[techdragon]

It’s all well and good to mention great artists and such. But it’s a bad comparison, this is about a tool that is conceptually limited, it’s something art has never had before. We didn’t have paint brushes that wouldn’t let you use them to paint a nude portrait or spray cans that refused to let you use them do create graffiti.

This artistic tool is built to prevent you trying to create content containing certain concepts which is a fundamental new factor in how artistic tools shape the art that is created with them.

And in case my viewpoint isn’t clear, I don’t think it’s a good thing, and that we should not allow it to become normal. I don’t object to its existence, because I understand corporate politics and how it leads to this. But this sort of crippled tool has all the concerning potentials of “newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984, except to art not to language.

[visarga]

Blame that to the harsh criticism these models get on reception. If you say "picture of a doctor" and the output does not cover all races and genders with equal probability, then it's biased. If you say "John wants to become a *" and it fills in stereotypical male dominated jobs, then it's biased.

[ralfd]

> But it’s a bad comparison, this is about a tool that is conceptually limited, it’s something art has never had before. We didn’t have paint brushes that wouldn’t let you use them to paint a nude portrait or spray cans that refused to let you use them do create graffiti.

But is the comparison to 'art' apt?

The platonic ideal is that this will work like the holodeck from the Enterprise, but the skill is all in the machine, there is no effort or skill for the consumer aside from the decision what she wants to see.

I can enter "monkey on a bicycle" in the Google image search and Google shows me pictures of monkeys on bikes. Dalle works exactly the same. Is Googles image search for that reason like a paint brush? Should it make illegal content available? I don't think so, it is a content service. A future Dalle-22 may be virtually indistinguishable from Youtube or Pornhub and A) it should be able decide what it wants to be and B) be bound by the same laws like youtube or pornhub.

[techdragon]

The skill is in providing the inputs that produce output pleasing to the audience. To use another Star Trek analogy, “Tea” isn’t the same as “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” by using more specific inputs you “cook” with the replicator.

This is the way it’s an artistic tool. You can say “monkey on a bicycle” and sure you get it randomly generating stuff, but if I ask for “capuchin monkey riding a red schwin bicycle with whitewall tires and a basket on the front handlebars” I’ve used the tool to craft a specific image I’ve constructed in my imagination, it becomes a tool to take what I have imagined and realise it, it’s an artistic tool just like the photoshop contextual fill tool is an art tool, just way more advanced.

As for future iterations… I don’t see any reason to assume that “Dall-E 22” or even “Dall-E 44” will somehow gain sentience and have tastes or be capable of deciding what content it want to produce for us. The “Tastes” of this model are determined by its training data, as is what it is capable of generating, you mentioned PornHub and that’s a great example, no matter how good the model gets at generating photorealistic things from descriptions, if they don’t include anything in the training data that’s labeled as “dildo” then the mode will have no way of knowing what to generate and will just produce randomised nonsense… so again you would be forced to use it as an artistic tool, to describe the scene constructively like they do with their dead horse example, “horse sleeping in a lake of red liquid” produced an image that looked like a dead horse in a lake of blood. If you have to do this then you are “painting” a scene by writing an elaborate description of everything in it and are using the model as an artistic tool in order to produce the visual image you want.