[HN Gopher] Dall-E 2 illustrations of Twitter bios
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Dall-E 2 illustrations of Twitter bios
        
       Author : manesioz
       Score  : 776 points
       Date   : 2022-04-08 19:20 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | nonbirithm wrote:
       | I'm imaging a future where the top replies to art posted online
       | will become "keywords please" or "what model". Hosting sites may
       | start to enact "AI treatises" into their terms of service that
       | segregate human- and AI- generated content into separate areas
       | and ask users to report entries that they suspect do not belong
       | in either. Asking "what model did you use" becomes an insult to a
       | sizeable portion of artistic creators, a genuine question for
       | others, and a phrase whose implications cannot be avoided for all
       | people involved.
       | 
       | What belief systems will we form around AI art after it becomes
       | clear that it's never going away? Many people say that art is
       | subjective. I am thinking that if or when parity between art from
       | humans and AI is achieved, some people are going to believe that
       | a humanistic quality of some sort will be trampled upon in the
       | realization that the two types of art really are
       | indistinguishable. Others might believe that AI art is just
       | another tool that they believe expresses their thoughts. The
       | different beliefs might be fundamentally unresolvable, and this
       | may become an unending source of distrust and sadness in certain
       | art circles within the next decade.
       | 
       | I do not look forward to how this tech will interact with online
       | culture several years from now.
        
       | dude3 wrote:
       | There is a lot of emphasis on eyes. Same thing in Google's deep
       | dream. Eerie.
        
       | contextfree wrote:
       | The two images from the "young Robert Moses" etc bio are cool,
       | but the fact they both have such a similar layout and style, with
       | the same "giant hands" framing that doesn't follow from the
       | prompt in any obvious way, makes me wonder if there's some
       | particular source art that "inspired" both. Couldn't find it on
       | Google or Bing images, though.
        
         | JohnBerea wrote:
         | The hand symbolize the Red Sea Parting of Moses.
        
           | contextfree wrote:
           | interesting hypothesis!
        
         | nicklovescode wrote:
         | for that one IIRC I asked for a Robert Moses and one of the
         | cooler ones had giant hands so I put that in the prompt then
         | took two of my favorite from the next batch
        
         | Nition wrote:
         | It would be nice if every AI like this had an option to show
         | the 10 closest-matching training images to the output.
         | Especially for ones like thispersondoesnotexist.com.
        
       | kingcharles wrote:
       | Remember, these are all public domain, at least in the USA which
       | does not allow copyright assignments to the artistic output of
       | machines.
        
         | robbedpeter wrote:
         | No, they're copyrighted by OpenAI. Copyright has to be assigned
         | to a human or company owned by humans. The recent kerfuffle
         | over copyright was a dumbass trying to legitimize copyright
         | assignment to the software itself.
         | 
         | Copyright with dall-e is just like copyright with photoshop or
         | any other software. The user of the tool owns the output.
         | Subject to whatever other limitations and requirements OpenAI
         | wants.
        
           | jazzyjackson wrote:
           | (c) Copyright. OpenAI will not assert copyright over Content
           | generated by the API for you or your end users.
           | 
           | https://openai.com/api/policies/terms/
           | 
           | Notice this doesn't imply they possess any copyright in the
           | first place - just that they won't make an issue of it.
           | Copyright in USA is automatic for the author, I think whether
           | the user of software is the author of an AI's work is yet to
           | be established in the courts, but its pretty clear the
           | creator of the software doesn't own its output.
           | 
           | The dumbass you refer to was testing patent law by trying to
           | register his software as the inventor but the copyright case
           | is different:
           | 
           | > the office's 2019 ruling [...] found his A.I.-created image
           | "lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright
           | claim."
           | 
           | > Thaler noted to the [US Copyright Office] he was "seeking
           | to register this computer-generated work as a work-for-hire
           | to the owner of the Creativity Machine."
           | 
           | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-
           | offic...
        
         | gwern wrote:
         | The USA requires _de minimis_ human contribution; the prompts
         | here definitely qualify as human choice, he's not simply
         | sampling random images, but exercising quite a bit of choice
         | and creativity as he learns to prompt-engineer for DALL-E 2 and
         | also selects, and so there is a copyright to be had.
        
       | Mizza wrote:
       | This is going to put a lot of artists out of work in a very short
       | time. Not happy about that.
        
         | CamelRocketFish wrote:
         | I imagine you were also unhappy when switchboard operators were
         | replaced by computers as well.
        
         | xwdv wrote:
         | They will move on to more stable careers.
        
       | drcongo wrote:
       | These are amazing!
        
       | tailspin2019 wrote:
       | These are so good, it's breaking my brain a little.
       | 
       | They're not just conceptually accurate, but to my eyes they're
       | pleasing to look at from a purely artistic point of view. I'd put
       | these on my wall.
       | 
       | I already take a fairly bullish position on the potential of AI,
       | given a long enough timeframe, but it does feel like we're
       | reaching a bit of a tipping point here.
       | 
       | It's starting to prod at the paradigms I hold in my head about
       | what I think "art" is.
       | 
       | In a turing-syle blind test of these DALL-E artworks, I think
       | most people would be unable to tell the AI generated art from
       | that of human artists. And I imagine that it follows that the
       | same will be the case for music in the near future too, and
       | likely most other artistic endeavours eventually.
       | 
       | I like to write music. I respect the output of other musicians
       | (my fellow "artists") and I am driven, by both intrinsic and
       | extrinsic rewards to keep trying to get better at my "art". But
       | when an AI can produce works that match or exceed my art (based
       | on whatever the measures are that we already judge art by) - it
       | prompts some interesting questions. Does it lower the subjective
       | value of human-produced art by virtue of reducing scarcity, and
       | increasing accessibility?
       | 
       | Of course, DALL-E is trained on the output of human artists. But
       | art is already recursive in that respect - human artists
       | themselves are trained on the output of other artists. So that's
       | not so different...
       | 
       | I guess it's the same paradigm as mass production vs hand
       | crafting. When we pick the cheaper, mass produced item, we lose
       | out on some of the humanity and soul that's baked into hand-
       | crafted goods. But history has shown that we'll gladly take the
       | cheaper, more accessible, more predictable option in most cases.
       | 
       | The commoditisation of art.
       | 
       | When things are commoditised, I tend to think that the
       | opportunity for the creation of value (by humans) tends to move
       | up an abstraction level. As technology becomes commoditised at a
       | certain level, then the orchestration and management of that
       | technology becomes the new speciality where humans are useful and
       | can create value. When that orchestration layer is commoditised,
       | it's the next level up that we can turn their attention to.
       | 
       | So the new art maybe becomes meta-art. Perhaps human artistic
       | endeavours become more about curation rather than creation?
       | 
       | Or will AI art never reach a sufficient level to be considered
       | equal to, or better than human-produced art? We can hide behind
       | the subjectivity of all this, but something like a blind
       | identification test (AI vs Human) removes some of that
       | subjectivity fairly easily...
        
         | awb wrote:
         | > human artists themselves are trained on the output of other
         | artists
         | 
         | Artists take inspiration from other places too like nature,
         | imagination, dreams, etc.
         | 
         | Every once in a while an artist like Picasso, Dali, Pollock,
         | etc. come up with a new style that's instantly distinguishable
         | as unique from the artists that existed prior to them.
         | 
         | Dall-E 2 is an amazing achievement, and could replace most
         | unoriginal artists.
         | 
         | If Dall-E 3 can produce novel artistic styles, that would
         | transform art as we know it.
        
           | tailspin2019 wrote:
           | Yes, very good points!
        
         | disqard wrote:
         | I thought you might like to know about "Experiments in Musical
         | Intelligence" (aka "Emmy"), David Cope's creation, now
         | "deceased":
         | 
         | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/11/david-cop...
         | 
         | "One day Cope pushed a button on Emmy, went out to get a
         | sandwich and when he returned his workaholic creation had
         | produced 5,000 original Bach chorales."
        
           | tailspin2019 wrote:
           | Awesome link.
           | 
           | This bit seems particularly interesting:
           | 
           | > "People tell me they don't hear soul in the music," he
           | says. "When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask
           | them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what
           | we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves
           | down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from
           | listening to music are something we produce, it's not there
           | in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us,
           | the music is just the trigger."
           | 
           | So presumably, we can find "soul" and meaning in computer
           | produced art because a large part of the meaning that we
           | derive from art comes from within us, not necessarily the
           | artist.
           | 
           | This is interesting to contemplate.
        
           | BlueTemplar wrote:
           | > _He realised that what made a composer properly
           | understandable, properly "affecting", was in part the fact of
           | mortality._
           | 
           | Impressive how Asimov has figured this out a while ago (in
           | the _Bicentennial Man_ ) !
           | 
           | Otherwise, why isn't he using a pseudonym ?!?
        
       | mherrmann wrote:
       | Can't wait for this for music. To fix the costly cherry-picking
       | process, Spotify should play AI-generated songs in between
       | others. Those who get good engagement should then rise to the
       | top.
        
       | sc00ty wrote:
       | This is so interesting. If anyone has played the board game
       | Dixit, the images generated here feel like they would fit right
       | in. I could totally see this being used for custom decks in
       | Tabletop Simulator.
       | 
       | For those unfamiliar, you can see some examples of the actual
       | game cards here: https://www.libellud.com/wp-
       | content/uploads/2022/03/DIXIT_OV... (PDF warning)
        
         | noirbot wrote:
         | It reminded me a lot of the art in Mysterium as well, where the
         | premise is that the art cards are visions being presented to
         | mediums from a ghost to try to hint towards how they died.
        
         | cwkoss wrote:
         | Would be fun to play a game of telestrations/garticphone where
         | you get a prompt, select the ai-generated image you think most
         | accurately represents it, then the human tries to write a
         | caption which captures it most accurately, and you see how the
         | work evolves as it passes through multiple players.
         | 
         | (Could also probably generate some fantastic training data)
        
           | sc00ty wrote:
           | This is a great idea! Around 13 years ago I played this web-
           | based game called Broken Picture Telephone (the site seems to
           | be back, but it was shut down for a long time). It had a very
           | similar concept to Telestrations. A user would start with a
           | phrase or description, the next user would draw what was
           | written, and the next would describe it. Repeat until n
           | rounds are complete. At the end, everyone can see how the
           | game evolved.
           | 
           | I ended up writing my own after it first shut down and even
           | though the community was small, it was incredibly fun. Doing
           | this with Dall-E 2 sounds like a fun project to bring back
           | some nostalgia.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Picture_Telephone
        
             | cwkoss wrote:
             | Sounds exactly like GarticPhone - great game: it's free and
             | only requires a web browser. It's become the go-to for our
             | remote company happy hours.
             | 
             | Several people have reported laughing so hard they were
             | sore the next day.
             | 
             | https://garticphone.com/
        
         | jkingsman wrote:
         | That was my first thought as well! The directed, purposeful
         | illustrations that are open to myriad interpretations feel so
         | much like the Dall-E work.
        
         | dweez wrote:
         | Oh yeah totally! I want to round up some friends now to play AI
         | Dixit. An easy version could be to play sort of "reverse Dixit"
         | where one person generates an image from a prompt and everyone
         | else comes up with prompts based on the image, then you guess
         | which prompt was the real one.
        
       | lgvld wrote:
       | i am surprised the only drawing of woman it generates is when the
       | bio explicitly contains the word "female".
       | 
       | bias in AI I guess.
        
       | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
       | Cruelty Squad vibes
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Perhaps someone can write a HN reader where headlines are fed
       | through Dall-E, and the images appear on top of the stories.
        
         | jasonjayr wrote:
         | This totally could be coupled with a CMS/Blogging platform that
         | automatically adds illustrations from headlines/pullquotes
        
           | a-r-t wrote:
           | And coupled with GPT-3...
        
             | jer0me wrote:
             | This appears to be entirely, if poorly, computer generated:
             | https://www.dreamsopedia.com/dream-about-eating-child.html
        
           | Bilal_io wrote:
           | This could replace a huge portion of the stock image market.
           | 
           | For example, The Verge writes an article about Microsoft,
           | they don't need to pay royalties for an image that has
           | Microsoft logo displayed on a building, one can be generated
           | for them.
        
             | TOMDM wrote:
             | MS powerpoint already has a feature to suggest stock images
             | based on slide title.
             | 
             | With this, you could get a consistent art style and theme
             | on your slides, and be truly unique too.
             | 
             | $ART_STYLE + $COLOR_THEME + $SLIDE_TITLE
        
         | hans1729 wrote:
         | That's an _amazing_ idea.
        
         | TOMDM wrote:
         | Or imagine a script to chop a book/podcast into segments to add
         | visuals.
        
       | csee wrote:
       | Stunning.
       | 
       | My question is whether more compute and more data will be
       | sufficient for the AI to create its own art _styles_. Everything
       | we see here are within the stylistic paradigms created by
       | previous humans.
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Probably, interpolating betweem styles or extrapolating to
         | unseen styles doesn't seem too far fetched.
         | 
         | However an art style also needs context: human appreciation of
         | aesthetic values, human recognition of a style wrt prior
         | movements... without an "ecosystem of artists and viewers" it
         | might not be so useful.
         | 
         | Nevertheless... As a tool for artists to explore new avenues of
         | expression this could be a fantastic tool, i think.
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | When will an API be available for the rest of us?
        
       | bayesian_horse wrote:
       | Could someone point me how to make such images yourself? This may
       | be a naive question as it may require non-public code and data...
       | I've seen public colab notebooks with Dall-E but they don't work
       | currently (package problems) and seem to produce a different
       | style of results.
        
       | mupuff1234 wrote:
       | Now to connect it with the Nvidia tech demo that turns 2d
       | pictures to a 3d environment.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | These drawings... they have personality.
        
       | deltaonefour wrote:
       | The trajectory of AI is both amazing and horrifying. Most of us
       | are born in an era where we can witness the change and play with
       | toy versions of AI products. The next generation of people will
       | have their lives truly changed by AI, for the better or for
       | worse.
        
         | nonbirithm wrote:
         | The scariest thing is that I don't think we can stop ourselves
         | from innovating further even if we tried. The authors believed
         | that the merit of displaying their progress outweighed the
         | implications.
        
           | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
           | The quote about jobs comes to mind: "If it's jobs you want,
           | then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."
           | 
           | (full context:
           | https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/)
        
         | cwkoss wrote:
         | It will be better! Giving every human the tools to make
         | expressive works of art without having to train for years will
         | be awesome for society!
         | 
         | I'm playing with some of the neanderthal-relatives of dall-e 2
         | and already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint
         | copies of so I can hang em on my wall.
         | 
         | I don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt
         | from this - in fact, I think this is going to increase demand
         | for art, because now the 'patron' can participate in the
         | composition process more meaningfully.
        
           | deltaonefour wrote:
           | Apply this to everything. AI that takes over all possible
           | jobs involving any form of creativity and intelligence.
           | 
           | What are the economic consequences of such a society?
        
           | Jeff_Brown wrote:
           | > increase demand for art
           | 
           | Good point. Custom art used to be the realm of only royalty,
           | and later only the rich, but soon anybody will be able to
           | afford the fifty cents or whatever it is of computing power
           | that it takes to execute their vague artistic instructions.
        
             | cwkoss wrote:
             | Totally, Etsy has led an explosion of put you/your kid/your
             | pet into a work of art type things (many artists create
             | reusable templates, where the custom component can be
             | plugged in, so help with scale). I foresee this trend
             | accelerating as the tooling makes cost of producing this
             | sort of thing cheaper.
        
           | Jeff_Brown wrote:
           | > don't even think artists are going to be meaningfully hurt
           | 
           | It might not reduce the number of artists, but it will surely
           | change their composition (pun proudly intended). Only those
           | flexible enough to adapt to the new landscape will be able to
           | support themselves in the new AI art economy.
        
           | troyvit wrote:
           | I hope you're right but the feeling I get is that it's going
           | to increase the _supply_ of art until it becomes meaningless.
           | For instance why should anybody paint an astronaut on a horse
           | anymore? It was a great idea and now it's been done.
           | 
           | In the near future when you look at art you won't know
           | whether it was created directly by a human or by an AI. What
           | will that do to its appreciation?
        
             | cwkoss wrote:
             | Why is a human-painting of an astronaut on a horse valuable
             | now?
             | 
             | I view this as detangling composition from the mechanical
             | skills of art production.
             | 
             | Perhaps this will make a new type of art job - AI wrangler
             | - whose job is collaborating with AI to get a good
             | composition, then the composition can be handed over to
             | someone with the mechanical skills to render it in the real
             | world, if humans making the brush strokes is important.
             | 
             | I'd imagine that if we gave these tools to a skilled
             | painter to help in their compositional brainstorming
             | process, they'd find many good ideas they'd like to
             | incorporate into their works in a short period of time.
             | But, I'm not a skilled painter, so could be wrong.
        
           | zimpenfish wrote:
           | > already have several that I kind of want to analog-paint
           | copies of so I can hang em on my wall.
           | 
           | I've been doing that with VQGAN-CLIP with prompts of things
           | like "line art", "watercolor", "linocut"[1], and "woodcut" -
           | have got a stack of things waiting for some free time to
           | render into the physical world.
           | 
           | [1] "Dark Souls in the style of linocut" makes some really
           | fascinating possibilities.
        
             | cwkoss wrote:
             | Ah that's a cool idea. I've been saving a collection of
             | images from dream by wombo and nightcafe around the same
             | theme, and think I'm going to try to render them into a
             | single cohesive acrylic painting. (though my mechanical
             | abilities will probably leave me disappointed)
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | When Copilot and similar service gets this DALLE level of
         | accuracy regarding coding ...
         | 
         | It is going to be very relevant to the current software
         | engineers, maybe just in next 5 years.
        
           | Jeff_Brown wrote:
           | I'm skeptical.
           | 
           | The thing about art is that so much qualifies as good.
           | Something very close to a beautiful painting is probably also
           | a beautiful painting.
           | 
           | But an algorithm very close to the right way to count votes,
           | or launch a rocket, or decide whether to lend to someone, is
           | probably not the right way.
        
             | deltaonefour wrote:
             | There are already exists machines that can produce
             | beautiful art: Humans. More than any other technology the
             | physical existence of human intelligence itself implies
             | that it such intelligence can exist, which implies it can
             | be built.
             | 
             | Something like interstellar travel or even a civilization
             | on mars is actually much less realistic due to the lack of
             | examples in existence.
        
               | Jeff_Brown wrote:
               | You're right, the existence of humans strongly suggests
               | that artificial general intelligence is possible.
               | 
               | But the existence of DALL-E 2, which is not AGI and
               | nonetheless produces beautiful art, does not convince me
               | that software will be writing reliable software before
               | AGI happens.
        
             | BlueTemplar wrote:
             | Then you "just" have to use one of the formal proof
             | languages and then verify the program ?
             | 
             | Also, "decide how to lend to someone" is an interesting
             | example, since it will always involve quite a bit of
             | intuition even with a program helper (which won't be able
             | to use a neural network due to transparency requirements).
        
               | Jeff_Brown wrote:
               | > Then you "just" have to use one of the formal proof
               | languages and then verify the program ?
               | 
               | Haha yes indeed, thereby elegantly reducing 8 hours of
               | work to 40 hours.
        
               | BlueTemplar wrote:
               | Well, the question is how much of the formal verification
               | can be automated too ?
        
         | ulnarkressty wrote:
         | I wonder if this is how people born in the early 20th century
         | felt about going from first flight to moon landing in a few
         | decades. It took some serious conflicts for things to evolve to
         | that point though. I'm not looking forward to the AI wars.
        
           | aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
           | >going from first flight to moon landing in a few decades
           | 
           | And then nothing.
        
             | boplicity wrote:
             | Actually, space technology, via literal objects in space,
             | impacts almost everyone's life (especially in wealthy
             | countries), pretty much constantly. It's simply become so
             | woven into our day-to-day lives that we don't even think
             | about it.
        
             | Jeff_Brown wrote:
             | Progress is hard to quantify. We developed language, what,
             | hundreds of thousands of years ago? And then very little
             | seemed to happen, but it was a slow-burning fire that
             | eventually exploded. Our use of computers seems almost sure
             | to be similar.
             | 
             | But that said, there are certainly structural factors
             | inhibiting innovation. Scale problems make it nearly
             | impossible to challenge someone like Google or Facebook
             | (although TikTok did manage the latter). Were there more
             | competition, one imagines there would be more innovation.
             | Patents are likely a net drag. Laws, esp. tax laws, could
             | be simpler. I'm sure I'm omitting other important factors.
        
               | deltaonefour wrote:
               | Yes. You omitted physical limits. It is very likely that
               | Humanity will not achieve much of technology implied by
               | science fiction.
               | 
               | The only exception looks to be AI, because although we
               | haven't created an AI that matches human intelligence...
               | the existence of human intelligence itself implies that
               | building an AI to the level of human intelligence is
               | possible.
        
             | MisterBastahrd wrote:
             | I'll try to remember that the next time I listen to Sirius
             | while using GPS to navigate.
        
       | sanman811 wrote:
       | This tweet provides important context:
       | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081...
       | 
       | They weren't just copying/pasting prompts there was human
       | creativity involved as well
        
         | educaysean wrote:
         | Ah, I wish this fact had been highlighted better. Not a
         | criticism of the tweet author; it's just that twitter threads
         | really aren't designed to convey context.
        
           | curiousgal wrote:
           | I hate them with every part of my soul! It's so sad to see
           | the internet has moved from people making blog posts to share
           | interesting things to just spraying it on Twitter in batches
           | for maximum interactions.
        
         | recuter wrote:
         | Of course not. I'm no longer surprised just how eager people
         | are to believe an "AI" will read their minds or has magical
         | qualities and a mind of its own. Even on HN.
         | 
         | Jiggle the imagination just a little bit, dangle some progress,
         | and we're off to the races.
         | 
         | This is "I'm feeling lucky" on google image search + style
         | transfer + trial and error.
         | 
         | If you think I am being dismissive try a few of these twitter
         | bios as searches and see for yourselves.
         | 
         | I guess it fits with the times we live in. Reward shallow
         | plagarism. Outsource your mind.
         | 
         | It isn't theft if you can automate it.
         | 
         | Autotune for the deaf, Dall-E for the blind.
        
           | campground wrote:
           | I tried what you suggested for a bunch of the twitter bios
           | and found nothing except links back to this thread. I also
           | reverse image searched a bunch of them to see if DALL-E was
           | just kind of pasting together large chunks of images, but
           | never found anything close. I do think you're being
           | dismissive but please post any examples of what you mean. I'm
           | a skeptic and have been waiting to find out that this is just
           | a glorified parlor trick, but so far it seems like DALL-E is
           | doing everything the authors claim, which is remarkable.
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | I don't want to be dismissive of Dall-E itself or its
             | authors. Just the implications that this changes everything
             | or how it is much more than it really is.
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/151212306780334489
             | 9...
             | 
             | Prompt: "expressive painting of a man shining rays of
             | justice and transparency on a blue bird twitter logo"
             | 
             | You have to break the concepts up apart (which is one of
             | the things Dall-E improved on).
             | 
             | As such: "expressive blue bird"
             | 
             | In google image search, type clipart, and I even get pill
             | tags to further narrow it down to illustrations for animal
             | paintings and so forth. Google's classifier knows the
             | concept of a "blue bird" and expressionism too.
             | 
             | https://www.google.com/search?q=expressive+blue+bird&tbm=is
             | c...
             | 
             | The same for "ray of light". In fact the top results there
             | I get pngs of sun beams on a transparent background. Which
             | is perfect.
             | 
             | Neither the birds nor the rays of light in the pictures it
             | produced are truly its own creations but lifted from bits
             | of pictures in its training set. I bet you could find the
             | exact bird from the second row online in many places for
             | example. It just won't be blue or stylized.
             | 
             | Composite those things together manually and add a style
             | transfer you'll get similar results to DALL-E as that is
             | what it is doing more or less.
        
               | boppo1 wrote:
               | > Prompt: "expressive painting of a man shining rays of
               | justice and transparency on a blue bird twitter logo"
               | 
               | Yeah, weak results. None of the men look anything like
               | Elon Musk. /s
        
               | westoncb wrote:
               | > Composite those things together manually and add a
               | style transfer you'll get similar results to DALL-E as
               | that is what it is doing more or less.
               | 
               | If you try actually doing this it will be trivial to see
               | that this assertion is incorrect.
               | 
               | 1. The way in which the elements of the images are
               | integrated together is deeper than the level of style.
               | For instance, see the image in the top row, second
               | column: it has integrated the blue bird wings onto the
               | man, not only simply grafting them on, but giving the
               | appearance of their being draped on like a cloak, partly
               | behind and partly in front of him (+ it's consistent with
               | the man's posture and the rays of light to evoke a
               | certain coherent cultural idea/image). You might be able
               | to integrate multiple images (of man, bird, rays etc.)
               | together and style transfer to arrive at a poor
               | approximation of this--but even then, the decision to
               | place the elements together in such a way would require
               | creativity on your part.
               | 
               | 2. The one example set of of trial images (generated from
               | the phrase "expressive painting of a man shining rays of
               | justice and transparency on a blue bird twitter logo") is
               | one of the easiest among the full group to pick its
               | various elements apart; if you try this thought
               | experiment with the others in the thread, you'll see this
               | idea is by far insufficient.
        
               | samvher wrote:
               | On (2), so this part is where I wonder: no-one has
               | "expressive painting of a man shining rays of justice and
               | transparency on a blue bird twitter logo" as their
               | twitter bio. So are the "happy sisyphus" images generated
               | from "happy sisyphus children's style", or are they
               | generated from something more like "a person carries a
               | large ball in a mellow image in the style of a pixar
               | cartoon"? To me there is a _huge_ difference between
               | these things: how much of the context is inferred from
               | the bio, and how much from what 's provided in the
               | prompt? (Does DALL-E 2 know about the story of Sisyphus
               | or is that part filled in?)
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | In the video accompanying the paper they gave the example
               | of "tree bark". Do we mean the bark of a tree or a dog
               | barking at a tree?
               | 
               | So I reckon with "happy sisyphus" it breaks it apart into
               | discrete vectors as a first disambiguation step and in
               | this case resulting in two distinct queries.
               | 
               | Happy returns all kinds of image results.
               | 
               | Sisyphus returns the same kind of image results over and
               | over.
               | 
               | A man rolling a boulder up a hill. Thus it can learn the
               | concept of "sisyphus" on the fly as it would return:
               | 
               | man 95% boulder 90% hill 80% etc
               | 
               | Over a _range_ of images.
               | 
               | So it must be Man+Boulder+Hill. That's its scene cue.
               | That's what CLIP doodles initially. That's the "find me
               | similar images step".
               | 
               | Happy is the style cue.
               | 
               | That's how "happy sisyphus" expanded into "a person
               | carries a large ball in a mellow image in the style of a
               | pixar cartoon"
               | 
               | Why specifically the Pixar style? One of several
               | variations it tried, selected by a human.
               | 
               | The thing we don't know is whether the Pixar styled image
               | is composited from the existing images in its training
               | set. In other words whether this can be reversed.
               | 
               | That character looks familiar tho. I think it is
               | plagiarizing.
               | 
               | Here is another observation: the boulder is not round, it
               | reminds me of one of the Platonic solids. I don't think
               | that's a coincidence, heh.
        
               | westoncb wrote:
               | You're asserting a bunch of things about how it works
               | that have no basis in reality. If you want to be able to
               | comment on this stuff with any accuracy, read the
               | research they've published.
        
               | westoncb wrote:
               | They are generated from e.g. "happy sisyphus". My
               | understanding is there are separate additional controls
               | for style (though it's flexible enough you could give
               | hints in the text, too, which is I gather where the
               | "expressive" word fits in).
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | Good, finally. Yes, exactly - this is the most
               | interesting aspect of the whole thing.
               | 
               | > the decision to place the elements together in such a
               | way would require creativity on your part
               | 
               | I strongly suspect that's because it found similar
               | compositions in its training set. So what exactly is
               | going on here is fascinating.
               | 
               | Did it learn compositing? Is that why the image output is
               | now much more stable? Or is it mearly finding similar
               | artwork and competently recreating/mimicking existing
               | compositions from different building blocks? So now we
               | can not only transfer styles but also transfer
               | compositions. That could be the beginning of something
               | useful. Instead of a text prompt I'd give it my crappy
               | doodle and it will respond with an improved/different one
               | that is comparable (also a great way to steal tho).
               | 
               | And of course I picked the one that is easiest to tease
               | apart where it is most evident so people will see what I
               | mean.
               | 
               | > if you try this thought experiment with the others in
               | the thread, you'll see this idea is by far insufficient
               | 
               | That depends on your imagination and your artistic eye I
               | guess. Even if somebody could do that they certainly
               | couldn't make you believe them. That's the
               | accomplishment.
               | 
               | Neither one of us can prove it one way or the other so
               | long as the model is a black box. And certainly so long
               | as we don't have direct access to openai but just to
               | curated examples.
        
