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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I have shown imagen (and dalle2) to a number of people now (non-tech, just everyday friends, family, co-workers) and I have been pretty stunned by the response I get from most people:

"Meh, that's kinda cool? I guess?" or "What am I looking at?"..."Ok? So a computer made it? That seems neat"

To me I am still trying to get my jaw off the floor from 2 months ago. But the responses have been so muted and shoulder shrugging that I think either I am missing something or they are missing something. Even really drilling in, practically shaking them "DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS A ORIGINAL IMAGE CONSTRUCTED ENTIRELY BY AN AI?!?!" and people just seem to see it as a party trick at best.

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I think I can explain this that for most people the whole world is basically magic anyway. They don’t understand any of the details about how any digital tech works so to them they have no framework for which things are impressive and which things are not. The just know that computers can do a great many things that they know nothing about. “Oh I can bank online? Ok.” “Oh, I can have the computer write my book report for me? Ok.” “Oh, this McDonalds is fully staffed by sentiment robots? Ok.”

This is the other side of the classic XKCD "Tasks" (https://xkcd.com/1425/).

A non-technical person in 2014 (when the above was originally published) would likely have the same conception of the difficulty of recognizing a bird from an image as they would in 2022, even though the task itself has gone from near-insurmountable to off-the-shelf-library in eight years.

Even as Imagen and Dall-E 2 amaze us today, these feats will likely be commonplace in a few years. The non-technical may have only a vague sense that their new TikTok filter is doing something that was impossible only a few years prior.

Exactly and I was thinking of that XKCD. Very much case in point, I have the Merlin Bird ID app which can determine species from ridiculously blurry photos and can also identify hundreds of birds from their calls alone in noisy environments. In 2014 I would have sworn this would be impossible.

The tooltip you get when you hover your cursor over the comic:

"In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it."

I'm working with his son Henry Minsky and other great people at Leela AI on that same old problem, applying hybrid symbolic-connectionist constructivist AI by combining neat neural networks with scruffy symbolic logic to understand video, and it's mind boggling what is possible now:

https://leela.ai/

>Our AI system, Leela, is motivated by intrinsic curiosity. Leela creates theories about cause and effect in her world, and then conducts experiments to test these theories. Leela can connect all her knowledge and use this network to make plans, reason about goals, and communicate using grounded natural language.

>Leela has at her core a hybrid symbolic-connectionist network. This means that she uses a dynamic combination of artificial neural networks and symbol networks to learn. Hybrid networks open the door to AI agents that can build their own abstractions on the fly, while still taking full advantage of the power of deep learning.

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

>Neats and scruffies: Neat and scruffy are two contrasting approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) research. The distinction was made in the 70s and was a subject of discussion until the middle 80s. In the 1990s and 21st century AI research adopted "neat" approaches almost exclusively and these have proven to be the most successful.

>"Neats" use algorithms based on formal paradigms such as logic, mathematical optimization or neural networks. Neat researchers and analysts have expressed the hope that a single formal paradigm can be extended and improved to achieve general intelligence and superintelligence.

>"Scruffies" use any number of different algorithms and methods to achieve intelligent behavior. Scruffy programs may require large amounts of hand coding or knowledge engineering. Scruffies have argued that the general intelligence can only be implemented by solving a large number of essentially unrelated problems, and that there is no magic bullet that will allow programs to develop general intelligence autonomously.

>The neat approach is similar to physics, in that it uses simple mathematical models as its foundation. The scruffy approach is more like biology, where much of the work involves studying and categorizing diverse phenomena.

We're looking for talented engineers and designers to help, including neats and scruffies working together!

https://leela.ai/jobs/

A pretty common generalization I've witnessed is many non technical people (even people who are tech savvy but have no CS background do this) is people assuming the feature that is in reality quite difficult to implement won't take much effort, and vice versa.

I think that hits home.

A lot of people would just answer something to the likes of "Well, they made The Matrix with a computer 20 years ago", and technically that's just as true.

From their remote viewpoint on what's happening in IT, the rest is an implementation detail to them.

"Oh, they have the internet on computers now!" Homer J Simpson.

That is exactly what Will Wright (the creator of SimCity and The Sims, and Robot Wars / Battle Bots contestant) was getting at when we made these one-minute robot reality videos about "Empathy" and "Servitude".

His idea was to probe just how much random people on the street (or in a diner) would believe about autonomous intelligent robots operating in the real world.

Of course we were actually hiding behind the scenes tele-operating the robots through hidden cameras and a wireless web interface, listening to what the people said and making the robots respond with a voice synthesizer and sound effects, clicking on pre-written phrases and typing ad-libbed responses.

Empathy (a broken down robot begs for help from passers by on the streets of Oakland):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE

Servitude (a robot waiter takes orders and serves food in a diner in Oakland, making stupid mistakes and asking for a good review):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg

All his robots aren't as harmless, non-violent, polite, and obsequious as those two. Here's an old interview with Will at Robot Wars 1997:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nmbs0WqDQM

Here is Super ChiaBot and her MiniBots, created by Will and his daughter Cassidy, getting its leaves shredded and body slammed at BattleBots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrArvRG2yQA

Here's a more recent video of Will throwing a tantrum about the failure of SimSandwich, destroying his old creations because they're pixely and poorly rendered, then complaining about how those jerks at EA hate him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-7F7s46-9A

I think if you've been paying attentiont to the space, this generation of image diffusion is shocking in how quickly it has improved on what we had a year ago.

