Above, on the left, is an image of the late actor John Candy created by the unfathomably complicated AI image generator Midjourney, which no doubt based this image on thousands of pictures of its subject. On the right is a cartoon version of John Candy made by some animator, probably based on a handful of still photographs of him. Here is John Candy.
I don't read a ton about AI in the mainstream media, so maybe I'm just not getting exposed to the right stuff, but is anyone saying it is transformative right now, in this moment? Because that is clearly false, so anyone writing that is getting ahead of themselves. But writing about potential is important.
Were people writing about the internet in the early 90s wrong? It hadn't yet changed the world, but did they deserve to be mocked for saying that it would? Rarely do things remake the world the moment they are invented.
I think proliferating this point of view while true in part, also kills the advantage that AI is genuinely giving big and small corporations, ppl who follow you should start using it in every part of their lives to increase their productivity ten-folds
I hope your last paragraph is right. I'm really sick of living in a world seemingly dominated by the anti-human obsessions of tech evangelists and I would love for one of their attempts to remake civilization to fail in a very public, very noticable way.
Without going into theories of mind and all that, if AI is so damn clever, why can't they come up with an autocorrect or a spellcheck that works, one that doesn't insist on "correcting" text that already is correct?
That ought to be one thing that an LLM can do well, and in my experience, it sucketh. For that matter, contemplate a simple word, take, for instance "deal". Think of all the different and wildly varying meanings of that word.
You and I can instantly and seamlessly process from spoken or written context whether "Deal!" means "we have reached agreement on essential terms!" or "the situation cannot be altered so you will have to find a way to live with it!"
The accomplishments thus far are so impressive, that it’s unbelievable they can be still overhyped. Managing to achieve such levels of unjustified hype may itself be an achievement unparalleled in human history.
Something I've noticed about the AI images of "real" people - someone with a better artistic eye could probably tell me if I'm full of shit, but they always look a bit... glossy. That AI image of John Candy doesn't look like John Candy because, it seems to me, his face is way too symmetrical. This is maybe why the cartoon succeeds better - the cartoonist used abstraction to exaggerate features of his face that are, you know, already on his face. As opposed to smoothing over and shrinking down those exaggerated features to get closer to a kind of perfect human average.
*Right now*, yes, AI sucks at several things, and any revolutionary potential it has is just potential. But there are enough of the world's smartest minds working on these problems and many others that I believe it can't help to get much better at all of these things very quickly. Much like the internet in the early '90's, it's just a matter of who ultimately controls the technology and how they wield it
It's possible that Midjourney is programmed not to accurately draw real people's faces for legal reasons. Your statements about Midjourney not following verbal instructions very well and large language models generating factually incorrect claims are both true.
"Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized statistical norms."
William Gibson, Count Zero
I think that pretty well describes what's happening within these models.
Tho I still think the fact that generation is at this point so fast, cheap, and 24-7 means that we'll be flooded with a seismic new level of spam across all aspects of society for a generation. The content will suck. It will be everywhere.
What the AI cheerleaders don't understand is that for the truly artistical images "generated" by Midjourney, there is an actual human refining and making the base image better. AI is nothing more than a poorly programmed information regurgitation machine. It CAN be useful to assist in certain tasks but in reality you still need human brain power to sift through the information and make actual sense and usefulness of the AI-puke.
I've dabbled w/ Midjourney and other "AI" generative imaging plug-ins for design work and it's useful for spitting out tons of iterative design "ideas". I'm going to use air quotes a lot in this comment because the people ascribing creativity, thought, reasoning and logic to AI chat/image bots are either AI fanboys or don't actually understand the creative process and abilities that humans have.
AI doesn't "understand" or "think" or even "create" anything. It's a program that data mines for information that might be related to the prompt. But try writing the prompt several different ways and inevitably the AI just pukes out crap. People have a hard time using Google to its full potential and we've had 2 decades of learning how to write search queries into Google and then parsing through what it gave us. AI simply sorts the data on a more granular level but again, it is now perceived by users as "thinking" because it does the parsing for us and still we get crap. Crap in, crap out.
I'm not threatened by being replaced by AI any time soon. The job I do has layers of complexity to it that an AI cannot resolve. AI can be as useful tool, however it isn't the greatest invention since the wheel or the Big Bang.