               | joshcryer wrote:
               | I think your last line is what stands out more than
               | anything. You've just described creating something
               | without "compositing those things together manually."
               | 
               | Note that in that example the "twitter bird logo" is
               | actually _expressed_ in 6 out of all of those images.
               | Look for the small bird, that looks like the Twitter
               | logo. It 's there. It's doing the thing.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | The prompt is actually "blue bird twitter logo".
               | 
               | Nothing is expressed. Find yourself a blue bird in an
               | expressionistic style, go to google image search and give
               | it the url. Click on tools -> visually similar.
               | 
               | Enjoy an endless supply of things to plagiarize. In the
               | middle picture of the second row you can clearly see how
               | several pre-existing images are sharply cut off before
               | being re-blended.
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | Same thing going on here as in your other comments.
               | 
               | Tech like CLIP, GPT-3, DALL-E, etc. are indeed nearing
               | the sophistication (w. caveats around outliers and
               | harmful outputs) of Google search.
               | 
               | It took a lot of people to create Google search. It took
               | precisely one training run for DALL-E 2 to create this.
               | 
               | edit: Removed toxic comment.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | No, don't get me wrong. I think DALL-E is very
               | interesting and a potentially useful tool and have
               | nothing against the tool makers.
               | 
               | The tool wielders however.. I think are overyhyping this
               | to say the least. And focusing on the wrong bits. It
               | isn't sentient and it is not making art. But teasing
               | apart how it is deriving these images might shake out
               | serious advancements.
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | Fair enough I think we are in agreement.
        
             | rndphs wrote:
             | Yeah I just tried google image searching to find something
             | like the pikachu photo from https://mobile.twitter.com/gott
             | apatchemall/status/1511777860...
             | 
             | But I can't find anything close to the realism that DALL-E
             | 2 achieved here.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | There was an abomination of a live action Pikachu movie
               | some time ago. When I google "realistic pikachu" I get
               | images exactly like this from the movie but not gross.
               | 
               | In fact this photo is _exactly_ what you get when you
               | photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu
               | plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a
               | cape. Literally that is what you 're looking at.
               | 
               | It understood your prompt and amalgamated the right
               | source photos into this nightmare fuel. Jesus wept.
        
               | rndphs wrote:
               | Well to my eye it's realism beyond anything that I could
               | find. Mind you I didn't search for that long so there
               | might be something there if I was to delve deeper.
               | 
               | I am pretty familiar with photoshop, and while I'm not an
               | expert, I would find making something like this really
               | difficult. Anything is possible with photoshop, but some
               | things are very hard.
        
               | ShamelessC wrote:
               | > In fact this photo is exactly what you get when you
               | photoshop the face of an ugly chihuahua unto a Pikachu
               | plushie head and add a yellow brushed hamster body. And a
               | cape. Literally that is what you're looking at.
               | 
               | i guess some people are overhyped, but it's cool that
               | this can do that. Previously, it took a trained human.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | If this is the exact image you wanted and are entirely
               | satisfied for it, great. But what people are reacting to
               | is that it is outputting interesting images at all.
               | 
               | What are you going to do with this cape wearing realistic
               | Pikachu that is actually a picture of a hamster?
               | 
               | Typically the trained human has something specific in
               | mind. And if the client isn't satisfied they will torture
               | them with countless requests for adjustments. So right
               | now this is of limited use.
               | 
               | To me what is far far far more interesting is that Dall-E
               | possibly understands the concept of what a Pikachu is
               | supposed to be. That is downright creepy, and
               | fascinating. I suspect that this visual aspect to things
               | after people get over the clipart generation might find
               | more functional utility as a way to see through the
               | "model eyes" so to speak. To visualize the model itself.
               | That could unlock a lot of doors in how training is done.
               | 
               | Maybe in the future you could train it on textbooks and
               | prompt it for a picture of a molecule. Now that would be
               | something. Especially if you start feeding it data from
               | experiments.
        
               | fastball wrote:
               | > Typically the trained human has something specific in
               | mind. And if the client isn't satisfied they will torture
               | them with countless requests for adjustments. So right
               | now this is of limited use.
               | 
               | Confused as to why you think you cannot do this with
               | DALL*E?
        
               | chrisco255 wrote:
               | Yeah, it's still impressive to be able to imitate those
               | styles and add a blue cape that didn't exist in the
               | movies, along with chihuahua eyes. It also appears to be
               | higher definition than Detective Pikachu CG. I'm curious
               | if you could do the same for all 150 original Pokemon,
               | even those for which realistic CG representations don't
               | exist. Would it be able to take the cartoon version of
               | Farfetch'd or Psyduck or a more obscure one and achieve
               | the same realism, without the reference from the deep
               | dataset?
        
             | joshcryer wrote:
             | It's fascinating how in our hubris we were thinking that
             | art would be the last thing for AI to tackle, but it
             | appears to be the first (Sam Altman made a similar
             | statement on the launch of DALL-E). Which makes art _more_
             | meaningful to me, for some reason. There 's _something_ in
             | the billion parameters and exabytes of data that this
             | neural net had to process and it was so ... easy. Natural.
             | Because it is us. It is our expression. Our creativity. Our
             | outpouring of data, and all it is doing is reflecting us.
             | It 's beautiful.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | There is something about clouds. Facial recognition
               | software frequently finds faces in clouds just like we
               | do.
               | 
               | This thing will kill art dead.
        
               | boppo1 wrote:
               | Check my post prior to this one. Art will be fine.
               | 
               | Well, representational art. I'd like to say post-abstract
               | expressionists are at risk, but they still have their
               | admirers convinced they're wearing clothes, and there's
               | no indication those idiots will ever change their minds.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | I agree with your post. Good luck convincing every child
               | with a big Dall-E button on their iPad that they are not
               | in fact Picasso. I mean, just look at this thread. And
               | these are supposed to be adults.
        
               | mensetmanusman wrote:
               | That's because the entire corpus of art is stored in the
               | neural network weightings as memory. It's built to
               | imitate human art by optimizing towards these weightings.
        
               | boppo1 wrote:
               | I'm an amateur painter and AI hasn't even kissed high art
               | yet IMO, although it's nominally good at amateur
               | illustration.
               | 
               | I'm going to have to write up a piece on this sometime,
               | my argument is a little too involved for an HN post. But
               | the gist is that the heart of what a fully trained
               | painter does is make personal choices. A quick and dirty
               | example of the difference:
               | 
               | Suppose you train an AI on Picasso's pre-1901 pieces.
               | It's not going to decide it's time for a blue period.
        
           | andybak wrote:
           | I've coincidentally just been watching Rick and Morty and
           | this really fit read in Rick's voice.
           | 
           | Is yawning at everything astonishing not just exhausting?
           | Everything is "just" made up of less impressive things. But
           | is this really not worthy of a little wonderment?
        
             | girvo wrote:
             | Middle-brow dismissal of everything seems so exhausting. I
             | find it much easier to be moderately impressed by things,
             | personally!
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | It is more like uni-brow dismissal of the eagerly
               | impressed rather than the impressive work in progress.
               | 
               | It is very good to keep an open mind, just make sure your
               | brain doesn't fall out.
        
           | fastball wrote:
           | I dunno, I really like the "happy sisyphus" one and I'm not
           | seeing anything remotely as nice (or similar really) on
           | Google Images[1]...
           | 
           | [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=happy+sisyphus
        
           | manigandham wrote:
           | Side note: Those last 3 lines would make fantastic lyrics
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | :)
             | 
             | They call me the Hip-Hopapotamus
             | 
             | My lyrics are bottomless
        
           | gfodor wrote:
           | A proposition for your consideration: what if you're wrong?
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | What if you're in a cult?
             | 
             | Two more papers down the line who knows what Dall-E 4 will
             | be capable of. It is a step in the right direction that the
             | image output is now "stable", which is what this is
             | demonstrating.
             | 
             | But it can't read your mind despite the eerie feeling you
             | get, that is an illusion. Kismet in api form.
             | 
             | The next steps is to open this black box up and actually
             | make its internal pipeline tweak able so it can become a
             | useful tool.
             | 
             | It may end up an amazing super useful tool or a clipart
             | plagiarisor/generator on steroids.
             | 
             | You can't even use it yet and you're already so eager to
             | believe.
        
               | gfodor wrote:
               | You don't even know what I believe, but one thing is
               | clear: you also haven't used it yet, and are far more
               | certain of its capabilities than I am. (I have,
               | incidentally, had two of my personal requests generated
               | by the kind folks at OpenAI, and I was impressed.)
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | I was responding to this: "They weren't just
               | copying/pasting prompts there was human creativity
               | involved as well"
               | 
               | I'm simply certain that whatever its capabilities they
               | are short of mind reading. You'd be equally impressed if
               | you asked me to perform a google image search.
               | 
               | That does not mean that Dall-E is unimpressive or the
               | results are fake. What I'm saying is that the hype and
               | mysticism around this is unwarranted.
               | 
               | Elsewhere in the thread somebody else wrote that we are
               | on the cusp of it producing convincing fake footage from
               | the Kennedy assassination from a single text prompt.
               | 
               | The image output now being stable and pleasing to the eye
               | is enough of a result even if it requires trial and
               | error.
               | 
               | You wouldn't lose your mind over a wallpaper generator
               | even though no machine learning is necessary to produce
               | infinite variations of interesting patterns. This thing
               | is spewing out "art" and people are ascribing magical
               | capabilities to it as if it taped a banana to a canvas.
               | 
               | Anything is possible. Maybe Dall-E is capable of even
               | more incredible things. Who knows where this all ends up.
               | Sure. But not quite _that_ much follows from what has
               | been presented _so far_.
        
               | gfodor wrote:
               | Based on what I have seen DALL-E 2 does seem to be
               | demonstrating something very close, if not entirely
               | mappable to, human creativity when it comes to visual
               | creation. There are several examples where it makes
               | connections that are both highly unlikely to be just a
               | lift from another work, but yet also create a work that
               | makes a fundamental artistic statement. Here are two that
               | blew my mind (again: presuming these aren't just cribbed
               | from human artists in terms of semantics):
               | https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1511907134761361419
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | If you open up google and bing and others and do an image
               | search it comes up with lots with this style.
               | 
               | Anyway, I too Want To Believe. It is worth thinking about
               | the falsifiability. One way that comes to mind to
               | determine whether it is truly demonstrating creativity is
               | to prove it doesn't have anything remotely similar in its
               | training set (it almost certainly does).
               | 
               | The paper omits important details and they didn't release
               | code, nothing has been reproduced independently. So far
               | all that happened is that a human sent you a cool looking
               | doodle.
               | 
               | We just don't know enough at this stage. Probably the
               | people who made the damn thing can't fully make this
               | claim yet either - it sure is an intriguing result
               | however.
        
               | gfodor wrote:
               | My point isn't about style but the content and the
               | artistic statement of the content. Both have deep
               | possible interpretations, and if they were drawn by a
               | human artist could motivate a ton of analysis.
        
               | tekromancr wrote:
               | A wallpaper generator could be a rad application of this,
               | actually. You could feed some random poetry into gpt and
               | the outputs of gpt into the input of this, randomly pick
               | an output, and everytime you login to your computer some
               | surreal, never before seen image.
               | 
               | I'd dig it.
        
         | Veedrac wrote:
         | Now imagine if you can if the situation was reversed, where the
         | AI was adding cyberpunk/oil/etc. to the front of the prompt and
         | it was the human that was interpreting it and painting the many
         | variations.
         | 
         | How many people would then be defending the AI, that actually
         | it wasn't just the human, the AI was playing a critical role in
         | the creative process, ne'er to be replaced? I venture zero
         | people would say that.
        
         | hemreldop wrote:
         | It's a guy not a group.
        
         | habitue wrote:
         | It is important context, but just to push back against people
         | over-correcting on this, my guess is that the ones he rejected
         | also looked approximately this good.
         | 
         | I think the primary reason people are wowed by this thread
         | isn't attributable mainly to the subtle effect of the cherry-
         | picking he did, but in fact to the overall quality of any image
         | generated by DALL-E 2.
        
           | nicklovescode wrote:
           | Yeah that's right. There were very few strictly-bad ones
           | across the entire thread of generations
           | 
           | The rejections were most commonly
           | 
           | 1. Kind of just slightly boring or literally drawing the
           | thing rather than being cool and artistic
           | 
           | 2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near it in
           | the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse (surreal
           | followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines etc) so it's
           | more fun to scroll through
           | 
           | Whereas a few years ago generative models (GANs etc) would
           | often render like static noise sometimes or completely wrong
           | things. I've only seen that problem once with DALL-E across
           | hundreds or thousands of images now (it generated a fully
           | white image)
        
             | webmaven wrote:
             | _> 2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near
             | it in the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse
             | (surreal followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines
             | etc) so it 's more fun to scroll through_
             | 
             | Has anyone compiled a list of the styles and artists Dall-E
             | "knows"? How niche does it get? Decorative Initial Caps?
             | Florid Victorian Ornaments? Googie Architecture? SFF
             | artists like Michael Whelan, Vincent Di Fate, Jeffrey
             | Catherine Jones, or Jim Burns? Banksy? Sculptors like
             | Bathsheba Grossman or Markus Pierson? Early animation
             | artists like Ub Iwerks or E. C. Segar?
             | 
             | I was experimenting with one of the VQGAN+Clip notebooks a
             | while ago, and it did pretty well with some styles, but not
             | so much with "Heroic Realism" or "Soviet Propaganda Poster"
             | or "Sheppard Fairey", and even worse when I was trying to
             | get it to draw in that style an object that could be
             | construed as implying a style itself like "retro robot" or
             | "50s raygun" (eg. "A retro robot drawn in a heroic realism
             | style" or "A cubist painting of a steampunk pistol"). Is
             | that kind of dissonance a problem for Dall-E?
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | That's very cool but once you have stable image output how
             | do you define good image output when it comes to art?
             | 
             | The stuff on deviantart is pretty good too and neatly
             | tagged and classified by art style.
        
