[tianqi]

I've seen many comments describing the "horse riding man" example as extremely bizarre (which it actually is), so I'd like to provide some background context here. The "horse riding man" is a Chinese internet meme originating from an entertainment awards ceremony, when the renowned host Tsai Kang-yong wore an elaborate outfit featuring a horse riding on his back[1]. At the time, he was embroiled in a rumor about his unpublicized homosexual partner, whose name sounded "Ma Qi Ren" which coincidentally translates to "horse riding man" in Mandarin. This incident spread widely across Chinese internet and turned into a meme. So they used "horse riding man" as an example isn't entirely nonsensical, though the image per se is undeniably bizarre and carries an unsettling vibe.

[1] The photo of the outfit: https://share.google/mHJbchlsTNJ771yBa

[cubefox]

While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.

This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.

And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.

[vessenes]

Interesting background! Prompts like this also test the latent space of the image generator - it’s usually the other way round, so if you see a man on top of a horse, you’ve got a less sophisticated embedding feeding the model. In this case, though, that’s quite an image to put out to the interwebs. I looked to see what gender the horse was.

EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out

[yorwba]

There's also the "horse riding astronaut" challenge in image generation: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut-redu...

[laughingcurve]

Gary Marcus is not the man to be looking to on this topic

[yorwba]

Gary Marcus successfully wrote an article about getting image generation models to show a horse riding an astronaut, which is all I needed him to do. (Actually he wrote two, but this one felt more concise.) Take it as an existence proof, not an endorsement.

[observationist]

Just like a basilisk, if you never refer to him again, he fades away and doesn't bug people anymore. Let him fight through whatever he needs to if he ever bothers coming up with anything the rest of the world needs to hear; until then, we can enjoy the peace and quiet.

[AlphaAndOmega0]

Gary Marcus successfully predicted all ten of the one AI Winters.

He also claimed that LLMs were a failure because of prompts that GPT 3.5 couldn't parse, after the launch of GPT-4,which handled them with aplomb.

[rahimnathwani]

This is fascinating!

From the article it seems the name is 马启仁, not 马骑人 so the guy's name sounds the same as 'horse riding man', but that's not a literal translation of his name.

[klipt]

Right, a homophone

[bogzz]

Fun fact, the Serbian parliament building has two statues of horses riding men in front of it.

Which is really apt because in Serbian "konj", or horse, is a colloquial word for moron. So, horses riding people is a perfect representation of the reality of the Serbian government.

Another fun fact, the parliament building in HL2's City 17 was modelled from that building.

[djhn]

I was curious enough to fact check this. The statue does look like two horses wrestling or even mounting two men, but here’s what the city’s tourism website says about it:

[the famous sculptor Toma Rosandić] named this composition of bronze horses and their tamers “Black horses at play, and with them great heroes”, saying that the horses represent strength, and men tame and control that strength.

[bogzz]

I wasn't trying to imply that my interpretation of the art is the correct one.

It's just what I think of every time I see those statues.

[djhn]

It’s a valid interpretation. Fact checking may be the wrong word choice and if it wasn’t clear your story passed the fact check: there are indeed two statues, just like you described (with some margin for interpretation). I was just curious to see this postmodern sounding piece of art and it turned out to be a pair of fairly traditional bronze statues.

[Lerc]

On the topic of modern Chinese culture, Is there the same hostility towards AI generated Imagery in China as there seems to be in America?

For example I think there would be a lot of businesses in the US that would be too afraid of backlash to use AI generated imagery for an itinerary like the one at https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate-overseas.aliyuncs.com/Qwe...

[tianqi]

Since China has a population of 1.4 billion people with vastly differing levels of cognition, I find it difficult to claim I can summarize "modern Chinese culture". But within my range of observation, no. Chinese not only have no hostility toward AI but actively pursues and reveres it with fervor. They widely perceive AI as an advanced force, a new opportunity for everyone, a new avenue for making money, and a new chance to surpass others. At most, some of the consumers might associate businesses using AI generated content with a budget-conscious brand image, but not hostile.

[Lerc]

>Since China has a population of 1.4 billion people with vastly differing levels of cognition, I find it difficult to claim I can summarize "modern Chinese culture"

Ha! An American would have no such qualms.

[idiotsecant]

Well, they would modify it slightly to claim "real American culture is..." In general, the range of 'real' America is about 300 miles, in my experience.

[SchemaLoad]

A lot of the hostility in the west likely comes from most of the CEO talk about how they want to use this tool to make you obsolete and homeless. The Chinese models have largely just been released for free for anyone to use.

[yorwba]

There's definitely some hostility: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/A5shO-6nZIXZvJUEzrx03Q

[yieldcrv]

> "Why did such a strange metaphor like 'the sound of an electrocardiogram machine moving paper' appear in this story that had nothing to do with medicine?"

this is sending me, I don't know what's funnier, this translation being accurate or inaccurate

[vintermann]

I assumed it was something like that. With all the (impressive) Chinese text in these examples, this definitively wasn't catering to foreign audiences. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's interesting, it's not something we see a lot.

[TacticalCoder]

Very interesting! What's weird though is that the chinese do not even pretend: every single picture has asian-looking people generated.

But on the one picture that honestly looks like a man getting ass-raped by a horse, it's a white man.

I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).

White people are a minority on earth and anti-white racism sure seems to be alive and well (btw my family is of all the colors and we speak three languages at home, so don't even try me).

[queenkjuul]

You're crazy, white people are in tons and tons of ads in the West.

[dashundchen]

> I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).

What are you talking about? 1. This is such a strange thing to fixate on and 2. whatever commercials I am seeing that aren't blocked still have white people in them

[popalchemist]

Super tone-deaf and inappropriate. Not realizing how it would read to the uninformed is a bad look. Myopic at best, openly hostile toward the west along racial lines at worst.

[queenkjuul]

Well i found the funniest comment in this thread, at least

[badhorseman]

Why not ask for simply a man or even an Han man given the race of Tsai Kang-yong. Why a white man and why a man wearing medieval clothing. Gives your head a wobble.

[DustinEchoes]

Yep, it’s the only image on the entire page with a non-Chinese person in it. Given the prompt, the message is clear.

[yorwba]

The message is "We watched Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and liked the medieval aesthetic enough to emulate it."

[badhorseman]

remind me of the bit of lord of the rings where muscular horses dominate European peasant men, as per the prompt translation.

[yorwba]

Yes, in those movies, the hot white guys (and sometimes girls) usually ride on top of the muscular horses. So when you want to show a horse riding a man as a visual gag, why not make the man a hot white guy with a gruff beard?

You act as though they first decided to make an image representing Westerners and then chose that particular scene as an intentional insult, but you need to consider that they likely made thousands of test images, most of which were just playing around with the model's capabilities and not specifically crafted for the announcement post.

So why did this one get picked? I think it boils down to the visual gag being funny and the movie-like quality.

[badhorseman]

If it was a an elf, knight or some sort of fantasy warrior sure with a comedic prompt sure, That is not the case. If you translate the prompt as people have here, you can see what was typed in,'Subdued white man' under 'muscular horse'. Who is the mare in the picture or even the gelding. If I was to do the visual gag it would be a knight or a a warrior not a peasant, there a no peasants in lord of the rings and very few medieval fantasy has peasant of any kind.

[popalchemist]

Racial/cultural tension is part of the context in which this image is appearing. Not only because of historical tensions, but because this image appears as part of this generation's Manhattan Project style arms race toward AGI and global dominance. Your denial of that is a reflection of your own ignorance.