What I am concerned about is the rush to use AI for automation purposes to reduce human labor requirements and "errors", when we've already witnessed AI failing on many levels. I just hope we don't get more Techbros thinking AI is going to save us from ourselves and beta testing this shit in systems that have real consequences.
This reminds me of the joke, "AI is anything that doesn't work yet" - once it works reliably well at superhuman levels, like for classifying images, we yawn and no longer talk about it as "AI" - instead focusing on the next thing computers can't quite do yet. So while I take your point about some of the hype - there's an enormous amount of useful stuff happening behind the scenes based on deep learning models - automatic translation between languages, image classification and captioning, advanced safety systems, super powered image editing (with humans still fully in control, but much more productive) etc.
Today's "AI" is astoundingly successful compared to anything we had previously - it can write high-school essays that get better grades than the student users can.
The "Big Bang" and similar hype is overblown for sure based on *today's* AI, but *if* it continues improving at the pace of the last few years, it'll be justified. Writers always project ahead based on their guess of where things are going, not where they are now.
Finally, expecting the machine to create accurate human faces for particular individuals is about the most difficult possible artistic demand. Humans have evolved an absolutely astounding ability to distinguish facial features of other humans; there's obvious evolutionary pressure to do this well.
We can't do it with other animals. You're expecting the machine to look at 1000 photos of *one particular* sea lion, or dog, and produce a new image of that particular animal (not just the species - the individual) that's uniquely recognizable. No human artist can do that - except for humans.
Expecting the machine to be able to do it for humans, when we ourselves can't do it for any other species than our own, seems pretty unreasonable. At this stage.
Yeah, I really wish this wasn’t the case. I’m getting heavily involved in my company’s massive investment and pivot to AI. It’s super interesting, it’s fun and challenging in a way that I haven’t had at work since my small company was acquired by the giant megacorp, but I’m finding that I spend a huge amount of time reassuring the other lawyers at the company that no, AI is not coming for their jobs. It’s just not even remotely close; the question doesn’t even make sense. It’d be like getting worried that a zoo opening up down the block means you’re going to be attacked by zebras.
I don't read a ton about AI in the mainstream media, so maybe I'm just not getting exposed to the right stuff, but is anyone saying it is transformative right now, in this moment? Because that is clearly false, so anyone writing that is getting ahead of themselves. But writing about potential is important.
Were people writing about the internet in the early 90s wrong? It hadn't yet changed the world, but did they deserve to be mocked for saying that it would? Rarely do things remake the world the moment they are invented.
I think proliferating this point of view while true in part, also kills the advantage that AI is genuinely giving big and small corporations, ppl who follow you should start using it in every part of their lives to increase their productivity ten-folds
I hope your last paragraph is right. I'm really sick of living in a world seemingly dominated by the anti-human obsessions of tech evangelists and I would love for one of their attempts to remake civilization to fail in a very public, very noticable way.
Without going into theories of mind and all that, if AI is so damn clever, why can't they come up with an autocorrect or a spellcheck that works, one that doesn't insist on "correcting" text that already is correct?
That ought to be one thing that an LLM can do well, and in my experience, it sucketh. For that matter, contemplate a simple word, take, for instance "deal". Think of all the different and wildly varying meanings of that word.
You and I can instantly and seamlessly process from spoken or written context whether "Deal!" means "we have reached agreement on essential terms!" or "the situation cannot be altered so you will have to find a way to live with it!"
Or a dozen different meanings, depending.
I suspect AI going the way of Chatroullete (was going to connect the world = guys just exposed their dicks and then everyone forgot about it).
The accomplishments thus far are so impressive, that it’s unbelievable they can be still overhyped. Managing to achieve such levels of unjustified hype may itself be an achievement unparalleled in human history.
Something I've noticed about the AI images of "real" people - someone with a better artistic eye could probably tell me if I'm full of shit, but they always look a bit... glossy. That AI image of John Candy doesn't look like John Candy because, it seems to me, his face is way too symmetrical. This is maybe why the cartoon succeeds better - the cartoonist used abstraction to exaggerate features of his face that are, you know, already on his face. As opposed to smoothing over and shrinking down those exaggerated features to get closer to a kind of perfect human average.