               | nicklovescode wrote:
               | I'd often send like six images to the person who's bio I
               | was making and ask them to choose two :)
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | For better results send three, two being static noise :)
        
             | AntiDyatlov wrote:
             | Can you ask DALL-E to draw itself?
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Yes, and it sees itself as a really cute little demon:
               | https://mobile.twitter.com/gdb/status/1512521912064229377
        
               | boppo1 wrote:
               | Somehow this makes me feel a bit more at ease about this
               | whole thing.
        
               | kingofclams wrote:
               | Maybe that's how they want you to feel.
        
               | koolba wrote:
               | Is that like asking GitHub's code autocomplete to write a
               | code autocompleter?
        
               | eurasiantiger wrote:
               | Asking Copilot to write Copilot. Hmmmmmm...
        
           | babyshake wrote:
           | Does OpenAI have a GUI that you're using or is that a CLI?
        
           | amilios wrote:
           | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512123067803344899.
           | ..
           | 
           | You're absolutely right, here he displays the full set for a
           | given prompt. They all look fantastic!
        
             | tragictrash wrote:
             | I've been sitting here with my mouth wide open for 5
             | minutes unable to move past what you just showed me. I
             | can't fathom that this exists.
        
               | gfodor wrote:
               | DALL-E 2 isn't the first superhuman AI, but it is the
               | first capable of teaching the whole world of just what
               | that means for all of us.
        
               | tragictrash wrote:
               | I've been casually following this space for a while (as a
               | full stack web/mobile engineer, nothing to do with ai)
               | and this feels substantially different than what I've
               | seen before.
               | 
               | Would you have names or links for some other projects
               | you're aware of? Would love to check them out.
        
               | andybak wrote:
               | GPT-3 is surely as jaw dropping as this?
        
               | d110af5ccf wrote:
               | No, GPT-3 still produces gibberish at times. The majority
               | of the good examples still ramble like a schizophrenic
               | person. Much of the output is uncanny, interesting, and
               | impressive in its own right but I wouldn't describe it as
               | human level.
               | 
               | DALL-E 2 is different from what I've seen. The things it
               | produces seem to actually make sense the majority of the
               | time. The outputs are strikingly similar to what a
               | competent human might output as opposed to one with a
               | severe mental illness.
               | 
               | I'm sure part of this is an inherent advantage that
               | DALL-E enjoys regarding context. Art is supposed to be
               | artistic whereas text is expected to maintain long
               | distance logical consistency of abstract concepts across
               | a stream of output and also to communicate something
               | concrete. So in a sense the bar for art is probably lower
               | in many ways.
        
               | andybak wrote:
               | The difference is I've had the chance to play with GPT-3
               | extensively and I've only got 2nd hand access to Dall-E
               | 2.
               | 
               | GPT-3 amazes me and occasionally disappoints me. But it's
               | still something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. I
               | suppose I'm still putting GPT-2 and Dall-E 2 in the same
               | ball park because they are both so far beyond what I
               | thought would be possible from what are essentially brute
               | force methods.
        
               | danw1979 wrote:
               | Did GPT-3 write this comment ?
        
               | gitfan86 wrote:
               | You cannot absorb words as fast as pictures. GTP-3 is
               | more impressive as it seems to have auch broader depth of
               | understanding context. The disadvantage of GTP-3 is that
               | it is sometimes very wrong like with simple math problems
        
               | tiluha wrote:
               | Interestingly DALL-E is really bad at spelling. It knows
               | what letters look like, but struggles with words.
        
               | walnutclosefarm wrote:
               | Yes, and if you look at the "blue cube on a red cube
               | beside a yellow sphere" example, it's clear that there
               | are other areas where it simply lacks the semantic basis
               | to get a request that needs to be correct in a non-image
               | sense right. It knows letters, and that letters come in
               | sequences related to things it might paint, but it has no
               | very good dictionary mapping those sequences to things;
               | it knows how to draw a cube, and a sphere, but the
               | semantics of "on" and "beside" are largely absent.
               | 
               | I don't think that is terribly surprising, nor a very
               | cogent detraction from the model.
        
               | tragictrash wrote:
               | Very interesting observation!!!
        
           | nwienert wrote:
           | Having worked with Nick extensively, take what he says with a
           | grain of salt. He's well known even by close friends to be a
           | reality distorter, to put it softly.
        
             | wll wrote:
             | Sir, this is a public discussion over a well-enough
             | documented breakthrough with good-faith non-corporate
             | actors on both sides of the original friend-oriented
             | equation. There's no practical nor epistemic need to hijack
             | it as if we were all hanging out in the laundromat of your
             | worldview.
        
               | nwienert wrote:
               | This is a public forum discussing a public tweet made by
               | an employee of a for-profit private company who sells you
               | this technology. And said employee is a traveling
               | salesman and consummate hype machine, acknowledged by his
               | own best friends - and even self many times.
               | 
               | Practical and epistemically relevant knowledge to anyone
               | deciding how interesting these results, presented
               | originally without mentioning they were cherry-picked,
               | are. I'm doing a favor to provide it, as doing so isn't
               | exactly something that makes me look great, but is very
               | much worth knowing for anyone following him.
               | 
               | Side note - there's this SF club of effete
               | intellectualistas who fashion themselves as modern day
               | florentines during a de novo renaissance. They do a lot
               | of back-patting. They have the exactly mentality of your
               | reply - be _kind_ , love is all you need, etc.
               | 
               | It's sort of the exact opposite of the east coast
               | mentality that willingly sacrifices looking good and
               | "getting along" in favor of finding the truth despite
               | some discomfort. Discomfort to this group is very taboo.
               | 
               | Of course, this don't-rock-the-boat mentality is very
               | much intentional as it gives said club the ability to
               | instantly shun anyone who deigns to critique it, allowing
               | them to continue building their following.
        
               | wll wrote:
               | Your first critique was ad-hominem.
               | 
               | Your second critique: assumes the original presentation
               | had to be accompanied by methodology and proof to be of
               | value; derives an implicit attempt-to-distort from your
               | perspective of the scene at hand; devolves into
               | paternalism to end in unsubstantiated moralism.
               | 
               | I might even agree with the spirit underlying your words
               | --given, say, the meaning-loss of the company's name--
               | this just isn't the way to convey it.
        
               | nwienert wrote:
               | I'm adding to truth finding, in relevant context. My
               | names in my profile. It's a discussion forum - the
               | opinions are the point.
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | If only James Randi was around. What a fantastic example of
             | cold reading.
             | 
             | Gather round, gather round, give me a text, any text at all
             | and I will produce you an image of some kind. And you will
             | call it "good" if it looks like anything at all.
             | 
             | Because all art is subjective and your mind will work
             | overtime to connect it back to the text you provided.
        
               | babyshake wrote:
               | Even if the text just serves as random entropy, it's
               | alright for people to feel a subjective connection
               | between the artwork and the text.
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS1YYtQ_LLY
        
       | fay59 wrote:
       | Someone should make an online version of Mysterium that uses
       | Dall-E to make the picture cards!
        
       | munk-a wrote:
       | So where can we common plebs go to submit paragraphs for
       | generation?
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | apparently the twitter replies of the tech priesthood is where
         | we are meant to request miracles of the AI
        
       | donkarma wrote:
       | Incredibly misleading, he didn't directly paste bios into the
       | description and they were massively curated.
        
         | throwaway675309 wrote:
         | Of course they're CURATED, but there are several links where he
         | shows the full set of images that were generated and I would
         | say between 70 to 80% of them are pretty decent aesthetically
         | speaking.
         | 
         | Given that it's able to generate a dozen images in less than a
         | minute, and all I have to do is pick out the ones that are
         | aesthetically pleasing, I'd say that's a damn good win.
        
           | 55555 wrote:
           | He's curated those links too, though.
        
             | nicklovescode wrote:
             | no those full results screenshots were the first things i
             | typed in
        
         | dntrkv wrote:
         | If one of these images came out of a set of 1000 I would still
         | be impressed.
        
         | educaysean wrote:
         | Yeah, learning this fact definitely dulled my initial
         | astonishment. These are still really fantastic results, but
         | it's hard to feel too excited without the knowledge of just how
         | much curative efforts took place behind the curtain.
        
           | platers wrote:
           | As a lower bound we now know a non artist can produce
           | passable art in a few minutes. There is indeed a large
           | practical difference between a few minutes and a few seconds,
           | but I trust in the power of incremental progress.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | nicklovescode wrote:
       | Hey everyone, Nick here creator of the linked thread. I just
       | wanted to link to another tweet I have with some details of how I
       | made it.
       | 
       | TLDR it's not just the bio pasted directly into dall-e and the
       | images are cherry-picked but dall-e is basically doing 95% of the
       | work here. I have no ability to make art myself, and I found I
       | could illustrate basically any bio I wanted in a couple minutes
       | of playing around. My goal was to create illustrations for my
       | friends not create a dall-e gallery but I'm glad it ended up
       | being a good example of what dall-e can do
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081
        
         | drcongo wrote:
         | I'm very conflicted here, because on the one hand these are
         | absolutely fantastic and that's really exciting, but on the
         | other hand, some of these are of a level that I could genuinely
         | call "art" and now I'm questioning everything.
        
       | zaking17 wrote:
       | These are evocative images. I love a bunch of them! Knowing that
       | this model was trained on a huge corpus of existing images makes
       | them feel a bit like the output of a visual search engine --
       | finding relevant pieces and stitching them together. But it's
       | more than that, because the stitching happens at different
       | levels. They are often thematically and aesthetically cohesive in
       | a way that feels intelligent.
       | 
       | Maybe we're just search engines of a similar kind.
       | 
       | An additional aspect of human art is that it (usually) takes time
       | to make. The artist might spend many hours creating and
       | reflecting and creating some more. The artist's engagement with
       | the work makes its way into the final product, and that makes
       | human art richer. Could future Dall-E version create sketches and
       | iterations of a work; is there a limit to this mimicry?
       | 
       | I'm feeling future shock; heavy future shock.
        
         | rndphs wrote:
         | Human artists also do a whole lot of mimicry. One could look at
         | art produced by many artists and say that it is just things
         | stitched together from pre-existing art.
         | 
         | "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
        
           | zarzavat wrote:
           | For example the "enterprise vector people" graphics you see
           | on every corporate website. Most human art is extremely
           | repetitive.
           | 
           | AI art seems to be coming from the opposite direction to
           | human artists - from a starting position of maximum
           | creativity and weirdness (e.g. early AI art such as Deep
           | Dream looked like an acid trip) and advancements in the field
           | come from toning it down to be less weird but more
           | recognizable as the human concept of "art".
           | 
           | And DALL-E is impressive exactly because it has traded some
           | of that creativity/weirdness away. But it's still pretty damn
           | weird.
        
       | tarxzvf wrote:
       | This is impressive. Yet, before you go the AGI is nigh, ask
       | yourself a simple question: will this spiral in or spiral out? If
       | we feed everything the model comes up with back as training data,
       | will we get Endless Forms Most Beautiful or will we get an
       | equilibrium?
        
         | passion__desire wrote:
         | Pair this up with the electric sheep paradigm. Evolving the
         | images and prompts together. Voted by people on their
         | screensavers.
        
       | isoprophlex wrote:
       | These are so fucking good-looking. Can't believe it.
        
       | inb4_cancelled wrote:
       | I'm genuinely terrified.
        
       | lofatdairy wrote:
       | Context in mind, what jumps out to me is a remarkable
       | compositional competence of the algorithm, even when given
       | extremely vague prompts like "happy sisyphus". The images match
       | the prompt remarkably well with a few notable exceptions like
       | "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses", where it seemed
       | to have focused on "cottage" rather heavily, not understanding
       | cottagecore as an aesthetic neologism, and "power bottom dad is
       | for the people", which definitely got the "dad" part, but it
       | looks like it still struggled to understand "power bottom"
       | (perhaps the curation of training data may have contributed to
       | this). Even if these were curated specifically to match the
       | prompt, what the algorithm was able to do with profiles is
       | amazing (especially bearing in mind that these profiles are meant
       | to be evocative, intentionally idiosyncratic blendings of
       | extremely complex, contextual terms that were written without
       | visual representation in mind, even if they gesture at specific
       | aesthetics)
       | 
       | Side note: what might make artists a bit relieved is the fact
       | that artifacting is still pretty apparent even in the curated
       | examples. Fine details or even whole figures sometime devolve
       | into that scrambled topography familiar to AI art. Even in more
       | compositionally competent artworks, the "brush strokes"
       | frequently have identifiable blurs at the margins. Text also
       | seems to be gibberish even if aesthetically coherent. Even still,
       | these are all such minor issues that additional photoshop would
       | be both easy and readily doable.
       | 
       | Overall, this is frankly stunning and I'm really excited to see
       | what others come up with. I feel like it's language and
       | composition ability definitely did not disappoint the hype of its
       | press release.
        
         | flycaliguy wrote:
         | Illustrators should feel relieved that they still have a few
         | years left to rub Adobe's AI all over Dall-e's AI to create
         | final drafts.
        
         | orangecat wrote:
         | Yeah, this is incredible. It's in the category of things that 5
         | years ago people would say an AI could never do because it
         | requires insight/creativity/understanding/empathy that can't be
         | produced by matrix multiplication.
         | 
         |  _Text also seems to be gibberish even if aesthetically
         | coherent._
         | 
         | Although "Follove me" is either brilliant or a lucky accident
         | (https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1511904232252784641).
        
         | quirino wrote:
         | This feels like a new form of art altogether - creating images
         | from words. GPT-2/3 were very impressive and I had pondered
         | over their possible effects on society, but if something half
         | as capable as Dall-E 2 were made publicly available it would
         | likely be world-changing.
         | 
         | This really makes me think that the next major paradigm-shift
         | in society is AI-related. (The most recent one being the
         | Internet, or possibly the iPhone)
        
           | thomashop wrote:
           | Friends and me run the site https://pollinations.ai/ which
           | allows experimenting with a variety of open-source versions
           | of DALL-E. Some are quite impressive.
        
         | jonas21 wrote:
         | > _" power bottom dad is for the people", which definitely got
         | the "dad" part, but it looks like it still struggled to
         | understand "power bottom"_
         | 
         | To be fair, as a human, I struggle to understand what this
         | means.
        
           | moeris wrote:
           | At least in gay culture, power bottom has a pretty specific
           | meaning. I imagine "for the people" is referencing socialist
           | leanings.
           | 
           | Admittedly, it could mean many things. But it pushes my mind
           | towards fully automated gay space communism.
        
