September 29, 2022

"Seemingly superficial generations like an 'avocado chair' showed that OpenAI had built a system that is able to apply the characteristics of an avocado..."

"... to the form factor and the function of a chair.... The avocado-chair image could be key to building AGI that understands the world the same way humans do. Whether the system sees an avocado, hears the word 'avocado,' or reads the word 'avocado,' the concept that gets triggered should be exactly the same, she said. Since DALL-E’s outputs are in images, OpenAI can view how the system represents concepts."

From "AI can now create any image in seconds, bringing wonder and danger" (WaPo). 

DALL-E is now open to all, without a waiting list, so prepare your requests. I'd put my name on the waiting list, but now that I can waltz right in along with anybody and everybody, I can't think of anything I want AI to turn into an image for me. A few weeks ago, I was interested in a TikTokker who was using DALL-E to generate images. I clicked the "follow" button and caused him to come up in my scrolling, but in the last couple weeks, as soon as I see him I immediately swipe him up out of my view. I just don't care what the computer coughed up. It was pointless weirdness.

But if you get the right request, it might be vaguely intriguing:

40 comments:

Kate said...

I was just watching a Corridor Crew YouTube last night that utilized DALL-E. They uploaded snapshots to a companion program that translated the photos for DALL-E, which then created great likenesses done in whatever style CC asked for. Like them, I found it thrilling to consider gaming and animation possibilities that could star . . . Me. Me as classic Wonder Woman. Me as Commander Shepard. Me as Kratos. (No, haha. That's the one CC made and it was excellent.)

Kay said...

I’ve been having a lot of fun with DALL-E, but it is difficult to control. If you have something specific in mind, the app might not be able to execute it. You have to be open to the spontaneity of the thing. The “mistakes” can lead you in a newer better direction. It’s a very fun tool.

Christopher B said...

Except when most people hear 'avocado chair' I can pretty much guarantee they aren't thinking of an actual avocado put in blender with a chair. They are thinking of a chair colored in a hideous green shade, and the context is going to have to make clear if that is not the case. There is no 'triggering of a concept that should be exactly the same' in *all cases*. The meaning of each instance of an 'avocado' is highly context specific.

Achilles said...

They are slow pedaling this stuff to inure people to the threat.

The window for the Butlerian Jihad is closing.

Joe Smith said...

That avocado chair is pretty good...as good as what I see in museums.

Pablo PicAIsso...

mikee said...

The furry teacup remains a work of art to be venerated for its novel juxtaposition of texture versus function, of course. I bid $150 for the avocado chair. And I will wait for the call from the Met.

Lincolntf said...

Cool app, thanks for the link. My first few attempts were underwhelming, but I'm going to get the hang of it eventually.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

I was picturing a wrinkly dark green bean bag, which avocados can impersonate if they are ripened too much. That output looked like something my 3rd-grade self would have done to combine attributes. I don't know if that AI is scary or laughable.

mtp said...

If you understand how these AIs work, you will understand how far from "understanding" this is. 2D images are embarrassingly easy for computers to work on--they are literally grids of integers.

In layman's terms, these programs do nothing more than change a pixel and check the effect on a reward function. If the reward goes up, keep the change, goes down, reject the change.

Beyond that, there are complex and ingenious optimizations such as adversarial networks, to train and speed up the process. But there is absolutely no intelligence here, no understanding, nor anything that could be mistaken for intelligence by a person familiar with the mechanics. These are advanced hill-climbing algorithms.

Bill Peschel said...

Midjourney is another AI art program that was used to interpret lines from Mr. Blue Sky.

JK Brown said...

So AI can now do "art" at the level of (who was the soup can guy from the '60s?).

stlcdr said...

With the proliferation of art, at what point does it stop being art?

PigHelmet said...

Dall-E is good at recreating artistic styles and mediums, so long as there are plenty of accurately labeled examples available on the internet. It’s eerily good at mimicking the style of R Crumb, for instance. “Mona Lisa in the style of R Crumb.” You might also add other terms to the prompt, to reinforce the effect you want. “1970s, underground comix, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat,” and so on.

You can also upload your own photos and, by going into edit mode, erase part of the image and ask the AI to replace what you eliminated with whatever you wish. It often does quite a good job of, for instance, changing people’s clothing or eliminating unwanted elements from a photograph. (That’s called in-painting.) It can also, of course, add fantastical elements. A sea-monster in the lake.

