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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This week's revolutionary AI advance:

Imagen Video

It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.

As for this:

While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.

Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.

ETA:

Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:

Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor

Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.

Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.

Reading this with its assorted replies along with @Primaprimaprima's post earlier in the week leaves me feeling like I have a fundamentally different understanding of art, and experience it in a vastly different way from the majority of commenters here. I'm not sure what to make of your stated concern because I don't see how it even relates.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious. Whether it's GPT-x or DALL-y it's all very obviously not human, not even close, and thus I find myself wondering what all the furor is about.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning? Ditto the visual medium, I've gotten used to cheap sci-fi book covers having nothing to do with the plot, but am I really the only guy who's noticed?

Seems to me that you're painting in apocalyptic terms what to me looks like just another Thursday and that raise the question of which, if either, of us is actually out of line.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

At least for images, I think they can be pretty respectable in at least some spheres, even if they suffer in others. Now, some of that's related to the limits of the genre I'm interested in -- there's furry artists that do really fancy stuff, but it's not the majority -- but it's at least plausibly human-genned, even in its errors, for some limited range of works. There are a few tells (trivially, output of vanilla SD does best with square images and lower resolutions while artists prefer to not, there's some prompt bleeding, so on), but they're not present in all works and very far from obvious.

I don't think this is as apocalyptic, because there are places where that's not the case yet, and where it may be years (possibly the better part of a decade) before that changes. But I don't think it's another Thursday, either.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious. Whether it's GPT-x or DALL-y it's all very obviously not human, not even close, and thus I find myself wondering what all the furor is about.

First of all, I think sans some sort of blinded test, the "passing tranny fallacy" (or the "toupee fallacy" as I've more commonly seen it called) should be the default conclusion.

However, I do suspect that even if you did do a blinded test, you would find that you could tell better than chance. Presuming that you would, I think the furor is about the potential future, not the present. If we compare what AI generated images looked like in October 2021 and October 2022, the difference is stark. We can't extrapolate directly to October 2023 or 2030, but we do know with pretty good certainty that it will be no worse, and there's good reason to suspect that it will be better, and by a significant amount.

Which then raises the question to me, what do you mean by "not even close?" "Close [to human-made art]" is a subjective measure, of course, but is your opinion that AI art is currently just so far away from human-made art that the idea of it getting "close enough" to substitute human-made art in many significant contexts within the next 5-10 years is science fiction?

I don't really understand. The images that started coming out this week are often indistinguishable from human made ones. I expected that would take years from where it was, not months.

No matter what happens next, AI gen is going to be at least as important for content generation as, say, Photoshop. And of course restricting an important tool to megacorps is going to silence people.

The images that started coming out this week are often indistinguishable from human made ones.

Do you have specific examples in mind that you can link? because the ones that have been getting linked here on theMotte certainly aren't.

Here is one (yes, twitter, boo hiss etc):

https://twitter.com/GoranGligovic/status/1577560899883307009

Now, don't get me wrong, an AI stamping out what appears to be the most generic fantasy cover imaginable is a low bar to clear. But if you asked me without context, I would have assumed a human stamped this out instead. I am of the opinion AI will wipe out the mediocrities of art, actual talent will be just fine. Not coincidentally, large swathes of twitter are losing their minds.

Ok that is pretty impressive, there's still something distinctly "off" about it, but it is not obviously AI generated at first glance.

To be fair, by the standards of modern art that doesn't seem too far off the mark.

Eh, I can't claim that this joke is an original. https://stonetoss.com/comic/artificial/ .

...pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning?

Yes. You are an outlier. A majority of people are consistently failing the reverse turing test for text and images. Literally everyone will at least have some of their time wasted reading the first couple sentences of AI generated text before realizing something is off. Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

While I'll grant that this is true in the sense that it's always possible to tank the signal to noise ratio by cranking up the noise, I'm not following your reasoning here. What do you think telemarketing calls and internet spam are? and what is it that makes AI generated media different?

Telemarketing and internet spam are so predictable that we generally don't have to process it to ignore it. A script is enough in most cases. AI comments show up where you expect human content. We don't have any automated way to differentiate between AI and human yet, and if we did, AI makers would just use it to become more humanlike.

Also, the less intelligent half of the population falls for telemarketing, internet spam, media manipulation and botting all the time and we all suffer the consequences of this.

Telemarketing and internet spam are so predictable that we generally don't have to process it to ignore it.

Ditto most AI generated media. Which is kind of my point.

Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

The internet is already full of info-chaff (otherwise known as spam) and things are, for the most part, working fine. If AI is going to change that then it needs to do a lot better than fooling people for a couple of sentences. Spammers can already do better than that.

pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I’ve encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

I do understand what you’re saying - some people have rather low standards for being impressed. I consider myself to be above-average in my ability to identify AI-generated images. But given how quickly the quality of generated images is improving, even I can’t just brush them all off as “eh, uncanny valley, it’s not there yet”.

Have you seen what’s getting posted to AIbooru? The image quality is astounding. There are often still tells if you look closely, but for a lot of these, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they’re “obviously” AI-generated (independent of your ability to recognize, say, styles that are common to certain models, which seems to be a separate issue).

I’m with you on AI-generated text never being very impressive though.

It's kind of common courtesy to mention NSFW when you're dropping a NSFW link. Don't make us make it a rule.

If you're threatening to make it a rule if it is not followed, it is already a rule.

Do you have a particular reason why you think it's bad to politely request that people warn about NSFW links, or are you just in a mood again?

The rules are organic and it's probably not an official rule because none of us felt like we have to warn everyone who might post a not-entirely-SFW link and we don't want to argue with Nybblers about whether or not something is NSFW and if we only decided something was NSFW because we are personally and egregiously converged and biased, but I do think it would be courteous to warn if you're gonna drop a link to AI-generated hentai.

Why wait for a wave of people to link NSFW without warning before making it a rule? If one person did it and its objectionable, isn't that enough to just make it a rule?

I suppose that "having a rule for NSFW warnings in the sidebar" contributes to a mood or culture that TheMotte doesn't want (i.e. is a bad look), which is why it seems your ideal world is where no such rule is listed on the sidebar, but also people somehow know not to post NSFW content without warning.

Maybe I'm missing your point, but I'd imagine all the people worrying about AI art are not thinking of GPT-3 and stable diffusion. They are thinking of GPT-4/5 and stable diffusion 2. With the rates at which the models have been improving in recent years, it hardly seems fanciful that the next generation of these language models and image generators will be human or super-human level, not sub-human.

pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

You're not alone. Currently "AI art" competes with the bottom tier of artists, if at that. Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation) and controlled, it's basically just clip art for situations where you need an image and the contents barely matter.

Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation)

To some extent, that's present now. At the most trivial level, holding seed and settings constant, while making small changes to a prompt, can maintain layout and theme. At extremes, people have managed to make short animated gifs by transitioning from one seed to another, or from one prompt weighting to another.

At more serious levels, artists can use img2img and have greater control of the final appearance's layout, or 'rerolling' individual parts of an image or apply a prompt only to that section of an image using inpainting. There are some limits to these techniques -- getting readable text out is basically random and very rare chance, even conditional prompting still makes it hard to apply adjectives (and sometimes even nouns) to only one part of an image -- but there is more than filling in text and hitting the random button a hundred times.

Now, there's a difference from consistency to control.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy"

I keep pointing out when people mention this: You can see a distribution, and notice that the distribution gets sparser when you get towards "better at passing, but where I can still notice them". You can then deduce that there aren't many who are so good that you won't notice them at all.

Even if we assume a uniform distribution, wouldn't it still be the case that the distribution of those you notice would still get sparser when you get towards "better at passing, but where I can still notice them?"

Like, imagine a toy model where there are 300 total MTF trans people, with 100 who are bad at passing, 100 who are better, and 100 who pass perfectly. You'll always notice the 1st 100, you'll notice the middle 100 about 50% of the time, and you'll never notice the last 100. By your observations, then, you'll notice 100 poorly-passing MTF and 50 better-passing MTF. Since the middle group is better-passing, you'll also notice that those 50 are qualitatively different - i.e. noticeably closer to actually passing - from the 100 in the 1st group, besides just noticing them only 50% of the time. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that then it follows that there are even fewer people in the 3rd group.

That's true if "better at passing" means "more often doesn't get noticed", but it's not true if "better at passing" means "still noticed, but doesn't look quite as bad". I was suggesting the latter scenario.

OK, I had to think about this for a while, but I think I follow. You're really only looking at those who are so far away from passing that they would fail to pass 100 times out of 100, and looking at the distribution of how badly they fail at passing? I think that makes sense, and you're probably correct in your inference.

It is probably a good heuristic but you are assuming the shape of the distribution and still then it could go wrong. For example let's say that there is a latent variable that measures the degree of femaleness that was uniformly distributed over trans and that your likelihood of clocking them decreases monotonically towards high femaleness then, depending on your clocking function, you could get the same picture of a sparser distribution towards high femaleness without it being so.

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