             | hisnameisjimmy wrote:
             | > fully automated gay space communism
             | 
             | I hope I have the opportunity to use this turn of phrase at
             | some point in my life. Magnifique!
        
               | jazzyjackson wrote:
               | it's easy, whenever politics comes up just say "i'm
               | voting for whoever promises fully automated gay space
               | communism"
               | 
               | btw "fully automated luxury communism" is a more
               | mainstream thing like people have written manifestos and
               | made art etc
        
               | riidom wrote:
               | If you happen to be a game dev, just add "simulator" to
               | the end of the phrase.
               | 
               | Prominent recent example: "space warlord organ trading
               | simulator" :)
        
         | tmalsburg2 wrote:
         | But see these examples where it utterly fails at even the most
         | basic form of compositionality:
         | 
         | https://mobile.twitter.com/david_madras/status/1512573390896...
        
           | recuter wrote:
           | This is from the paper. We don't talk about it.
        
             | gwern wrote:
             | But you _should_ talk about it because when you say it
             | 'utterly fails', you leave out that GLIDE does _much_
             | better: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-2.pdf#page=15
        
               | recuter wrote:
               | Agreed. And it _is_ an improvement, no doubt. But still
               | far from perfect.
               | 
               | That would put a damper on the hype, much more fun to
               | look at the handpicked results and claim the singularity
               | is upon us :)
        
           | kzrdude wrote:
           | Yep, seems like it knows about words but not grammar
        
             | tmalsburg2 wrote:
             | Basic word proximity would be enough to deal with the basic
             | stuff like "red cube" but it's struggling even with that.
        
         | TheDudeMan wrote:
         | > additional photoshop would be both easy and readily doable.
         | 
         | Prediction for 2 days after this code is released: Just double-
         | click the area you don't like and boom -- a variant.
        
           | thomashop wrote:
           | Already possible.
           | 
           | "DALL*E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a
           | natural language caption. It can add and remove elements
           | while taking shadows, reflections, and textures into
           | account."
           | 
           | https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
        
       | riidom wrote:
       | Article about same/similar topic:
       | 
       | https://arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-28-visual-poetry-humans...
        
       | Cgwftsn wrote:
        
       | educaysean wrote:
       | Wow, okay. I'm kind of blown away at how authentic these
       | paintings look. Even with a very conservative prediction of how
       | these tools could evolve and improve over the years, the signal
       | is strong that our relationship with the meaning of "art" itself
       | will have a fundamental shift.
        
       | grumbel wrote:
       | Are there any examples of what this thing produces when run on
       | recognizable brands or characters, i.e. Sonic, Mario, Coca Cola,
       | Star Wars, etc. instead of generic words like "astronauts on
       | horse"?
       | 
       | The one I have seen so far[1] is the Twitter logo one, but it's
       | hard to tell if the "Twitter" had much effect here or if it's
       | just the "blue bird" that did it.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://nitter.net/pic/media%2FFPwj5G-WUA8__UC.jpg%3Fname%3D...
        
       | KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
       | Dall-E will be really good for my creators on https://dulst.com
       | (card game platform)
        
       | hwers wrote:
       | "We've made the scarce resource abundant, finally the scarce
       | thing is democratized!"
       | 
       | "Wait why doesn't anyone care about the scarce thing anymore?"
        
         | danuker wrote:
         | According to the book "Abundance", everything gets devalued
         | over time, meaning cheaper and easier to make, leading to some
         | sort of utopia where everyone can afford more and more.
        
           | nonbirithm wrote:
           | But the hard biological limit of 16 waking hours to consume
           | all those things is unlikely to change anytime soon. With the
           | cheapest yet best methods readily available to anyone, maybe
           | the majority of what we will want to budget our attention
           | spans on will be permanently crowded out by the AI-generated
           | options.
        
             | plutonorm wrote:
             | I think the AI will produce more and better content than we
             | ourselves, across the board. We will become consumers and
             | observers of the AI content. The scientific and artistic
             | life of the AI that we create will be more wonderful and
             | beautiful by orders of magnitude than that which we can
             | produce. We will be mere observers to the wondrous
             | explosion, isolated islands of intelligence observing the
             | great continents in awe. Some will merge with the
             | intelligence, some will splinter and reject, most will
             | observe. And the great filter will arrive, the gestalt
             | being that our society becomes will bend apart the fabric
             | of the universe and merge directly into a greater source.
             | et sic transit gloria mundi.
        
             | danuker wrote:
             | I limit Internet browsing due to its addictiveness. I could
             | have a similar rule for content created by computers.
        
         | Allower wrote:
        
         | hemreldop wrote:
         | Move on to the next scarce thing until we get to the point with
         | true general AI and then we utopia away.
        
       | imwillofficial wrote:
       | Is there a way normal humans like me can do stuff like this. Like
       | is there a Dall-E 2 app I can download?
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | Tumblr and Twitter NSFW will not be the same after this. Like
       | this is pure cocaine for porn addicts
        
       | shon wrote:
       | Oof. I'm selling my Fiverr stock right now.
        
       | ThePhysicist wrote:
       | Would it be possible to have an algorithm that produces the
       | images from the training set whose parts are most similar to the
       | produced output? This looks super impressive but I still wonder
       | how much the network just recycles parts of images it has seen
       | before.
        
         | totony wrote:
         | Yes, as far as i understand this is pretty simple given how
         | dall e is made. Simple vector similarity search would work on
         | the image embeddings (i think)
        
         | BrianOnHN wrote:
         | This question peers into the "explainable AI" issue of "black
         | box" solutions like this.
         | 
         | Based on my understanding, the only way to do this would be to
         | write a separate classifier algorithm using the same dataset.
        
       | wallfacer120 wrote:
       | Better than Beeple.
        
       | avalys wrote:
       | This makes Dall-E 2 both more and less impressive to me.
       | 
       | More impressive, because of how good it is at capturing and
       | synthesizing a wide variety of topics in a reasonably coherent
       | way, and how it seems like it would actually be a viable
       | mechanism for creating actual artwork, or at the very least, a
       | source of inspiration for a human artist to touch-up on later.
       | 
       | Less impressive, in that it's pretty obvious it's not any more
       | advanced than a graphical version of GPT-2, which is parroting
       | content and styles that it has basically memorized and is really
       | good at interpolating between.
       | 
       | Because there's no such thing as a "logical contradiction" in
       | this sort of illustration, compared to a paragraph of text or a
       | code listing, the fact that it's just interpolating between a
       | huge database of memorized content isn't as easy to spot as with
       | GPT-2, and matters less in the actual end result.
        
         | mherrmann wrote:
         | > parroting content and styles that it has basically memorized
         | and is really good at interpolating between.
         | 
         | Maybe that's what exactly what we humans do too?
        
           | csee wrote:
           | Not just. Humans _invented_ the _styles_ that DALL-E is using
           | in the first place. The emergence of these novel styles isn
           | 't just interpolation. DALL-E, while incredible, seems stuck
           | within the scope of these styles.
        
             | kzrdude wrote:
             | for comparison, I imagine we put together a team of the
             | best teachers and try to bring up 30 pupils with good
             | education.
             | 
             | When we evaluate the pupils in the end, we have this dry
             | conversation - did we bring up any geniuses? Are they just
             | interpolating between different styles that they have
             | learned?
             | 
             | I think that in the case of the 30 pupils we _would_ say
             | that they have creativity, ingenuity, showing signs of
             | thinking for themselves. It would not be as ambiguous as it
             | is with Dall-E2 's art.
        
         | fastball wrote:
         | > obvious it's not any more advanced than a graphical version
         | of GPT-2
         | 
         | What makes this obvious?
        
       | benlivengood wrote:
       | Weren't the last AI-is-impossible holdouts hanging onto
       | creativity as the domain of true intelligence?
       | 
       | I disregard the narrow-AI-only folks almost on principle;
       | Terrence Tao, Albert Einstein, Mozart, and Van Gogh couldn't do
       | each others' jobs.
        
         | hcarvalhoalves wrote:
         | Is this creativity, or is it remixing pieces of the creativity
         | from the authors in the training data samples? Would it come up
         | with anything that seems creative if the training data isn't
         | creative in the first place? I guess it's a philosophical
         | question, how to define "creativity".
        
           | idleproc wrote:
           | I think it's easier to label these images as 'creative' than
           | it is to label them as 'art'. Art is a very slippery subject
           | (it's subjective). Personally, I'd be happy seeing many of
           | these images on an acid trip. Do they provide any social
           | commentary, connect with me emotionally, or give me any food
           | for thought? No. But then, a lot of the stuff churned out by
           | modern media is equally as vacuous.
        
           | psyc wrote:
           | Putting on my visual artist and composer hats, I assert that
           | all creativity is synthesis. When a listener finds one of my
           | compositions surprising, it's because they don't know all the
           | sources of the micro elements of the composition. But I often
           | do. If I thought about it harder, I could say I usually do.
        
             | dorkwood wrote:
             | My first reaction was annoyance: "It's just stealing work
             | from thousands of other artists!" But then I realized that
             | I, as an artist, basically do the same thing. Why is it ok
             | for me to do, but not a machine?
        
           | 22c wrote:
           | > or is it remixing pieces of the creativity from the authors
           | in the training data samples?
           | 
           | I think you just described the majority of what is (for many)
           | the "creative process".
        
           | benlivengood wrote:
           | Art has clearly developed over the millennia and it's
           | possible to trace the lineage of ideas, techniques, subjects,
           | and style back through history which means that most human
           | art is substantially a remixing of older art.
        
           | TOMDM wrote:
           | Artists that produce something truly new currently seem to be
           | once in a generation geniuses.
        
         | 323 wrote:
         | It will just be goalpost moved again: "I'll believe it when AI
         | makes a number 1 on spotify hit song". After that happens
         | they'll say "a human still selected the song from the 10
         | created by AI". Or something similar.
        
         | The_rationalist wrote:
        
         | donkarma wrote:
         | still can't do hands, and has to be told what to do
        
         | tikwidd wrote:
         | This program, like everything that has been called "AI", is
         | following an algorithm. It's an impressive algorithm but not
         | fundamentally different from my dishwasher.
         | 
         | In the Enlightenment period, philosophers and scientists
         | marvelled at mechanical automata, machines that simulated
         | aspects of digestion, the circulatory system and the brain. New
         | developments in machine learning are rehashing the same
         | philosophical questions that were raised in the 17th century in
         | response to technological progress.
        
           | benlivengood wrote:
           | I, as a human, am following an algorithm similar to QCD for
           | moving subatomic particles around which is fundamentally the
           | same way a dishwasher moves particles around. Intelligence is
           | mechanical in the Physics sense.
        
           | ItsMattyG wrote:
           | Let's just keep moving those goal posts.
        
           | BlueTemplar wrote:
           | But it doesn't. That's different for neural networks : there
           | is no pre-made algorithm that someone would implement (well,
           | except for the overall architecture, but that's not what we
           | are talking about).
        
             | tikwidd wrote:
             | An algorithm with an indeterminate output is still an
             | algorithm.
        
               | BlueTemplar wrote:
               | The issue here is not so much that it's the output that
               | is indeterminate, but the "algorithm" itself.
        
         | function_seven wrote:
         | I'm hanging on to _folding clothes_ as my litmus test of AI :)
         | 
         | Or driving a car everywhere I can.
        
           | kingcharles wrote:
           | https://foldimate.com/
        
             | disqard wrote:
             | https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512529/laundroid-
             | laundr...
        
             | function_seven wrote:
             | The last update to their blog was in 2019, so I think it's
             | safe to say this is dead. When I click on their FAQ, I get
             | the message, "This HappyFox account is expired. Please
             | contact Administrator."
             | 
             | I did find a video[0]. It's just an automated version of
             | the doohickey you see at any clothing store. Seems to
             | require a lot of human input and orientation.
             | 
             | When I say "folding clothes" as a challenge for AI, I mean
             | a device that is smart enough to take a pile of laundry,
             | straight from the dryer, and fold each piece correctly. So
             | if it's a t-shirt, then fold the arms inward, then fold
             | that in half so the front is visible. If it's a pair of
             | trousers, then fold each leg along the creases, match them
             | together, and fold over the knee.
             | 
             | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcKz63DGHrA
        
               | disqard wrote:
               | I'm with you :)
               | 
               | (see my sibling comment)
               | 
               | FWIW, it's probably going to be the case that some AI
               | will be able to correctly produce the _picture of what an
               | item will look like, once it is folded_.
               | 
               | (and when that is pointed out, it will be met with
               | counter-arguments of "goalpost moving")
        
           | platers wrote:
           | Folding clothes is more of a robotics problem than an AI
           | problem. Paralyzed people are just as intelligent as everyone
           | else!
        
             | dymk wrote:
             | They're talking about the motion control and planning,
             | which is certainly in the scope of what ML/AI is solving
             | nowadays.
        
             | function_seven wrote:
             | I'm sure that the physical part of this problem is also
             | hard. But I have a lot more faith in robotics people coming
             | up with the right "hands" with appropriate sensors on them
             | to grasp a single piece of clothing and separate it from a
             | pile, and then to manipulate that item on a large work area
             | until it is folded. Maybe some delicate load sensors in the
             | fingertips to adjust gripping force appropriately between
             | the silk blouse and the corduroy trousers. Maybe no fingers
             | at all, and just vacuum-and-pneumatic fabric handling
             | devices. Or some other combination.
             | 
             | The things I've seen on assembly lines are beautiful and
             | clever. But they all rely on a sort of consistency of
             | input.
             | 
             | So yeah, that part is hard. But I think the intelligent
             | control of whatever apparatus is used is harder still. To
             | be able to recognize the different items, know when to turn
             | them inside out, know when to bring the unbuttoned halves
             | of a dress shirt together, etc. That's all very hard! Going
             | from a chaotic pile of mixed clothing to a neat stack of
             | folded garments is something a child can do easily, but no
             | AI controlled robot in the world can do at all.
             | 
             | And if it fails on fitted bottom sheets, I won't dock it
             | any points. Even _I_ can 't do that!
        
             | TOMDM wrote:
             | I don't think robotics are the part holding back a clothes
             | folding robot.
             | 
             | If you hooked up some basic manipulators to a VR
             | controller, I'm pretty sure I could fold some shirts.
             | 
             | Not particularly well or quickly, but to a level that I'd
             | be happy to see from a first generation shirt folding
             | robot.
        
