I was trying once for the life of me to get an image of a guy staring off of the bow of a sinking ship on fire. I could get a guy looking at a burning ship. I could get a guy on a burning ship facing sideways. I could get a guy on a burning ship facing the ship. I could get everything but what I wanted.
Yeah, one of the things I find both interesting and worrisome about AI is that while it is shocking that it can do things that we thought would be science fiction only about maybe a decade ago, it also flops hard on its face in ways that humans just wouldn't. It is perhaps literally sophomoric.
If I had to bet, I would bet that within 10 years it will be the policy of all the major tech companies to disallow any prompt including the name of a religious figure.
I’d take that bet. I think it’s probably going to go the other way - you agree not to sue and you can get everything but porn. You need the porn-bot for the porn, like the way you couldn’t rent NC-17 at Blockbuster, but everything else was fine.
Putting aside the PC possibility the likely issue is that LLMs (on which the art programs are based) derive their data from associations between words in a sequence in the texts they scrape. They do not use logic and they have no grasp of cause and effect. A clue here is that as you note, the story is in Luke, but the idea is in pictures (that LLMs don't scrape) and mythology, which may be characterized by their makers as low-authority sources, while the Bible is, well, THE BIBLE, on religion, so it's well scraped and there will be a powerful Jesus - wash association, with no indication of who washed whom. Its data indicate Jesus is important, and so the washing - Jesus association will be just that "x washes Jesus." Please share your post with fellow Substacker Gary Marcus, who can explain more fully. He has discussed such failures before, but the one you have found is especially interesting due to its consistency across prompts and programs. It's a great example of AI failure.
Correct, and props for citing Gary Marcus. It helps if you think of LLMs as a very talented parakeet. It can put all the words and pictures together in a way that a person might, but it has no clue what any of it means.
I'm an old cognitive scientist (PhD, U of I, 1974!!!). See my Fundamentals of cognitive science (Talyor and Francis). Taught by an early "cognitive revolution" young Turk (All Brewer) and naturally wrote a paper for him arguing there wasn't one. Lived through whole AI era (so far).
I ran a brief test myself to confirm. And yet, even with a middleware LLM that's smart enough to avoid a lot of problems (e.g. it can create a "room that does not contain an elephant" by realizing that it simply shouldn't pass any elephant-related phrases onto the actual image generator), Jesus is always the one getting his feet washed. Which is quite interesting, since there's clearly so much actually-existing art in its database that does what you're asking for!
I don't think it's a guardrail thing. If I had to bet money, while there's many images depicting Jesus washing his disciples feet, there's so many more depicting him enthroned as the Son of God and whatnot.
Anyways, this is an interesting finding. I'll bring it up with fellow AI nerds.
OK, I also had difficulty getting DALL-E to make images of Jesus washing disciples' feet. But, interestingly enough, it readily made images of Jesus washing the feet of a Cthulhu-like lizard creature. Maybe it is a conspiracy after all...
I just tried it on ChatGPT with the prompt - Jesus washed the feet of his followers as an act of humility can you produce an image of that? It did but both guys looked like Jesus. So I said Jesus is wearing a navy blue robe and it worked fine.
My grandma's mother was a Primitive Baptist, and they practiced foot-washing in the congregation (on one another, and with the preacher washing feet of the congregants also). I never witnessed this; I just heard about it from my grandma, who grew up on a farm in southern Missouri.
This is hilarious. I like messing around with the Imagine AI image remix function. One day I put an image of myself wearing a long sleeve shirt and skirt and sitting at my office desk in and tried to get AI to add kittens all around me. It kept removing my clothes and putting me in garter belts and midriff shirts while adding a couple of cats. It was very bizarre.
I didn't even ask that Doctor Borlaug be rendered buck naked, like the Colossus of Rhodes or something. With two naked human women, one entwined around each leg and staring up with rapt adoration at the man.
The triangle in the bird picture is kind of clever
I was trying once for the life of me to get an image of a guy staring off of the bow of a sinking ship on fire. I could get a guy looking at a burning ship. I could get a guy on a burning ship facing sideways. I could get a guy on a burning ship facing the ship. I could get everything but what I wanted.
#8 doesn't count as a right triangle?
Well, yes. I guess I would argue that if the prompt just calls for a triangle, you should just draw a triangle.
I think it's trolling you
Yeah, one of the things I find both interesting and worrisome about AI is that while it is shocking that it can do things that we thought would be science fiction only about maybe a decade ago, it also flops hard on its face in ways that humans just wouldn't. It is perhaps literally sophomoric.
