless titles, I'm not sure why really
| tobltobs wrote:
| HN just prefers the original title to avoid clickbait. The
| drawback is that sometimes context gets lost. On the bright
| side this sometimes will make you discover interesting
| articles which you wouldn't have checked out otherwise.
| square_usual wrote:
| It provokes curiosity, I guess. It's like good ol' clickbait
| in that regard: ask a question with the promise of an answer,
| except the question is usually not explicit, just assumed by
| the user. Every time I see a contextless title I wonder "Hmm,
| what could this be about?" and click.
| napier wrote:
| That's a bit strong. It's a bit cryptic maybe..
| wccrawford wrote:
| I honestly thought it would be about not being an asshole to
| people doing their jobs, and instead how much better asking
| nicely is. Both for treating them as people, but also for
| getting what you want.
|
| So I'd say it's pretty misleading.
|
| But with the top comment making it clear what the context is,
| I'm fine with it after all.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I played around with these notebooks a while back, and wondered
| what you get if you jointly optimize for several different
| prompts. Has anyone tried this? (Or is this what the article is
| about?)
| 0xcoffee wrote:
| I didn't realize how clever the title was until I finished
| reading the article. Love it
| mineshkumar wrote:
| What's it mean?
| kortex wrote:
| I interpret it to mean "adding lots of superfluous adjectives
| makes the outcome better".
| prasenjit_pro wrote:
| Or it may be that the words connect everyone in their own
| domain. If a marketer reads it's kinda looks like a pitch,
| if a programmer reads it's kinda client, if a husband reads
| its like way to ask his wife, so on and so forth, Cleaver
| use of words.
| kaoD wrote:
| VQGAN+CLIP seem to have this dream-like quality where they
| generate images that are evocative of your prompts but don't
| actually picture them.
|
| I find it fascinating because in some cases it's not as obvious
| as "lump of white fluffy matter" = "sheep" but it still manages
| to evoke the prompt into our brains.
|
| I'll sometimes get an unrecognizable blob but quickly asking my
| SO "what is this?" she will get it... unless she consciously
| looks at it!
|
| Fascinating.
| bentcorner wrote:
| GAN Theft Auto also had a similar dream-like quality,
| especially with anything involving collisions (cars and how
| "big" the road was).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udPY5rQVoW0
| [deleted]
| kortex wrote:
| It's definitely "injective but not bijective" or something like
| that.
|
| Like I look at the prompt "sheep grazing on a hillside by tim
| burton". I look at the pic. Brain goes, "yup, that checks out".
| You wouldn't necessarily derive the domain from the range
| (preimage attack), but I can readily say, "if I fell asleep
| after watching Wallace and Gromit - Close Shave, and Nightmare
| Before Christmas, this is what I would dream".
| meowface wrote:
| >quickly asking my SO "what is this?" she will get it... unless
| she consciously looks at it!
|
| It does make you wonder about hypothetical artificial neural
| network-like "subconscious" layers and how "more conscious"
| prefrontal cortex layers potentially adjust predictions and
| perceptions based on their inputs. (Probably a convenient
| "just-so" "clockwork universe"-esque narrative unsupported by
| neuroscience research, though.)
| satori99 wrote:
| My city is in covid lockdown right now so I have been passing
| some of the time playing with these notebooks.
|
| It is oddly addictive.
|
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/t41uLs3Wogmrgn887
| fho wrote:
| Definitely not a gun-nerd ... but I got a laugh out of the
| Dyson AR-15 :-)
| Delowar776 wrote:
| Such a good work, love it
| yboris wrote:
| Here's a video of an "infinite scroll" depiction of a poem using
| this technology:
| https://twitter.com/mewo2/status/1414649438581268486
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbn1aJuarIU
| [deleted]
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