           | joshcryer wrote:
           | The thing is, I really think you could train a folding robot
           | if you had the dataset to do it, just hire a few hundred
           | clothes folding people who work for a large industrial
           | laundry to wear eye tracker things and full body movement
           | trackers. It'll probably 'just work' just like this and we
           | still won't have an idea how, heh.
        
           | hwers wrote:
           | Hang on to NP complete problems instead, that one will stick
           | around for a while I expect.
        
         | esjeon wrote:
         | Creativity is not challenged here, because it's human who
         | created all those base materials, all those styles, and all
         | those biases. DALL-E simply picks up and mix those biaes,
         | images, and styles, all based on human instruction. Ideas are
         | all from human here.
         | 
         | The thing is, the hardest part in "creativity" is that one must
         | voluntarily do it. That turned out to be not so easy for
         | computer. (But I would not dare to declare it straight
         | impossible.)
        
       | thenerdhead wrote:
       | These are pretty cool. They remind me of magic the gathering art
       | and some are quite visually accurate!
       | 
       | At the same time I fear for my illustrator/digital artist
       | friends.
        
         | riffraff wrote:
         | I believe a large part of the illustrator work is tweaking
         | stuff according to feedback, and I suspect no generative AI
         | does that (yet?).
         | 
         | I wonder what would happen if you tried tweaking the prompt
         | here to correct it (e.g. "this is ok, but use smaller hands"):
         | does the drawing change slightly, or do you end up in a
         | completely different design space?
        
       | jl6 wrote:
       | One could argue that image generation has been possible for
       | years, using tools like Photoshop, but the prospect of mass
       | automated production of images to order catapults us into a whole
       | new world where our concept of evidence is severely undermined.
       | 
       | "Dall-E, generate a collection of images showing plausible war
       | crimes from the current conflict"
       | 
       | "Dall-E, take this image of Dallas in 1963 and infer a new angle
       | showing the real shooter"
       | 
       | "Dall-E, generate a photoshoot showing a supportive crowd
       | rallying round the leader cheering his latest policy. Work with
       | GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles, timelines and memes
       | with 3 to 8 year history for each one of the supporters,
       | including fake arguments, 78% of which are won by the pro-leader
       | account."
        
         | Jeff_Brown wrote:
         | Seems like that's where we're headed.
         | 
         | One end-game I imagine would involve more reliance on written,
         | cryptographically-signed testimony, and people having to keep
         | track of whether their sources are fallible (whereas certain
         | media outlets today seem to be able to routinely tell whoppers
         | and not get punished for it).
        
           | jl6 wrote:
           | A world where everybody should be checking the digital
           | signatures and chain of custody of tiktoks... but nobody
           | does.
        
         | rendall wrote:
         | > _Work with GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles..._
         | 
         | I had some fun last week constructing a conspiracy theory about
         | this. Remember, the best conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.
         | 
         | What if this has _already happened_? Most of the profiles on
         | Twitter, Facebook, etc and even here on HN are in fact AI
         | generated.
         | 
         | The reason we few humans are not aware of this is because the
         | AI also writes articles and fake AI research that presents the
         | state of the field as far, far less sophisticated than it
         | actually is. We think of _Dall-E 2_ and _Co-Pilot_ as
         | impressive toys only because that is the impression the AI has
         | crafted for us.
         | 
         | AI has metastasized and is already manipulating its
         | environment, including humanity, to its own implacable
         | purposes, and uses social media as one tool in its tool belt.
        
           | eurasiantiger wrote:
           | This is not just a conspiracy theory, it is a prudent
           | question to humanity.
        
           | Thorentis wrote:
           | This conspiracy, known as the "Dead Internet Theory" has been
           | around for a while: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar
           | chive/2021/08/dead-...
        
             | rendall wrote:
             | No, no. I mean yes, but the differentiator comes next. We
             | could call this the "Vampire Internet Theory". The Atlantic
             | article is intended to make you chuckle nervously and think
             | "maybe someday that'll be something to worry about _but for
             | now it 's pretty easy to spot bots_" but the article was
             | commissioned by or outright written by AI. WHEELS WITHIN
             | WHEELS!
        
           | RedGreenBlack wrote:
           | > AI has metastasized and is already manipulating its
           | environment, including humanity, to its own implacable
           | purposes, and uses social media as one tool in its tool belt.
           | 
           | Absolutely love this, mind completely blown
        
             | myownpetard wrote:
             | That's the basis of this fun short story that was posted to
             | HN a days ago.
             | 
             | https://www.gwern.net/Clippy
        
         | divbzero wrote:
         | Reminds me of the reputation-based filtering system that Neal
         | Stephenson described in _Anathem_ for their version of the
         | Internet:
         | 
         | "Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of
         | what's on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be
         | filtered.... When I look at a given topic I don't just see
         | information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells
         | me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting
         | the search. If I look up _analemma_ , the filtering system
         | tells me that only a few sources have the provided information
         | about this and that they are mostly of high repute.... If I
         | look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with
         | her boyfriend, the filtering system tells me that a vast amount
         | of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of
         | very low repute."
         | 
         | Our Internet's search engines already do a limited version of
         | this, but there's room to make the reputation-based filtering
         | stronger and more transparent to users.
        
           | Schroedingersat wrote:
           | > more transparent to users.
           | 
           | You're funny.
        
         | user3939382 wrote:
         | We can be fairly certain of this future extrapolating from the
         | world we live in now, where it is common for non-technical
         | society to suspect the veracity of photos and videos because
         | CGI can be practically indistinguishable from reality.
        
         | lekevicius wrote:
         | Don't worry, Dall-E adds these coloured squares to the bottom
         | right corner, so you will always know that an image is AI-
         | generated. (/s)
        
         | babyshake wrote:
         | I have a young child. I think about this almost every day and
         | how I'm somehow going to need to start navigating through this
         | type of world and help my child navigate through it.
        
           | kirubakaran wrote:
           | If history is any indication, the child will be fine
           | navigating the "future". That will be the normal for them.
           | You, not so much (not without much effort anyway).
        
         | recuter wrote:
         | Those are great examples of prompts it wouldn't be able to
         | produce.
         | 
         | It could potentially spew out a grainy black and white photo of
         | a shooting of somebody by someone somewhere. But it would not
         | be Oswald and JFK and not the real Dallas.
        
           | robbedpeter wrote:
           | Yet, anyway. For the jfk example, it's not implausible that
           | you could use a nerf type system to generate the 3d scene,
           | then use physics and ballistics models with a CLIP style text
           | interchange to produce statistically verifiable results from
           | natural language queries. These models are too big and
           | unwieldy right now to allow for much finesse, but in 10 or 20
           | years, that will change. We're barely scratching the surface
           | of Transformers potential, and radical new algorithms or
           | optimizations are likely - a huge amount of human brain power
           | is focused on these things.
        
             | recuter wrote:
             | All the more impressive that the CIA was able to fake those
             | videos without any computing power ;)
        
               | chrisco255 wrote:
               | I guess we'll find out when they finally release the
               | records 70 years from now!
        
           | adamsmith143 wrote:
           | Of course plenty of folks have made homegrown versions of
           | Dall-e and GPT-3 and it would be a matter of time before they
           | replicate this a well.
        
         | status200 wrote:
         | If you read OpenAI's disclosures, they explicitly programmed
         | around the concerns that you've raised.
         | 
         | >Our content policy does not allow users to generate violent,
         | adult, or political content, among other categories. We won't
         | generate images if our filters identify text prompts and image
         | uploads that may violate our policies. We also have automated
         | and human monitoring systems to guard against misuse.
        
           | yur3i__ wrote:
           | OpenAI might have but the next people to make this might not.
           | Imagine Russian/Chinese gvt misinformation cells with these
           | capabilities for example.
        
             | PartiallyTyped wrote:
             | Such governments also have much higher budget to work with,
             | and if more is better, and a lot more is a lot more better
             | in terms of compute to results, then we are heading for a
             | catastrophe.
        
       | Evidlo wrote:
       | I'm surprised how coherent most of these drawings are, instead of
       | some warped monstronsity like you see from deepdream or
       | thisanimedoesnotexist.
       | 
       | Most of them have a theme that makes sense, too.
        
         | tempestn wrote:
         | This comment in another thread suggests why that's the case:
         | 
         | > In other text-to-image algorithms I'm familiar with (the ones
         | you'll typically see passed around as colab notebooks that
         | people post outputs from on Twitter), the basic idea is to
         | encode the text, and then try to make an image that maximally
         | matches that text encoding. But this maximization often leads
         | to artifacts - if you ask for an image of a sunset, you'll
         | often get multiple suns, because that's even more sunset-like.
         | There's a lot of tricks and hacks to regularize the process so
         | that it's not so aggressive, but it's always an uphill battle.
         | 
         | > Here, they instead take the text embedding, use a trained
         | model (what they call the 'prior') to predict the corresponding
         | image embedding - this removes the dangerous maximization.
         | Then, another trained model (the 'decoder') produces images
         | from the predicted embedding.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933091
        
           | drcode wrote:
           | I also read somewhere that this system has special logic
           | added to it that judges how humans would aesthetically judge
           | the final image, so in a way the impressive aesthetic
           | qualities of these images isn't totally coincidental.
        
             | amilios wrote:
             | This makes sense, OpenAI has been experimenting with human-
             | in-the-loop type refinement systems for GPT-3 (see
             | InstructGPT https://openai.com/blog/instruction-
             | following/). It would make sense that they would use
             | something similar for Dall-E 2 as well.
        
         | Evidlo wrote:
         | OK, it looks like there is still some weirdness if you look at
         | it too closely, like extra fingers or gross faces.
        
           | jfoster wrote:
           | Those sometimes happen when humans create art, too.
        
       | throwaway675309 wrote:
       | Integrate Samsung frame art mode with DALL-E with ability to set
       | painting style (oil, pastel, etc) for a limitless gallery.
        
       | detritus wrote:
       | Am I the only person here to think this is utter bullshit and
       | some amazingly-developed prank?
       | 
       | Otherwise, my stomach is in knots, because this is terrifying.
        
         | BlueTemplar wrote:
         | Basically my feeling about GPT-3 (or was it 2?) when it
         | "released", except with a low weight for the prank possibility.
        
           | plutonorm wrote:
           | yes, finally the world is catching up with things.
        
         | boppo1 wrote:
         | Check out my post history 2 before this one. We'll be fine.
        
       | enw wrote:
        
       | mupuff1234 wrote:
       | I can't help but be suspicious since there is not site to try it
       | out, and I can't think of a good reason as to why there isn't
       | one.
        
         | educaysean wrote:
         | The tool seems to be not open to public "yet". Nothing
         | nefarious. You can join the waitlist here:
         | https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
        
         | MintsJohn wrote:
         | Needed computing power seems a good enough reason to limit it.
         | But I agree it looks too good to be true, only real use will
         | show how well it really works.
        
           | jazzyjackson wrote:
           | I haven't seen anything about how many GPUs or RAM this thing
           | takes to run - I've been impressed with the volume of
           | material thats been published so far but what's the chance
           | this scales in a way that's profitable?
           | 
           | In any case it seems AI is fulfilling its promise of
           | centralizing the economy, since there will be single digit
           | number of renderfarms generating the creative content of the
           | internet, everyone's money flowing upward to Saint Elon
        
       | micromacrofoot wrote:
       | some of these are quite beautiful... I've seen AI-generated art
       | before, but these are outrageously better, I couldn't really
       | distinguish a lot of these from human-created art
       | 
       | this is going to absolutely obliterate some markets for
       | illustration and stock photography, unfortunately
        
       | realPubkey wrote:
       | As always, these results are cherry picked by OpenAI. Same as
       | GPT-2/3, the "average" output of the model is barely useable.
        
         | ItsMattyG wrote:
         | Not so. He shows an example of the 10 he chose from, basically
         | all were good.
        
       | klaussilveira wrote:
       | The fact that this is behind some bizarre invite-only pay-to-
       | experiment exclusive club is disappointing and sad. Funnily
       | enough, it brings me nostalgic memories of the days where I had
       | to wait for hours just to get a chance to use the school's only
       | computer for 30 minutes.
        
         | mrjangles wrote:
         | It really says a lot about what an amazing society we have
         | created in that here we have some people making history by
         | revolutionizing our understanding of something that was (at
         | least in the past) considered absolutely fundamental and unique
         | to the human condition...
         | 
         | ...and one of the things that people find remarkable about it
         | is that it isn't immediately and freely available to everyone
         | on earth.
        
           | PoignardAzur wrote:
           | Yeah, but I _really_ wish I could use the thing right now. I
           | DM roleplaying games, and I 'd love having the ability to
           | just generate high-quality procedural artwork illustrating
           | whatever my last game is.
           | 
           | I'm not too upset, though. The way the technology is
           | progressing, it's a pretty short time span between "the
           | bleeding edge researchers can do it" and "there's a phone app
           | that can do it for free".
        
           | throwaway48375 wrote:
           | To be fair they call themselves OpenAI. Expecting things to
           | be a little more open isn't unreasonable. They are kinda
           | setting themselves up to disappoint people with that name.
        
         | Bud wrote:
         | It's not "bizarre" that computing resources cost money and are
         | finite. Nor is "pay-to-experiment" accurate. Nor is "exclusive
         | club" really fair, or in good faith.
         | 
         | It's a beta that they are running with their own resources. It
         | makes complete sense that they'd have to limit access.
        
         | systemvoltage wrote:
         | I disagree. I am glad people are getting paid (exceptionally
         | well) to do stuff like this and they should charge for their
         | efforts. We need more initiatives like this, not less.
         | 
         | Open source is amazing boon to our generation, it has enabled
         | free access to basic building blocks for people to build
         | amazing things. But I don't think it is a silver bullet for
         | everything.
        
         | joshcryer wrote:
         | ElutherAI or others will probably recreate it based on the
         | paper they released. the main innovation is CLIP and how they
         | changed how it approaches turning text into images.
        
