> Why this test? Because pelicans are hard to draw, bicycles are hard to draw, pelicans can’t ride bicycles... and there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task.
At this juncture I'm left wondering why competing AI labs wouldn't train for this now well known "test".
Graphically perfect, but content-wise nonsense. The pelican's center of gravity is clearly behind the wheel. It needs to be above or very slightly ahead of the wheel.
The length of the pedals keeps changing, and you'll notice that neither of the pedals actually rotates around the hub: consistent with your point about the center of gravity being too far back, the circle the pedals are making is also shifted back too far.
Still impressed. And, to be honest, I don't think that this problem matter much. Physical accuracy is very nice, but for example is not the most important aspect when I watch a fantasy movie. Or even a scifi one.
This is really my biggest worry when it gets to consumer AI. People already have a hard time informing themselves properly. Now we have technology that just boosts the already existing confirmation bias people have. It's sickening.
That's not how the human mind works. People still get skewed views on body standards even when they know that what they are looking at is biased and/or photoshopped, for example. When an AI fake stirs emotions just right, half the people will not even care about the truth.
At that point their ground truth is completely skewed (already for some folk), everything is relative. Some of them will probably die off in self-induced Darwin award winning ways, but sadly certain skewed world views may persist.
No, it will just become like in the Soviet system - people will not believe anything anymore, and become disillusioned and just not care about anything other than their immediate surroundings. That's what being innundated with fake/exaggerated information results in. People don't know what to believe because they're seeing/hearing everything, and bits will be retained, but in general there will be a "this is too much, I can't keep up, who even knows, shrug".
My generation will be the new fox news boomers, but instead of Fox news it will be ChatGPT and Claude telling them that Israel is the greatest country in the world and if you disagree you must be an antisemite.
It’s the opposite, non-creatives (if such roles even exist in those industries) should be worried. All those models offset technical skills, allowing to get from idea to implementation through a different route (which can be easier or harder depending on idea and model - good luck tweaking that pelican’s exact pose and movements to match your imagination precisely). Nothing touches creativity, not even in the slightest.
But there’s a lot of panicking, fear-mongering and all sorts of nonsense around this whole subject.
My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name.
The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.
What's the problem? If I enjoy some show, material or text, if it brings me value or a brief moment of happiness, I could care less if it was made by an AI or a human.
This racism against AI-generated stuff has to stop. If not, we'll have a butlerian jihad on our hands that will set back prosperity, development and science for decades, perhaps centuries.
People mention the artists... ohh, boohoo... either do it on your free time, improve your performance and selling skills or move to another job.
It's not my job to slave away only so that artists can day dream and produce stuff that no one cares about.
I think we need to start separating such concepts like entertainment from the ones of enjoyment, fascination, function, interest, satisfaction, beauty and the sublime a bit more. Art theory literally has books on these things, as they all fall under the topic of aesthetics. Do you really enjoy a frozen pizza from the oven at home in the same way as a freshly made pizza from an authentic pizza oven?
I always care about the processes involved, especially if any human work is involved, from all its accuracies to its errors. For me, interesting things happen while we balance our understandings with a certain amount of holism and a certain amount of reductionism. Putting it on either side of the scale, like your holistic statements, is just pure ideology, and that doesn't hold any merit in reality and is honestly just bland, repetitive and boring.
I think the elderly are particularly vulnerable. I also have at least one family member whose social media feed is 100% slop, they are blissfully unaware, and if you told them, they wouldn’t believe you.
When advertising agencies for example see that their copywriter can go from idea to concept with a video generator instead of engaging an animator, they’ll simply cut the middleman who used to create that animation for them and use the tool instead, even if the content isn’t as good (though the quality of this one is really pretty good, there are obvious problems). They’ll happily accept mediocrity to save money.
People will still create adverts but quality and creativity will go down and a lot of jobs are going to be suddenly displaced.
Does "creative" mean that you are creative at coming up with ideas or does it mean that you are artistic and can create stuff?
I suppose it is more the latter, and it's the artistic people who create stuff who will suffer. The ones coming up with ideas, but previously couldn't create becasuse they lacked skill might win thanks to AI.
Coming up with ideas is easy, creating and putting in the effort is hard (until we had AI).
Probably the value of created stuff will go down rapidly because there will be so much of it.
In a serious creative tool you would also want a lot more creative input. At a minimum the ability to steer the animation with skeletons that feed into a control net, or something like that. And the ability to control the look and feel and create much more consistent characters. Both things that exist in good tooling, but both things that create work that will keep animators employed. But it will dramatically reduce the number of animators needed to reach a given level of "good enough".
And looking at the trajectory of the animation industry, I don't think increases in productivity will be used to raise the quality of the animation if the alternative is to just pay fewer animators
Yes sure if you look closely it’s slop, but a huge number of companies and advertisers just don’t care (and they feel the same about their social media content, blogs and yes code) - they will attempt to cut corners where they can to the detriment of true artists.
But yes, for anyone who does this for a living there will be obvious deficiencies, esp when you try to do something truly novel, intentional and interesting and don’t quite want what it produces.
But in this area they have made quite a lot of progress.
Google/Gemini has pretty impressive audio visual capabilities. I tried to have Claude add mulch to a landscape picture and it looked like someone hit it with the orange spray paint tool in MS Paint. Nano Banana actually produced something fairly realistic
Willison chose this task because (unlike actual images of pelicans) is was clearly not in training data, but could be reasoned about and composed from what's there. But just like those "how many golf balls can you fit in a 747?" interview questions, it should now be retired.
Thank you for the reply. Would something like a Squirrel flying a hangglider as an SVG be a good new test? Or would that be indirectly in the training data too?
> Why this test? Because pelicans are hard to draw, bicycles are hard to draw, pelicans can’t ride bicycles... and there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task.
At this juncture I'm left wondering why competing AI labs wouldn't train for this now well known "test".