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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

I just got access to the DALL-E 2 beta, and it's a ton of fun to make pictures out of everyday occurrences as prompts.

Someone else here on HN observed that everyday people don't "get" how huge this all is. I experimented with asking random acquaintances at a local cafe for prompts and showed them the generated pictures. All but one person was totally unimpressed.

If everything feels like magic, then what's one more piece of magic?

This scared me more than the implications of DALL•E 2 itself specifically. People think of the technology in the world as mysterious black boxes that do inexplicable things, and they hence no longer understand relative complexity, progress, or change.

My impression is that to most people DALL•E 2 is not "substantially" different to, say, Google Image search. Text in... image out. What's the big deal?

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None of us are immune to that. The amount of magic we all rely on every day is incomprehensible. We just take it for granted that there is power to our house, the trains arrive on time, the bridge doesn’t collapse, the coffee tastes nice and costs little.

if you enjoyed this comment, you may also enjoy the The Trigger Effect episode from James Burke's Connections series.

https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01

The commonplace thing that amazes me the most is the availability of food. My mind boggles at the complexity of getting hundreds of types of foods to a grocery store on a regular basis. I have no direct access to food, and if the food supply chain breaks down, I die. But it doesn't break down.

I was generating some images of parrots for a friend that's into bird photography when it occurred to me, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was sentenced to be pecked at by birds. Today is the first day of forever in the infinite aviary. Pictures of birds are no longer scarce. Every bird that ever was, is, or could be is mere key strokes away. When Prometheus stole fire, he couldn't have actually known what fire was before he stole it. Likewise, only a small niche even seems aware of the profound change which is now being ushered into the world. The generation of birds is now the purview of man. Forget selling the rope to hang us, the birds that peck us will be made in our image.

.-- .... .- - / .... .- ... / --. --- -.. / .-- .-. --- ..- --. .... - ..--..

Morse code translator: https://morsecode.world/international/translator.html

(WHAT HAS GOD WROUGHT?)

you rock

The thing is, regular people have been under the impression that computers are capable of generating complex imagery by themselves for quite some time already. About 10 years ago I was visiting family, and my uncle -- an older guy who enjoys tinkering with technology -- asked me to draw a picture on his new tablet. Now, I've spent a fair chunk of my life drawing, so I was able to sketch a pretty decent face quite quickly with just the basic pencil tool. When I handed it back, he was so amazed that he grabbed my grandmother as she was walking past. "Look at this! Look at what your grandson drew!" She glanced over, completely unimpressed, and said "yeah, but that's on the computer".

It's the same underlying reason for https://xkcd.com/1425/. These tasks have always looked similar. The only reason we are amazed is because we know why one task is harder than the other. Understanding that is not easy.

Randall Monroe himself didn't know how hard (easy) the task was. The Flickr team released a month after the comic this (sadly offline now):

https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-o...

Today a hobby programmer could do it by themself.

That is totally natural. People don't have a strong reaction, because they don't have the context of why it's impressive.

How do you know something is impressive or surprising? You compare it to the previous status of the industry, which is something you know, but the random people in the coffee house don't.

I doubt they really believe it's truly inexplicable. Most layman know that somebody knows what's going on in their device.

And nobody has an explanation for everything they use, but it doesn't mean they get attributed to magic. I have no idea how a bridge is designed and built, but I don't believe it's magic, it's just something beyond my knowledge.

Someone was describing it "lacks natural depth", "cause grinding feeling in the brain". It also seems unable to generate good manga-styled images. I think what those means is DALL-E 2 lacks syntaxes and contexts of arts.

I agree that People think of technology as black boxes that do inexplicable things, but I think that only matters if boxes interferes with their contexts and scopes. It seems it is understood a threat to digital artists, but at the same time, it is possibly less relevant than Google Search as it is.

>asking random acquaintances at a local cafe for prompts and showed them the generated pictures. All but one person was totally unimpressed.

I think this is because people reason this way: the computer has many pictures in its archive, saved as "dog.jpg" and "hat.jpg". If your prompt is "dog with hat", the computer just combines them. I think this is what people think is happening, so they are less impressed.

But I have only 40 free credits and I used them all up with prompts :-(

What if Google just at it to Google image search, and create new content for you without copyright?

I though of that but I think it's still wayyy too expensive. But I hope in a few years or even a few decades it will be the case

Most people are objective dumb (i.e. less smart than the median/average) so this doesn’t surprise me.

How can most of any quantity be less than average?

Edit: ah, I think I was thrown off by the use of “median/average” as equivalents.

It is true in every right skewed distribution. Furthermore almost every distribution is skewed.

The median is the midpoint where 50% of people are above/below the threshold. If there are outliers, and perhaps we can agree there are outliers on the smart/dumb scale, it can skew the average above or below the median.

And I guess being extremely dumb carries a larger risk of death than being extremely smart, so if people start out symmetrically distributed along this scale, the distribution will skew right over time.

Thanks to a few billionaires in a small town, the majority of people living there have a below average income.

The median and average are equivalent in a normal distribution.

But then would you still be able to say “most” are below average of the distribution is normal?

If we assume intelligence is a normal distribution, then we can say half of the population is below average. I think it's fair to categorize half as most.

“Half = most” is… innovative. I like to think of it as “half = so many that you’ll run into a lot of them.”

By "most" definitions, "most" means more than half. So we're literally arguing over a single person.

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