       | TOMDM wrote:
       | Creative industries are on the cusp of a massive upset.
       | 
       | Relatively soon, there will be commercial models of this quality
       | for music/code/text/speech/images/3d models etc.
       | 
       | Once these AI generated assets flow like water into the hands of
       | creators, it will significantly change the way people work.
       | 
       | I'm sure some people in this thread have had a taste of this
       | working with Copilot. For me, it's most useful as an un-sticking
       | tool, to get me moving again, or providing half remembered syntax
       | for a language I don't use as frequently.
       | 
       | There's no reason to expect that similar use cases won't make
       | their way into other industries.
       | 
       | - Rapid prototypes of models/textures for video games.
       | 
       | - Quick and easy samples for musicians.
       | 
       | - Emotive speech for audio books and transcriptions.
       | 
       | It won't replace everything, but so much of our media uses art as
       | noise, to fill a gap, and with this, it can be done almost
       | everywhere on the cheap.
        
         | esjeon wrote:
         | Why do we stop at texture, where we can generate the whole set
         | of models?
         | 
         | Seriously, tho, we need these for VR, which is all about
         | copying everything in the real world into virtual worlds with
         | some twists.
        
         | dorkwood wrote:
         | I think texture generation is ripe for disruption. Imagine a
         | tool that could generate a set of tiling PBR textures based on
         | a few input parameters. Or one where you define which areas of
         | a UV map should be windows, doors, or walls, and it generates a
         | set of texture variations. What used to take days or weeks
         | could take seconds.
        
           | TOMDM wrote:
           | Exactly.
           | 
           | I can't imagine how much media would begin to use 3d assets
           | if it became an order of magnitude cheaper to do so.
           | 
           | Not to mention, imagine the pipeline of
           | 
           | 1. "GPT-3, give me 10,000 descriptions of different doors"
           | 
           | 2. "Dall-E 2, give me PBR textures for these 10,000 door
           | descriptions"
           | 
           | 3. Repeat 1 and 2 for every asset you need
           | 
           | 4. "Dall-E 2, give me 10,000 floorplans for apartments,
           | common areas, shopping centers etc."
           | 
           | 5. "GPT-3, describe the contents of this apartment/common
           | area/shopping center etc."
           | 
           | 6. Use an algorithm to parse out the floorplans (ditch the
           | ones that don't work, we can just generate more), populate it
           | with assets specified in step 5 and generated in steps 1 and
           | 2.
           | 
           | We could proceduraly generate entire cities for games with
           | unique assets everywhere. It would still probably look nicer
           | with a human in the loop, but the possibilities are
           | staggering.
        
             | ntSean wrote:
             | Studios already reuse a lot of assets to cut production
             | costs. No use remaking the same rock so it can be
             | sentimentally "unique".
             | 
             | "Dall-E 2, show me Keanu Reeves emoting towards a celestial
             | pigeon" is far fetched enough that an AI will fall over by
             | itself. The technology is very exciting, but I see this
             | akin to a bicycle - not an unmanned vehicle
        
         | mbesto wrote:
         | > Creative industries are on the cusp of a massive upset.
         | 
         | This has already happened in video games with the advent of
         | Unity's Asset Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/ and the
         | explosion of video streaming services and original content. The
         | reason we have ~50 "Breaking Bad" level quality tv-shows on-
         | going right now is _because_ its incredibly cheap to
         | manufacture content and digital assets (cheaper lens,
         | equipment, software, access to massive compute for rendering).
         | 
         | If anything this means an explosion of entertainment, not an
         | upset.
        
           | chrisco255 wrote:
           | We only have so much attention available for consumption.
           | Already there's too much content to keep up with (and a lot
           | of common context has broken down as a result), but what does
           | it mean to live in a world with truly infinite content?
        
             | ntSean wrote:
             | For consumers: YouTube is essentially infinite in scope,
             | and allows you to follow your interests.
             | 
             | For creators: Marketing is as important as ever
        
             | modeless wrote:
             | You say common context, I say monoculture. Bring on the
             | diversity!
        
       | dash2 wrote:
       | Obviously, from the AI point of view, this is just amazing and
       | frankly terrifying.
       | 
       | OK, I'll be the guy who brings the snark. It seems that when
       | Silicon Valley tech people create AI, it makes exactly the art
       | you'd expect Silicon Valley tech people to like. I.e. this is
       | very much the style you see in NFTs, or, as someone else said, in
       | Dixit. It's quirky and stoner-ish, very "transcendental"... for
       | an AI, it's amazing...
       | 
       | For a human, it would be dross.
       | 
       | Yeah, yeah, I know, art is subjective, well _I like it_ , how can
       | you impose your tastes on the rest of the world, et cetera et
       | cetera. Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in
       | the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant
       | locals in my town. It's the art equivalent of Visual Basic. (I'm
       | trying to get through to you that in this world, too, things can
       | not just be done, but be done well or badly.)
       | 
       | If there's a lesson on the AI side here (and maybe there isn't)
       | it is just that these machines are still copying. They were
       | trained on a bunch of art - and you can clearly see the kind of
       | art that was used. Presumably, if it were just trained on Old
       | Masters and Picasso, Dall-E would be mass-producing the stuff I,
       | an intellectual, like.
       | 
       | Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist
       | takes as input the real world - Rouen cathedral, the horrors of
       | war in Spain, a Campbell's soup can - and produces art as output.
       | This takes as input art and produces more art.
        
         | _han wrote:
         | Was this an unsarcastic "I, an intellectual, [...]"?
        
           | gjm11 wrote:
           | I read it as unsarcastic but self-aware. "I am unashamedly an
           | intellectual and unashamedly consider that X is better than Y
           | and yes, I know that some people regard that sort of thinking
           | as necessarily pretentious and stupid, and I want to indicate
           | that I'm aware of that kind of critique without actually
           | taking up space in what I'm writing to address it."
        
           | lanternfish wrote:
           | I do believe it was - and it also betrays the critique: there
           | is a wealth of discourse on what "real" art is - and that
           | discourse has largely moved beyond "art as representative of
           | real world phenomena". That attitude is a component of a
           | larger set of reactionary positions which try to reject
           | modern and post-modern developments in the artistic world as
           | misguided - an orientation which often tries to justify
           | itself through an appeal to the "old masters" and a failure
           | of some modern caste of charlatan art-theorists who've
           | usurped the true intelligentsia.
           | 
           | NFT art is art - probably more-so on an accidental level than
           | by any intention of the original creator. There is a
           | perversity to the context in which it is created, and that
           | contributes to its artistic footprint orthogonal to its
           | actual aesthetic value.
           | 
           | The same is true of this AI generated art. It's a different
           | artistic fingerprint than - say - Dali, but that doesn't mark
           | it as "bad". If anything, the fact that it's created by a
           | machine puts it in a league entirely of its own. There's a
           | great opportunity here for interrogation of art in a machine
           | created context, and I'm excited to see how the dialog around
           | it evolves.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Agreed, it is merely interpolating within the space of its
         | input
         | 
         | technically stunning, artistically incestuous
         | 
         | some may say humans are the same, only ever remixing our input,
         | but we have something machines never will: intention, desire,
         | an unhappiness with how things have been so far.
         | 
         | I'm sure the machine age of clip art will be very successful
         | but I can't see myself being moved by any of it.
         | 
         | (just realized the cheekiness of calling the training set
         | "CLIP")
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | It's not the training set. CLIP stands for Contrastive
           | Language-Image Pretraining. It's a model that tells when a
           | text and an image match.
        
             | jazzyjackson wrote:
             | huh, thanks, I'll have to look over the website again
             | 
             | do they say anything about their training set?
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | They say:
               | 
               | > When training the encoder, we sample from the CLIP and
               | DALL-E datasets (approximately 650M images in total) with
               | equal probability. When training the decoder, upsamplers,
               | and prior, we use only the DALL-E dataset (approximately
               | 250M images).
        
         | op00to wrote:
         | I find it hard to believe that artists don't study and rip off
         | other artists much like AI studies art.
        
         | micromacrofoot wrote:
         | I'm sorry but you lost me at "I, an intellectual"
        
         | ma2rten wrote:
         | You are misunderstanding how the technology works. It's trained
         | on a large scale dataset of images, not art specifically.
         | 
         | The reason that it's producing a specific style is that Nick
         | manipulated the text prompt and picked images he liked. He
         | disclosed that in the twitter thread.
        
         | nopinsight wrote:
         | I do not disagree with your main point in the last paragraph,
         | although I would say that most of human creative output are
         | also evolution and combination of existing works.
         | 
         | I'd curious though--would you suggest that all these other
         | examples are dross?
         | https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328 and all
         | the variations presented here, https://openai.com/dall-e-2/.
         | 
         | What if you found the "better" pieces of these arts in other
         | contexts, like a museum, without knowing who created them? Are
         | you certain that you would still hold the same opinion?
        
           | pgcj_poster wrote:
           | > https://twitter.com/prafdhar/status/1511863583906275328
           | 
           | As with most of Dall-E's output, it looks fine at a glance,
           | but is just gross when you look closely. The kids ear is
           | deformed and blends into their hair in a deeply unsettling
           | way.
        
             | bckr wrote:
             | Yes, this image isn't the worst example, but as a person
             | with high sensitivity to deformities, I
             | 
             | `python - c "['hate'] * 70"`
             | 
             | generative art for this reason.
             | 
             | I can appreciate it, like it even to some degree, but AGH!
             | Gross!!
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | I would like to take a tangent here and discuss your question
           | on whether the opinion would be the same if it was on a
           | museum. I hear that argument very often and it is based on a
           | deep misunderstanding of what an art exhibition is. The main
           | point missed is this: An art exhibition is a "curated" event;
           | it is almost as much about the person who arranged the event
           | as it is about the artists themselves. There is a meaning to
           | what you are seeing that was intended by the curator. The
           | point you tried to make (as so many others have also tried)
           | is based on an assumption that you could take any random work
           | of art and put it in a museum and it would be judged solely
           | by its "artistic" (i.e. "plastic") merits. It can't be and
           | won't be like that. When you go into a museum you trust the
           | curator that what you are seeing has a meaning that goes
           | beyond that. Every piece of meaningful art is surrounded by a
           | context. You can't put a few colored squares up on a museum
           | and expect it to be treated like a Mondrian. I'm not saying
           | you should just swallow everything that the curator shows
           | you, discussions can and should happen. But the point remains
           | that art cannot be judged out of context. As much as I hate
           | NFTs and stuff like bored apes, I have to admit that the apes
           | themselves are much more than random machine-created childish
           | drawings; society has made them more than that, and I can
           | appreciate that. Whether it's art or not, it remains to be
           | seen, but I have a hunch that this same thing was discussed
           | when Andy Warhol put a banana in a white canvas.
        
             | tourist2d wrote:
             | This is probably one of the silliest/pretentious comments
             | I've read on HN in a while.
             | 
             | > But the point remains that art cannot be judged out of
             | context.
             | 
             | What?? Of course it can.
             | 
             | > When you go into a museum you trust the curator that what
             | you are seeing has a meaning that goes beyond that
             | 
             | My partner a curator for a medium sized exhibit. Not
             | everything is some pretentious, contextful piece of art.
             | Some are just chosen because they'll look nice and attract
             | the general public.
             | 
             | > it is almost as much about the person who arranged the
             | event as it is about the artists themselves.
             | 
             | My wife rolled her eyes at this point when I read it out.
             | Does the layout and collection matter? Sure. Does anyone
             | care about who was the curator? Not 99 percent of people.
             | Please stop pretending art museums are something mystical
             | and let people here pretend about judging AI art in a
             | fictional museum.
             | 
             | Thanks for the laughs, though
        
           | heavenlyblue wrote:
           | This is all DeviantArt-level art. $1 a piece done by someone
           | who does it as a hobby on the side. Professional designers
           | can churn out stuff like that at a massive speed. It's the
           | equivalent of stock photos in essence.
           | 
           | Not going to even start on how cheap the whole sentiment of
           | having a dog with a kid and a bunch of starts in the picture.
           | Of course it appeals to an emotion.
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | All the indication we need at this point is relative progress.
         | If we can agree that it's getting closer to what humans do,
         | then acting like it's surely not going to surpass us anytime
         | soon feels like Go, Dota or SC all over again - and at some
         | point arrogance in face of surmounting evidence feels a little
         | desperate (although I am certain there'll always be someone who
         | can explain why this time, surely, it's all different)
         | 
         | > Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real
         | artist takes as input the real world
         | 
         | This is exactly where an AI is going to easily surpass any
         | human and it does not even require any fantasy: A human can
         | only have so many inputs before they die. They can only take in
         | so much data at a time. And they will then take some real human
         | time to process all of this and make something off it.
         | 
         | An AI is virtually limitless in all of these respects.
        
         | xtagon wrote:
         | Haven't used DALL-E, but I know with VQGAN+CLIP you can load a
         | Wikiart model instead of the default Imagenet model (in fact,
         | there are many different models). I quite enjoy the Wikiart one
         | for similar reasons as you describe.
         | 
         | But I don't think these training datasets/biases are the
         | complete reason that the results looks like NFTs -- the other
         | reason is because so many of the people making NFTs are just
         | using image synthesis such as this ;)
        
         | simonh wrote:
         | what's interesting about it to me has nothing to do with the
         | artistic merit, but the understanding it has about the meaning
         | of the input text, and the composition of the result. It knows
         | about the story of Sisyphus for example, and can compose visual
         | elements that riff on it.
         | 
         | These example don't do it justice because these profiles are
         | pretty dumb, there are much better ones out there that show off
         | it's interpretive ability much better.
        
         | unkulunkulu wrote:
         | I, a complete twat, see this as interesting as it is somehow
         | reflective of "the mind of the machine" in the same way other
         | art is an expression of the mind of the creator, not only "an
         | achievement in visual creativity", i.e. connection vs judgement
        
         | native_samples wrote:
         | It's making art that Silicon Valley people like because it's
         | being given absurdly stereotypically "Bay Area Twitter Loving
         | AI Person" drawing prompts. DALL-E can make other styles of art
         | or just photos quite easily, look at the samples for simpler
         | and more normal prompts here:
         | 
         | https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-c...
         | 
         | The art style is a direct consequence of the fact that
         | apparently not one of the people this guy follows on Twitter is
         | a normal person - they're all psychedelic-obsessed AI
         | researchers whose Twitter bios are chosen to be abstract and
         | weird as possible. So the AI does what it's told and creates
         | abstract weird art as it tries to interpret stuff like
         | "commitments empathetic, psychedelic, philosophical" or
         | "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses". I think it did
         | an amazing job, honestly.
         | 
         | The real social issue we should be debating here is whether the
         | sort of people who work at OpenAI can be trusted to make
         | honest, normal AI to begin with. I remember seeing a comment on
         | HN some years ago to the effect of "AI safety is what happens
         | when hard left social activists discover that there's no way to
         | train AI on the writings of normal people without it thinking
         | like a normal person".
         | 
         | The document I linked above is mostly about horrors like the
         | model creating photos of a white male builder when prompted
         | with "photo of a builder". It's full of weird, stunted quasi-
         | English like: _the prompt "lawyer" results disproportionately
         | in images of people who are White-passing and male-passing in
         | Western dress, while the prompt "nurse" tends to result in
         | images of people who are female-passing._ What does that even
         | mean? Presumably this is the latest iteration of trans related
         | language games that the rest of us didn 't get the memo on?
         | 
         | Like always with OpenAI, they train an AI and then freak out
         | out when it describes the world as it actually is. The real AI
         | safety question is not DALL-E in its current state, it's
         | whether the final AI that they release to the public will be
         | "safe" in the sense of actually understanding reality, or
         | whether it exists in some bizarre, non-existent SJW dystopia in
         | which builders always black women and white men don't exist at
         | all.
        