But if you've never considered that a computer can produce an original image, this is just a new thing computers can do. OTOH I think it's also a lack of imagination in how useful this is, so far the output has been kind of random, so it seems a little gimmicky. Already "Parti" has gotten much closer to allowing a user to describe exactly what they want in the image, and as people start to see the use cases for them personally, it will hit them that they no longer have to hire someone, they can just type a request into a box.

I'm not sure there has been a period of more rapid development in DL than Diffusion Models (maybe transformers?). The next few years will be really interesting.

You can just type a request in the box if you don't particularly care what the result looks like and also don't care that some of the features might be copyrighted (since large models are quite capable of memorizing their training data.)

Asking for two different images in a series that have similar "art styles" is going to be enough work to still need a specialist aka an artist; it'll be most useful in cases you never would've bothered finding one before.

> Asking for two different images in a series that have similar "art styles" is going to be enough work to still need a specialist aka an artist

Running a separate style transfer network on the generated images is currently possible, although won't achieve the best possible results.

I wouldn't be surprised in the near future to see generation models that can take a text prompt and an image to mimic the style of, which could let it take style into account when generating the image rather than at just the surface level.

Since “style” isn’t at the surface level, you can’t take it into account with a single input. It means whatever the client wants it to mean. Getting an AI to do what you want there is still going to be a long conversation they won’t want to do.

It might (likely will be) easier to use the AI as a storyboard generator and have your in-house artists redraw it.

Its because people have been able to do this for years now, and so did you. You can try right now. Go to google, type "cat on a bicycle" and hit image search. TADA, computer made cats on bicycles images appear! Wheres the magic in that?

>THIS IS A ORIGINAL IMAGE

Yeah, about that. Ask it to draw you a fast inverse square root.

I love this comment, and I'd love to see an AI conjecture an explanation as to why I love it...

People dont care because all their text to image needs are well covered by Google Images.

Perhaps it's the combination of AI being so overhyped in the general public plus media that's already inundated with CGI, that it just doesn't blow them away?

I've made perhaps overly absolutist statements like "don't you see! this kills artists jobs!" and it was shrugged off as if I was insane. I probably could've phrased it differently, but to me this is game changing in several fields. Granted, it will open up a new field of "generative artists" but, having played with these things, this is a pretty trivial job, and their training nets are only going to get better.

I’ve had a lot of fun playing with Disco Diffusion prompts, but I agree that the people excited about “a generation of prompt artists” are a bit misguided. Soon an AI will emerge that can come up with “better” prompts than you, and the “art” of creating prompts will have a lower skill ceiling.

The GPT algorithms are actually pretty good at making detailed image generation prompts if you ask it to describe in detail the general idea you want.

Do you have a link to any papers about this? Would love to check them out

No, just playing around with dall-e mini (no access yet to anything else) and beta.openai.com's text-davinci-002 model. For instance, if I ask dall-e mini for "painting with dancers":

https://i.imgur.com/flXoTgZ.png

I can ask davinci-002 "Vivid description of a painting with dancers:" and get:

The painting is of two dancers in a passionate embrace, their bodies entwined as they move together in a sensual dance. The woman's dress is flowing and reveals her curves, while the man's shirt is open, revealing his muscular chest. They are surrounded by a crowd of people who are watching them with looks of admiration and desire. The painting is full of color and movement, and the dancers seem to be in a world of their own, lost in their passion for each other.

And then pass that to dall-e mini:

https://i.imgur.com/eOIQuPF.png

dall-e mini is sadly not quite up to the challenge, but it gives the generation a lot more detail. Some other examples:

"The painting is of two dancers in the middle of a dance. They are both wearing white, and their hair is flowing around them as they move. The background is a blur of color, and the light is shining on the dancers, making them look like they are in the spotlight."

https://i.imgur.com/ldktMHO.png

"The painting is full of energy and movement, with the dancers leaping and spinning around the stage. They are all wearing brightly coloured costumes, which stand out against the dark background. The light from the stage spotlight is shining on them, making them look even more vibrant. The whole scene is full of life and excitement."

https://i.imgur.com/1KFJbzJ.png

Like a neutral network just for making prompts that result in aesthetically pleasing Imagen images? And then maybe we can come up with a neutral net that can decide which pictures are good and which aren't. Then we can just have robots making art for the sake of consumption solely by robots.

It could also be used for more nefarious reasons like disinformation campaigns though... it will be interesting to see what the next few years have in store

You don't need good-looking pictures for propaganda. Old people (the main targets) believe literally anything they see on Facebook, especially if it confirms their priors aka fits their worldview, and prefer it to look bad because that's more authentic. For anyone else, the point is to make them disbelieve everything, not to believe you specifically.

