Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by recuter 1532 days ago
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.

2 comments

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
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.

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.
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.