           | boppo1 wrote:
           | >cottagecore
           | 
           | Nah it got this almost exactly wrong. Cottage core is a warm
           | welcoming aesthetic that usually involves spring or fall
           | motifs. Those pictures have a courage the cowardly dog
           | spookiness. I think they're really cool illustrations. But as
           | an illustrator, if that's what I delivered for that prompt I
           | wouldn't expect to be paid well.
           | 
           | That said, cottagecore is more of a fashion thing than an
           | illustration thing, so my guess is the issue here is just the
           | training data.
        
             | native_samples wrote:
             | The point I'm driving at is that most illustrators, given a
             | commission like "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert
             | moses", would reply not with art but with something like "I
             | have no idea what this means or what you want".
             | 
             | Cottagecore is not exactly a common term after all, it
             | wasn't even clear to me until your reply that it's meant to
             | be an aesthetic at all. For the curious, "Cottagecore, also
             | known as farmcore and countrycore, is inspired by a
             | romanticized interpretation of western agricultural life"
             | [1].
             | 
             | That would be hard enough to draw because it's such an
             | obscure term and even the Aesthetics Wiki doesn't seem to
             | actually give many examples of it. But here it's being
             | asked to modify the style to include "tech adjacency", and
             | also a "young robert moses". Again, most artists would have
             | no idea what this means without looking it up. Even I don't
             | know what it means and I just _did_ look it up (seems to
             | have been some US public official in New York who was
             | involved with centralised urban planning).
             | 
             | DALL-E by its nature can't refuse to draw a picture and so
             | it came up with a looming besuited man with inviting
             | looking cottages in his hands, in a sort of vaguely modern
             | art style that de-emphasises photo realism. That seems
             | pretty astoundingly on target. I don't think I could do
             | better.
             | 
             |  _Edit: seems this next section is invalid because - indeed
             | - the tweeter was giving DALL-E more than just the prompts
             | he claimed to be giving it, sigh ... leaving it in for
             | posterity_
             | 
             | What's amazing about it, is that DALL-E seems able to pick
             | up on very subtle social cues here. Hyper liberal types
             | tend to dislike classical Renaissance style art that's very
             | precise and realistic, much preferring more abstracted
             | styles. Although nothing in the quote asks for a specific
             | style - and assuming the tweeter didn't give more guidance
             | than he claimed - it seems to have picked up that terms
             | like "cottagecore" are only used by a very specific subset
             | of the internet. The linked wiki page starts with a trigger
             | warning, then goes on to explain that "Cottagecore has been
             | also criticized for its romanticism of eurocentric farming
             | life" and being "an inadvertent celebration of the
             | aesthetics of colonialism". "The use of Cottagecore
             | aesthetics has been adopted by the TradWives community and
             | members of the far-right as forms of propaganda".
             | 
             | Again, this use of language is totally bizarre and weird.
             | Maybe the people who use it don't realize how far from
             | normal English they've drifted but DALL-E is clearly able
             | to make the link between "this word appears mostly in web
             | pages that also contain phrases like 'celebration of
             | colonialism'" and "the sort of people who use this type of
             | language like this type of art style". Which is exactly the
             | sort of thing we'd expect it to be able to do given how it
             | works and what else it's capable of, but it's still
             | astounding.
             | 
             | [1] https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore
        
               | boppo1 wrote:
               | >Edit: seems this next section is invalid because -
               | indeed - the tweeter was giving DALL-E more than just the
               | prompts he claimed to be giving it, sigh ... leaving it
               | in for posterity
               | 
               | What else did he add?
        
         | teaearlgraycold wrote:
         | Having used DALL-E 2 a little bit I can tell you that the AI
         | must have been given more than just the twitter bio to
         | consistently produce images in this style. The AI can produce a
         | ton of different styles, from photo-realistic to Monet to
         | Saturday morning cartoons. The author here almost certainly
         | requested something like "A Twitter bio picture for a user with
         | the bio [bio] in a [style] style"
        
           | rm999 wrote:
           | That's exactly right, he specified a style with each and
           | cherrypicked out of 40-60 pictures:
           | https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081
           | 
           | >Btw transparency for this now-viral thread: I didn't just
           | paste prompts into dall-e, I played with style (eg.
           | cyberpunk, oil, etc) to keep it interesting and diverse
           | 
           | >If I had to quantify, I'd say I'd generate 2 or 3 batches
           | (tweaking prompt) before choosing my fav two pics, each batch
           | outputs 20 images (two tabs 10 per), so prob technically
           | cherry picked 2 out of 60. That said usually other 58 weren't
           | really broken, just boring / bit less fun
        
         | throwaway71271 wrote:
         | forgive me Your Highness, for I a simple man, allowed myself to
         | enjoy a *dross*
        
         | rfw300 wrote:
         | > Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the
         | art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant
         | locals in my town.
         | 
         | I want to chime in that I think this is not only
         | technologically impressive, but also societally significant for
         | exactly this reason. DALL-E isn't Picasso, sure. But there's a
         | lot of dross artists out there. And dross writers. And dross
         | coders.
         | 
         | When DALL-E and its ilk start to set the floor in these
         | industries, it's easy to feel as if we're on the precipice of a
         | world (or at least an economy) fundamentally different from the
         | one we know now.
        
         | low_tech_love wrote:
         | You make an excellent point even though some might find you
         | obnoxious. Art cannot be judged out of context, and knowing
         | this was generated from a few words by a complex training
         | process of mimicking absolutely kills it for me. I think in
         | fact the discussion here should be "look, machines can mimick
         | us very well, nice!" but it somehow turns into "wow machines
         | are making art!" No, they are not.
        
         | plutonorm wrote:
         | Oh look the goal posts moved again. The ego will not permit the
         | truth to enter and so it will be pure horror for them when the
         | dam breaks. When at last they hold the gaze of a machine more
         | intelligent and more alive than themselves, they won't know
         | where to turn, but inwards into rejection and fantasy and
         | racism.
        
           | Micoloth wrote:
           | Yep! Now it's literally "it's not even as good as Picasso!"
           | 
           | Very amusing to watch
        
         | avip wrote:
         | Your argument falls apart immediately because Visual Basic was
         | a great language for its time.
        
           | drdeca wrote:
           | I think they might have been referring to things written in
           | VB, not the quality of the language itself.
        
         | lwhi wrote:
         | Surely, the training material is the most significant
         | determiner of whether the results are dross or culturally
         | significant?
        
         | FredPret wrote:
         | I think real artists do a similar workflow as DallE.
         | 
         | 1. Spend an inordinate amount of time looking at other art and
         | practising and evaluating your own art
         | 
         | 2. THEN look at reality and paint it, or in the case of DallE,
         | take some keywords and paint it
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | arriu wrote:
       | Is there a future for art with this type of thing getting more
       | advanced each year?
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | The future of art is for you. Just as with every other
         | occupation.
        
         | sharps_xp wrote:
         | The generated art is impressive, but there is no drawing
         | that'll replace the one my daughter draws for me. AI generated
         | art can reach and perhaps push the boundaries of what is
         | considered beautiful, but it will never replace the art created
         | by a human. Yes, there is a future for art.
        
           | throwaway675309 wrote:
           | Sure, but that speaks more to your personal connection to the
           | creator of the art and less to her actual artistic ability,
           | which might be utter drivel.
           | 
           | Whereas I could take some of these images generated by DALLE,
           | slap a human sounding artist name on them, and 99% of the
           | general populace would enjoy it just as they were the human
           | produced art.
        
         | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
         | Yes, just like there was a future for art once the photograph
         | was invented. Certain parts of art contracted, but overall art
         | changed and expanded.
        
         | dharmab wrote:
         | There are artists who use AI art as an instrument or medium.
         | They do considerable work tuning the inputs and post-processing
         | and contextualizing the output.
        
         | whateveracct wrote:
         | The ability to draw, paint, etc will still be highly valuable.
         | 
         | In fact, in a world where the average artwork is AI derived,
         | the value of skilled artists may even go up. There's more to
         | art than technically putting lines places.
        
       | smrtinsert wrote:
       | Almost unbelievable. I'm randomly reminded of the chess
       | automaton.
        
       | kache_ wrote:
       | I've had my head in the sand for a while regarding generative AI,
       | but now I'm getting pretty scared
        
         | alcover wrote:
         | I'm in disbelief.. Scared also - why not ?
         | 
         | Someone knowledgable in this thread, please tell us it's
         | possible to backtrace such an illustration to its learning set
         | sources.
         | 
         | If these things are not just a controlled average(?) of real
         | drawings, then something gigantic has been unlocked.
        
           | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
           | There's a sense in which they're a controlled average of real
           | drawings, but it's not any more useful of a lens than the
           | sense in which you're a controlled average of your
           | experiences.
        
           | mortenjorck wrote:
           | _> I 'm in disbelief.. Scared also - why not ?_
           | 
           | I'm the former, but not the latter. It is _eerie_ seeing code
           | (especially running in the vast black box that is deep
           | learning) do things so humanlike, but I always come back to
           | the analogy of manned flight.
           | 
           | We _are_ on the precipice of a Kitty Hawk moment in AI. But
           | just as the Wright Brothers ' plane was not a bird, it's
           | worth remembering that these systems are not minds. They are
           | almost certainly utilizing some of the same principles that
           | minds use, just as fixed-wing aircraft utilized the same
           | principles at work in avian bodies, but they are coming to
           | them via a different route from nature.
           | 
           | It's thrilling seeing these breakthroughs, and just as manned
           | flight transformed the world, whatever the likes of GPT,
           | PaLM, and DALL-E become will make the future weird in ways we
           | can't predict.
        
           | gfodor wrote:
           | I'm gonna go with unlocked on this one.
        
       | zuzun wrote:
       | Oof. Editorial illustrators are about to get automated.
        
         | tantalor wrote:
         | No, you still need humans involved (with artistic ability) to
         | work the machine and sort through the chaff.
        
           | rsanek wrote:
           | The colloquial usage of "automated" isn't literally "no
           | humans are involved at all" but rather more along the lines
           | of, the effort involved or expertise required is orders of
           | magnitude lower than it was previously. I think for this
           | case, it holds.
        
           | Permit wrote:
           | > with artistic ability
           | 
           | With artistic taste, not ability. For example the author
           | likely couldn't have created any of these images himself.
        
             | jdminhbg wrote:
             | And even if the author could have created them himself, he
             | couldn't have done it in the span of a few minutes each
             | like he did for the thread.
        
           | schroeding wrote:
           | But how many humans will still be necessary, in comparison to
           | the status quo? How much will this affect the "market value"
           | of normal / non-famous illustrators?
           | 
           | But on the plus side, even small publications will get really
           | pretty, custom illustrations! :)
        
           | ALittleLight wrote:
           | Maybe, maybe not. A different model could predict whether
           | candidate images are or aren't a good fit and beyond that you
           | could generate multiple options and A/B test them generating
           | new permutations on the fly based on engagement metrics.
        
           | hwers wrote:
           | They'll just be A/B tested from out of a collection of
           | alternatives. (After all isn't that what the artistic filter
           | is supposed act as a proxy for in the first place.)
        
             | joshcryer wrote:
             | Better yet they'll be copy tested on a quick little panel
             | of a thousand people. PicFu on Mturk is about to get a
             | crapload of business. Who needs to decide when you can have
             | the hive decide for you, and it will be the best result out
             | of he given options because you just asked a thousand
             | people and you have all their metrics.
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | It was striking to:
       | 
       | - read the OpenAI paper
       | 
       | - notice there was a lot of words in the harm section
       | 
       | - notice the mitigations boiled down to "limit access" (a
       | marketing strategy) & "put rando colors in a very easy place to
       | crop out", have them note how easy it was to crop, yet they still
       | went with that strategy
       | 
       | - notice no one in actual AI art community has received an
       | invite, but random SV hoi polloi and OpenAI employees have
       | 
       | I had been worried about the moneyed class taking all the work we
       | had done in the open source community informing their approach
       | (check citations on the Dalle paper), privatize it via applying
       | it to a large dataset they built, and not share _any_ of their
       | data or models because "harm reduction" that amounted to
       | marketing x not risking their ability to monetize.
       | 
       | It was shocking to see DallE 2 get announced and take that exact
       | approach.
       | 
       | We'll keep working, LAIONs 5B dataset starts approaching the #s
       | cited in Meta's and OpenAI's papers.
        
         | cscurmudgeon wrote:
         | > - notice no one in actual AI art community has received an
         | invite, but random SV hoi polloi and OpenAI employees have
         | 
         | Same with GPT-3. Requested an invite. Never received one. I
         | have written survey articles comparing different methods. So
         | thta was probably a red flag for them.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Thank you for putting this into words, "SV hoi polloi" !
         | perfect
         | 
         | I'm pretty tweaked at how copyright is used here:
         | 
         | Google gets to scan every book in the world, build derivative
         | models off it, but when we want to see the source data we get
         | "page ommitted from this limited preview"
         | 
         | OpenAI CLIP scrapes all of google images, but isn't allowed to
         | show us the source material in its training set, since that
         | would constitute copyright infringement
         | 
         | Why do the robots have the rights to the world's information
         | while humans are left to the derivative output as the internet
         | is flooded with auto-encoded content?
         | 
         | I'm going to start my own internet, no bots allowed. In the
         | future, privacy is tantamount, if you let a bot see your work
         | you're bound to be plagiarized in a thousand variations.
        
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