[NichoPaolucci]

As I looked through the images I was unimpressed entirely, at first. But, then I started thinking, these look a little... "childish" to me.

Childish as in... A newish artist who is drawing a concept rather than light / forms (Which is something artists typically do as they understand drawing more and more).

The rose in the vase specifically - some models understood that there was supposed to be shading, reflections, the concept of refraction - others just drew "blue = glass" and "green = stem" and "red = rose".

Really odd to look at, considering if I saw any of these drawings from a human kid, I would say "good job buddy" and put it on the fridge. I'm expecting these to get better as models improve, and perhaps the artistic progression will be there along with it...

[jvanderbot]

I call this "symbol drawing". Beginning artists do this. They think "This is a head, a head is round. This is where eyes go, eyes are shaped like this", and the whole thing ends up being a collage of symbols vs a representation of the space and experience of viewing a face. When I used to be OK at drawing, it was because I forced myself to use touch instead of sight to compose images. So weird to explain, but I'd feel the 3d to get the lighting and such better.

A lot of art that someone smarter than me told me to appreciate seems to follow the pattern of hitting the space and/or experience while minimizing the use of symbols. Impressionistic paintings esp avoid symbols IMHO, while bizzaro picassos abuse symbols outright and still hit the experience they are going for.

[userbinator]

Really odd to look at, considering if I saw any of these drawings from a human kid, I would say "good job buddy" and put it on the fridge.

The Grok ones in particular gave me that thought. Most of them really look like what a kid would do when given the same tools, while the other models' output have distinctly more "AI-ness" to them (for lack of a better term.)

[MarcScott]

Grok consistently draws images that, if I were its parent, I would refuse to put on the fridge door.

[ralusek]

What's interesting is that the way in which they're childish is actually extremely human. In fact, one of the ways that you're often taught to draw more realistically is to stop thinking of the concepts as icons you're drawing the outlines of, and instead sort of blur your eyes and see things as they are: hues and values. In other words, become a camera or a printer that has no idea what it's capturing or printing other than a grid of values. That is how you achieve realism.

The fact that it has clearly iconified these concepts in its mind and is tracing the outlines of the things it thinks/expects to go where is very human.

[cj]

Parrots can also sound extremely human, but it’s only mimicry.

How do we know the difference?

[elcritch]

Yes, but Parrots don't mimic the stages of learning speech development like children do. They just memorize a phrase.

These SOTA LLMs aren't trying to mimic existing children's drawings, but interestingly they're following somewhat similar progression that human children do as they develop.

[diegof79]

They don’t develop. We should stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.

AI labs are improving the ML techniques used to build better models; it’s a big difference.

[perching_aix]

That's very clearly what they're referring to also, or at least I certainly doubt this would be lost on them, or most anyone here, at this point.

[diegof79]

I imagine that it should be clear to everyone here now, until I read threads like this comparing child development to the advances in LLM building.

It’s like saying that a new M-Apple chip developed like a child. There is a clear tendency to give human like attributes to LLMs, probably caused by the terms used in ML: training, learning, etc.

[ETH_start]

Isn't LLM training, the development?

[ipaddr]

LLMs come complete they don't train on the fly based on interaction with the world. LLMs are wikipedia if they stopped allowing edits and all of the previous edits are training.

[tadfisher]

The LLMs themselves are not doing the developing or learning.

[ben_w]

Both statements are true without contradiction.

A specific model develops as it passes through training.

AI labs change the architecture between models to allow them to surpass the previous models' best scores.

It's also going to keep being a hard sell to say "stop anthropomorphizing LLMs" when the models anthropomorphise themselves.

But besides that: Yeah, sure, they're not human, they're a cargo-cult mimicry of by and of minds that popped out of evolution doing gradient decent on intergenerational survivability. So what? Still interesting when the result of such cargo-culting incidentally echoes what our natural-selection-not-engineered moist electrochemistry happens to do.

[richk449]

If you want to know if something is a human or a parrot, you could give it a paint brush and ask it to paint the Mona Lisa.

[saidnooneever]

you can also use your eyes, hands or other senses :').

reminds me of those jokes?

what is difference between a parot and a human? silence rly? u cant tell the difference between a parot and a human? :')

[CamperBob2]

What's your parrot's take on the Jacobian Conjecture?

[cj]

My parrot doesn't have a take, but it sure can repeat one it heard on Reddit.

[CamperBob2]

So, you're saying that it was somebody on Reddit who disproved the conjecture, and not a "stochastic parrot?"

[cj]

You asked for my parrot's take, not how to disprove a conjecture.

Edit: And not a great example to use to prove human-ness considering humans didn't disprove the conjecture?

[NichoPaolucci]

Yes - precisely what I was getting at with the childish comment.

It felt a bit surreal to see a machines rendition of something that very closely maps to a younger human as they explore + understand more about the world. Scary, even (to me). This was the first time I’ve seen LLM output and thought “wow, maybe it is learning.”

[danesparza]

I took the same prompts to Gemini and was stunned by the results. The are completely different from the images shown in the article (and genuinely good art pieces that were generated).

[jstanley]

Were you using the Gemini image generator though? The article is about using LLMs to do drawing via tool calls.