Additionally, you can use what’s called out-painting to ask the AI to add elements to an image outside the existing frame, extending the image in often-convincing ways. OpenAI’s striking example takes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and expands it to panoramic size, revealing her imagined surroundings as they might have been painted by Vermeer.

Personally, I prefer MidJourney. It’s less buttoned-up. And Stable Diffusion can run on a private machine with a decent GPU and doesn’t censor prompts or output. Not that anybody here would create NSFW AI pictures.

Lurker21 said...

I am reminded of all the articles that I never understood that tried to teach me that for topologists or topographers everything was like a donut.

I guess for AI, as for topologists and topographers, avocados and chairs are the same thing.

tommyesq said...

Looks like a child's potty trainer sitting on its side.

tommyesq said...

Midjourney is another AI art program that was used to interpret lines from Mr. Blue Sky.

Odd the way it cooks up scary Haloween-y images for "hey hey hey."

n.n said...

Walnut chairs are good for the back.

Lincolntf said...

My first real success, as in I would hang it if it was real, used the search terms "Edward Hopper style painting of a baseball game at Fenway Park". 2 of the 4 results were really great.

RMc said...

I tried to create "Donald Trump selling pizzas", but it responded "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy." Hm.

RMc said...

I tried to create "Donald Trump selling pizzas", but it responded "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy." Hm.

RMc said...

I tried to create "Donald Trump selling pizzas", but it responded "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy." Hm.

RMc said...

I tried to create "Donald Trump selling pizzas", but it responded "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy." Hm.

typingtalker said...

DALL-E is a tool and like most tools requires practice and skill to operate. Interesting and useful but not the magic that many expect.

TwinsLawyer said...

Just read two articles today about DALL-E's failures:
See https://spectrum.ieee.org/openai-dall-e-2

Basically, it doesn't understand letters/words, scientific concepts, or faces.

For a more humorous take on AI's failings: https://www.cracked.com/article_35364_5-hyped-up-ai-stories-that-secretly-make-ai-look-really-dumb.html

Saint Croix said...

alien about to attack nightmare scenario

(I think Blogger did that one)

Saint Croix said...

impressionist cobalt blue

angel of death

Saint Croix said...

AI robot armageddon

blogger eating itself

Saint Croix said...

so far ninjas are a problem

beautiful blonde woman ninja

Ninja assassin Monet painting (2nd one is cool)

Saint Croix said...

scary pirate raiding a ship was kind of a disaster

R2D2 on death star somehow ended up on Tatooine

death star, bitch, death star!

worse genie ever

Saint Croix said...

Dr. Strangelove is kind of weird

Saint Croix said...

Can you guess who this is?

Saint Croix said...

They're really censoring the AI robot.

Nothing sexual. Nothing political. Nothing violent.

When I do Madman breaking out of a prison I get a bunch of French mimes

Surreal seems to work better than realistic

Saint Croix said...

Should I be worried that AI can't count?

Van Gogh painting of six penguins

Saint Croix said...

I really like Monet painting of Jack the Ripper

Saint Croix said...

Krypto the superdog painted by Hopper

Krypto the superdog painted by Monet

Krypto the superdog painted by Rembrandt

Krypto the superdog painted by Edvard Munch

(I don't think AI knows Krypto the superdog)

Saint Croix said...

I am running out of free credits!

Degas painting of Albert Einstein in outer space

Saint Croix said...

my favorites so far...

Rembrandt painting of Buster Keaton

Picasso painting of Marilyn Monroe

Munch painting of Krypto the superdog

Monet painting of Jack the Ripper

Saint Croix said...

Mr. Blue Sky at 10:08

thanks Bill!

that was super cool

MikeD said...

From a link I sent Althouse last Sunday, which she' evidently ignored in favor of some WaPo puff piece. Oh well!
DALL-E depends on art already made, on photos already taken, aesthetic assumptions statistically derived, and a language—our language—formed over the centuries by acts of communication innumerable about whose nature the great machine knows nothing. It’s largely a cultural-mining operation with a clever assembly line on top. It’s perhaps no coincidence that its name refers to a famous practitioner of surrealism whose work was distinctively suited to reproductions (and look alike variations) on a singularly large scale.”

Saint Croix said...

2 more

flying rats versus ninja assassins in the future

giant eyeball over Tokyo