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by ethanwillis 860 days ago
The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

2 comments

In what sense is a novel, never-before-seen image that comes out of DALLĀ·E 3 "encoded in" in the system? The image may be, in a sense, encoded in the latent space of images, but so is every image (of the same dimensions) that ever has been or will be.
The images generated are based on two things:

1). the code within the systems

2). the data entered into the system.

Those images are the result of how the data is processed by the code. Even if you put in a random number generator, the code processes those numbers based on it internal code constraints.

Now a well designed and built code base may be able to generate every image of the same dimensions. You can certainly write code that can exhaustively generate every possible image, but the question here is whether this exhaustive generation is intelligent.

This isn't really true except in the most reductive sense.

If you ask for a picture of Shakespeare dressed as Spiderman reading a McDonald's advert on the moon, no one has programmed that and the fact it knows these individual concepts is no different to the fact a human has seen them too.

> The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

The laws of physics encode every motion and interaction of every particle.

None of those fundamental laws directly says "water is wet".

> I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

You see it every time you use a machine learning system. Even the simplest models, say a linear regression line in a spreadsheet, "learn" from the data, not from the code.