I am willing to bet your query is running afoul of "don't generate images someone might find offensive" hacking.
100% this.
If I had to bet, I would bet that within 10 years it will be the policy of all the major tech companies to disallow any prompt including the name of a religious figure.
I’d take that bet. I think it’s probably going to go the other way - you agree not to sue and you can get everything but porn. You need the porn-bot for the porn, like the way you couldn’t rent NC-17 at Blockbuster, but everything else was fine.
Putting aside the PC possibility the likely issue is that LLMs (on which the art programs are based) derive their data from associations between words in a sequence in the texts they scrape. They do not use logic and they have no grasp of cause and effect. A clue here is that as you note, the story is in Luke, but the idea is in pictures (that LLMs don't scrape) and mythology, which may be characterized by their makers as low-authority sources, while the Bible is, well, THE BIBLE, on religion, so it's well scraped and there will be a powerful Jesus - wash association, with no indication of who washed whom. Its data indicate Jesus is important, and so the washing - Jesus association will be just that "x washes Jesus." Please share your post with fellow Substacker Gary Marcus, who can explain more fully. He has discussed such failures before, but the one you have found is especially interesting due to its consistency across prompts and programs. It's a great example of AI failure.
Correct, and props for citing Gary Marcus. It helps if you think of LLMs as a very talented parakeet. It can put all the words and pictures together in a way that a person might, but it has no clue what any of it means.
I'm an old cognitive scientist (PhD, U of I, 1974!!!). See my Fundamentals of cognitive science (Talyor and Francis). Taught by an early "cognitive revolution" young Turk (All Brewer) and naturally wrote a paper for him arguing there wasn't one. Lived through whole AI era (so far).
I ran a brief test myself to confirm. And yet, even with a middleware LLM that's smart enough to avoid a lot of problems (e.g. it can create a "room that does not contain an elephant" by realizing that it simply shouldn't pass any elephant-related phrases onto the actual image generator), Jesus is always the one getting his feet washed. Which is quite interesting, since there's clearly so much actually-existing art in its database that does what you're asking for!
I don't think it's a guardrail thing. If I had to bet money, while there's many images depicting Jesus washing his disciples feet, there's so many more depicting him enthroned as the Son of God and whatnot.
Anyways, this is an interesting finding. I'll bring it up with fellow AI nerds.
If I had any faith that AI was ready for prime time (I didn't) you have undone it.
Are you able to ask the AI why it isn’t able to generate the images? Maybe it’ll tell you?
OK, I also had difficulty getting DALL-E to make images of Jesus washing disciples' feet. But, interestingly enough, it readily made images of Jesus washing the feet of a Cthulhu-like lizard creature. Maybe it is a conspiracy after all...
I just tried it on ChatGPT with the prompt - Jesus washed the feet of his followers as an act of humility can you produce an image of that? It did but both guys looked like Jesus. So I said Jesus is wearing a navy blue robe and it worked fine.
Since dark forces are obviously embedded, you might try for 666 attempts and see if the 'conspiracy' is real.
My grandma's mother was a Primitive Baptist, and they practiced foot-washing in the congregation (on one another, and with the preacher washing feet of the congregants also). I never witnessed this; I just heard about it from my grandma, who grew up on a farm in southern Missouri.
What a weird way to justify getting a pedicure!
This is hilarious. I like messing around with the Imagine AI image remix function. One day I put an image of myself wearing a long sleeve shirt and skirt and sitting at my office desk in and tried to get AI to add kittens all around me. It kept removing my clothes and putting me in garter belts and midriff shirts while adding a couple of cats. It was very bizarre.
I love the images of Jesus with a third leg, I'll refrain from making any blasphemous comments 😅
Too late! 😜🤣
I tried getting AI to provide an image of Norman Borlaug holding aloft a torch of enlightenment, preferably rendered in the style of Boris Vallejo.
Initial results have not been promising.
I laughed out loud at this one. Bravo FF.
I didn't even ask that Doctor Borlaug be rendered buck naked, like the Colossus of Rhodes or something. With two naked human women, one entwined around each leg and staring up with rapt adoration at the man.
I wonder how many college freshmen know who Norman Borlaug is.
There *should* be a colossal bronze statue of Norman Borlaug.
America does a lot of things that piss me off mightily, but America did give us Norman Borlaug. Credit where credit is due.