*Right now*, yes, AI sucks at several things, and any revolutionary potential it has is just potential. But there are enough of the world's smartest minds working on these problems and many others that I believe it can't help to get much better at all of these things very quickly. Much like the internet in the early '90's, it's just a matter of who ultimately controls the technology and how they wield it
It's possible that Midjourney is programmed not to accurately draw real people's faces for legal reasons. Your statements about Midjourney not following verbal instructions very well and large language models generating factually incorrect claims are both true.
"Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized statistical norms."
William Gibson, Count Zero
I think that pretty well describes what's happening within these models.
Inject this post into my veins.
Tho I still think the fact that generation is at this point so fast, cheap, and 24-7 means that we'll be flooded with a seismic new level of spam across all aspects of society for a generation. The content will suck. It will be everywhere.
What the AI cheerleaders don't understand is that for the truly artistical images "generated" by Midjourney, there is an actual human refining and making the base image better. AI is nothing more than a poorly programmed information regurgitation machine. It CAN be useful to assist in certain tasks but in reality you still need human brain power to sift through the information and make actual sense and usefulness of the AI-puke.
I've dabbled w/ Midjourney and other "AI" generative imaging plug-ins for design work and it's useful for spitting out tons of iterative design "ideas". I'm going to use air quotes a lot in this comment because the people ascribing creativity, thought, reasoning and logic to AI chat/image bots are either AI fanboys or don't actually understand the creative process and abilities that humans have.
AI doesn't "understand" or "think" or even "create" anything. It's a program that data mines for information that might be related to the prompt. But try writing the prompt several different ways and inevitably the AI just pukes out crap. People have a hard time using Google to its full potential and we've had 2 decades of learning how to write search queries into Google and then parsing through what it gave us. AI simply sorts the data on a more granular level but again, it is now perceived by users as "thinking" because it does the parsing for us and still we get crap. Crap in, crap out.
I'm not threatened by being replaced by AI any time soon. The job I do has layers of complexity to it that an AI cannot resolve. AI can be as useful tool, however it isn't the greatest invention since the wheel or the Big Bang.
What I am concerned about is the rush to use AI for automation purposes to reduce human labor requirements and "errors", when we've already witnessed AI failing on many levels. I just hope we don't get more Techbros thinking AI is going to save us from ourselves and beta testing this shit in systems that have real consequences.
This reminds me of the joke, "AI is anything that doesn't work yet" - once it works reliably well at superhuman levels, like for classifying images, we yawn and no longer talk about it as "AI" - instead focusing on the next thing computers can't quite do yet. So while I take your point about some of the hype - there's an enormous amount of useful stuff happening behind the scenes based on deep learning models - automatic translation between languages, image classification and captioning, advanced safety systems, super powered image editing (with humans still fully in control, but much more productive) etc.
I think you're being unfair.
Today's "AI" is astoundingly successful compared to anything we had previously - it can write high-school essays that get better grades than the student users can.
The "Big Bang" and similar hype is overblown for sure based on *today's* AI, but *if* it continues improving at the pace of the last few years, it'll be justified. Writers always project ahead based on their guess of where things are going, not where they are now.
Finally, expecting the machine to create accurate human faces for particular individuals is about the most difficult possible artistic demand. Humans have evolved an absolutely astounding ability to distinguish facial features of other humans; there's obvious evolutionary pressure to do this well.
We can't do it with other animals. You're expecting the machine to look at 1000 photos of *one particular* sea lion, or dog, and produce a new image of that particular animal (not just the species - the individual) that's uniquely recognizable. No human artist can do that - except for humans.
Expecting the machine to be able to do it for humans, when we ourselves can't do it for any other species than our own, seems pretty unreasonable. At this stage.
Yeah, I really wish this wasn’t the case. I’m getting heavily involved in my company’s massive investment and pivot to AI. It’s super interesting, it’s fun and challenging in a way that I haven’t had at work since my small company was acquired by the giant megacorp, but I’m finding that I spend a huge amount of time reassuring the other lawyers at the company that no, AI is not coming for their jobs. It’s just not even remotely close; the question doesn’t even make sense. It’d be like getting worried that a zoo opening up down the block means you’re going to be attacked by zebras.