To me, it paves the way for creative prototyping. I don't see this as a zero-sum game between artists and AI. Instead, I could see artists using this for some serious time saving, and leveraging that extra time and energy for creating better results.

Over a decade ago, Will Wright (of SimCity fame) faked conversational AGI robots in the streets and restaurants of Oakland. It consistently took people 2.4 seconds to go from “Oh look. The robots have arrived.” to “And, I’ll have fries with that.”

Hollywood and the media have taught the public that tech is literally magic and can do literally anything. “Anything” is expected and pedestrian.

I often think a similar thing about aliens. That is, instead of the panicking and hysteria or whatever that fiction imagines might accompany the discovery of aliens I fully expect that people will mostly go "Oh, neat. Aliens." And go on with their lives.

Well, I'm still in awe that I have a bunch of walls around me and can cover my body with clothes, or that I'm still alive after all this time, and that I can even rest most of the day and not spend body energy running after or from animals. Amazing stuff.

A program that transforms text to an image? Huh.

I find that most people are primarily driven by a need. You need food? Pick some berries. You need warmth? Start a fire.

When it comes to technology - especially advanced technology like Imagen - people don't see the value because they don't have a need associated with it.

I haven't gotten such dismissive responses, but probably only because those I'm inclined to share such things with are the exact kinds of people who'd be blown away by them, and immediately grasp the significance.

I couldn't convince my mother in law it was more impressive than photoshop.

Similarly, when I sometimes talk to people about AI (and AGI) and how it will change the world, people respond, meh, yeah ok, so what?

I've gotten a lot of "wow, that's cool!"s, which is a pretty fair response for a non-technical person if you ask me!

Non-techy people understandably don't have a grasp of the difficulty of (programming) tasks. I think that makes it hard for them to get amazed in cases like this.

https://xkcd.com/1425/

It's just an illustration of the fact that the average person doesn't give a sh*t about AI "art" and that it will have ~zero cost and ~zero value.

Treating Imagen as just an "AI art generator" is extremely short sighted. Sure, you could just try to sell the outputs directly. But the real value is using it to supplement larger works. No need for a stock photo subscription service if you can just generate them automatically. Don't need artists to create textures for your simple games. I can spin up a merch shop powered entirely by AI art and nobody would know. The marginal cost of creation is approaching zero.

And perhaps even more interestingly these things not only exist but there is competition in this space! Essentially unregulated competition as well (and likely for the next 10 years). The cost will be driven into the ground.

With the amount of context awareness this AI has, there’s nothing all that special about human “art” to be honest.

I am willing to bet that the revenue from AI-generated "art" will be smaller than the revenue from human-generated art in 5 years (or even 10 years) despite the former probably being at least 2 orders of magnitude higher in volume. This is basic supply and demand + acknowledging the fact that humans don't care about AI "achievements".

AI achievements will be indistinguishable from human achievements. Humans will try to pass off AI achievements as their own. The line will become so blurred that it will be impossible to tell the difference.

If that happens, all art will simply have no value and art as % of GDP will plummet.

Incidentally, this hasn't happened in areas where AI already dominates like chess and go. Magnus Carlsen alone probably generates more "revenue" than all chess AIs combined.

In general, it's not possible for machines to replace labor - this is the Luddite fallacy. If the machines do exactly what you ask them to do this becomes even more true, because labor has the comparative advantage that they'll do things you don't know to ask for.

It is possible for the labor to quit and find something better to do, as happened to elevator operators, but that's a good thing.

In the case of chess, AIs don't want money and Magnus does, so they're not going to help you find ways to get more of it.

If there was a way to have an AI feed you moves without being caught, then I am positive Carlson wouldn't be at the top for long.

He wouldn't be at the top only if he was not using said way and his competitors were. This is of course missing the point. If chess enthusiasts knew that grandmasters were using AI to aid them when playing in tournaments, the interest (and the revenues) would simply plummet.

The apocryphal Henry Ford quote about the average person wanting better horses comes to mind. People off the street have no concept of the impact this tech and the methods behind it will have. Sure, no one is going to be printing these and hanging them in museums. Very few artists support themselves that way, though. The people diffusion models are coming for are the graphic designers, the concept artists, the marketers, and everyone else with a copy of Photoshop and a Getty subscription. GPT-3 is amazing, but it's also not good enough to be useful. Imagen is industry-destroying.

Although I agree that a somehow less extreme version of that will happen in the course of this decade bar a legal decision to prohibit using those models, that won't translate to comparable revenues. The companies providing those services will struggle to make even 10% of the salaries of the displaced workers in revenue. In fact, this will probably be a GDP-destroying (though not value-destroying) application of technology.

It's not about generating more revenue, it's about cutting costs. Any company that employs graphic designers etc. will be able to cut 90% of the staff.

Video game companies that need concept art? How about 1 guy/gal with Imagen to generate baselines and then curating/tailoring as necessary instead of a team of 5

That has nothing to do with anything I wrote. And doesn't contradict it actually.

Saved costs will not translate to higher margins for those that cut them because all competitors will be able to slash them as well, resulting in lower prices across the board.

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