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0 pointsrecuter3y ago0 comments

How do you propose we talk about what it is doing if not by using the terminology from the human editing process it is replacing? I'm struggling to express things.

My issue is that it appears to not be possible to explain what the AI is doing at all. If you could, you'd be able to actually control the output. And talking about how the model is trained is interesting but not an answer.

Of course there is a superimposing step, that just means it adds its layer on top of the photo you provide. That's all it means and that's literally what it is doing, that's all I tried to say, heh.

> If you pay attention to all the corgi examples, the sofa texture changes in each of them

Yes, exactly!

> This is far from a 'cool trick' and many of those images would take hours for a human to reproduce

OK, fair enough. I'll try to be more clear:

It is very cool and not a trick and the results are fantastic if you got out exactly what you wanted. Amazing time saver. And if not? Right now this is totally hit or miss.

It would also take hours for a human to reproduce a Vermeer and this no doubt has those in its training set and would style-transfer unto a corgi instantly. Certainly faster than Vermeer himself could do it.

But Vermeer could explain how he came up with the style, his techniques, choices, 'etc.

It reads like the advance here is that it will usually synthesize something that looks great but not always the thing that you want. With no recourse.

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gwillen3y ago

> Of course there is a superimposing step, that just means it adds its layer on top of the photo you provide. That's all it means and that's literally what it is doing, that's all I tried to say, heh.

It is not doing this. You are wrong. You are mistaken. You are confused. You do not understand what is happening.

(People have tried to tell you this several times, but you're not listening. shrug One more can't hurt.)

recuterOP3y ago

I am specifically referring to the flamingo example: "DALL·E 2 can make realistic edits to existing images from a natural language caption."

You provide the background image and a text prompt and it doodles on top of the image you provided as per their demonstration. I wasn't referring to the other examples down the page where it conjures up a brand new image from scratch based on your image input.

It is great that you can tell it to add a flamingo and it fits into the background you provide nicely due to the well tuned style transfer. That part is cool. And it is impressive that sometimes the flamingo it adds is reflected in the water. But sometimes it isn't reflected. And it isn't up to you, it is up to it. And you can't tell it to add a reflection as a discrete step.

Look more carefully. This is more akin to a clipart finder, except if the clipart doesn't exist it uses the most similar thing in its training set to what it guesses you want as a starting point to synthesize new clipart from.

It doesn't add it in like an artist would and you can't control it at all. I don't know how to better express this.

This isn't unimpressive or un-useful but not quite as mind blowing on second glance.

visarga3y ago

That sounds like "humanity of the gaps", retreating in smaller and smaller human only spaces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

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astrange3y ago

> But Vermeer could explain how he came up with the style, his techniques, choices, 'etc.

Often they can't. Ramanujan couldn't explain how he solved math problems, for instance, and humans can forget their own history easily, or even forget how to do something consciously while still doing it through muscle memory.

An ML model wouldn't forget the same way, but it could just lie to you.

ricardobeat3y ago

Being opaque to human understanding is one of the downsides of existing AI/ML tech, for sure. Check out to the video in the page, and notice how the images transition from random color blobs to increasing detail - that's showing you how the image is being generated. It's a continuous process of trying to satisfy a prediction, there are no discrete editing steps.

The kind of tech you're imagining, where the computer has semantic understanding of what's in the picture, and is reproducing something based on a 3D scene, knowledge of physics, materials, etc is probably decades away. In that sense yes, this is just a 'trick'.

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