AI is like Batman, useless without his money and utility belt. Your own abilities are more like Superman, part of who you are and always with you, ready for use.
"To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower..."
We - humans - have reasons to be. We get to look at a sunset and think about the scattering of light and different frequencies and how it causes the different colors. But we can also just enjoy the beauty of it.
For me, every moment is magical when I take the time to let it be so. Heck, for there to even be a me responding to a you and all of the things that had to happen for Hacker News to be here. It's pretty incredible. To me anyway.
I’ve no idea how to even check. According to various tests I believe I have aphantasia. But mostly I’ve got not even a slightest idea on how not having it is supposed to work. I guess this is one of those mysteries when a missing sense cannot be described in any manner.
Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.
How do people with aphantasia answer the question?
I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.
That is, they have to ascribe a placement rather than describe one in the image their mind conjured up.
Edit: This iDevice really wants to capitalise Apple.
Then maybe, at least in my case, it is my inability to focus my imagination when my senses are already being bombarded with external stimuli. But I cannot speak for anyone else.
To answer the question I imagine an apple with three dots in a triangle, closely together. There is no color because there is no real image, it’s just an idea. As other have said if prompted the idea gets more detailed.
That said, when I tried to learn building mind palaces it has worked. I can “walk through” places I know just fine, even recall visual details like holes in a letterbox. But again, there is no image.
In my conscious experience I pretty much imagine {apple, dot, dot, dot}. I don't "see" blue, the dots are tagged with dot.color == blue.
When you ask about the arrangement of the dots, I'll THEN think about it, and then says "arranged in a triangle." But that's because you've probed with your question. Before you probed, there's no concept in my mind of any geometric arrangement.
If I hadn't been prompted to think / naturally thought about the color of the apple, and you asked me "what color is the apple." Only then would I say "green" or "red."
If you asked me to describe my office (for example) my brain can't really imagine it "holistically." I can think of the desk and then enumerate it's properties: white legs, wooden top, rug on ground. But, essentially, I'm running a geometric iterator over the scene, starting from some anchor object, jumping to nearby objects, and then enumerating their properties.
I have glimpses of what it's like to "see" in my minds eye. At night, in bed, just before sleep, if I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes see fleeting images. I liken it to looking at one of those eye puzzles where you have to relax your eyes to "see it." I almost have to focus on "seeing" without looking into the blackness of my closed eyes.
Like they'll start at an arm and move along filling the rest of the body correctly the first time. No sketching, no finding the lines, just a human printer.
You may notice when doing the apple test, once you try and define a texture, your brain adding things you think should be there.
Scared the crap out of me a few years ago when I realized I had it. Came to grips with it now.
No one really sees 3d pictures in their head in HD
It's equally astonishing to me that others are different.
Do you see these pictures the same as if you were watching an HD TV?
I'm going to guess no. You don't see literally high def pictures in your head.
That's fine, but your egocentric inability to acknowledge other people have different abilities is not, it's childish.
It not just images either, it's short videos.
What's interesting though is that the "video" can be missing details that I will "hallucinate" back in that will be incorrect. So I cannot always fully trust these. Like cutting the apple in half lead to a ~1/8th slice missing from one of the halves. It's weird.
There are people who actually "see" a full-ass movie in their head when they read.
These are also the people who get REALLY angry when some live-action casting choice isn't exactly like in the book. I just go "meh", because I kinda remember the main character had red hair and a scar and that's it. :D
I have had some people claim to me that they can literally see what they are imagining as if it is in front of them for prolonged periods of time, in a similar way to how it would show up via AR goggles.
I guess this is a spectrum and it's tough to dealineate the abilities. But I just looked it up and what I am describing is hyperphantasia.
It's interesting that if non-aphantasia people are so common, I wonder why so few paintings have scenery based solely on imagination. I even remember asking a person who paints (not in the context of this condition) how hard it was for him to paint something not directly before his eyes, but from imagination, and why he didn't do it more often. I recall that he definitely did this (painting from imagination) rarely or not at all, and the question really puzzled him
I have aphantasia and my dog isn't anywhere. It's just a dog, you didn't ask me to visualize anything else.
When you ask about details, like color, tail length, eyes then I have to make them up on the spot. I can do that very quickly but I don't "see" the good boy.
We're reliant on training data too.
You don't have to pay to look at food in a grocery, or a recipe in a library you go home and cook. You do pay for ingredients you use up. Unless the book you looked at, or YouTube video you aped, trained you to garden.
Arguably, if creating an art style is simply a matter of novel mechanics and uniqueness, LLMs could already do that simply by adding artists to the prompts ("X" in the style of "A" and "B") and plenty of people did (and do) argue that this is no different than what human artists do (I would disagree.) I personally want to argue that intentionally matters more than raw technique, but Hacker News would require a strict proof for the definition of intentionality that they would argue humans don't possess, but somehow LLMs do, and that of course I can't provide.
I guess I have no argument besides "it means more to me that a person does it than a machine." It matters to me that a human artist cares. A machine doesn't care. And yes, in a strictly materialist sense we are nothing but black boxes of neurons receiving stimuli and there is no fundamental difference between a green field and a cold steel rail, it's all just math and meat, but I still don't care if a machine makes X in the style of (Jack Kirby AND Frank Miller.)
I'd disagree. Art styles are a category of many similar works in relation to others or a way of bringing about similar works. They usually build off of or are influenced by prior work and previous methods, even in cases where there is a effort to avoid or subvert them. Even with novel techniques or new mediums. "Great Artists Steal" and all that.
Some people become known for certain mediums or the inclusion of specific elements, but few of them were the first or only artists to use them. "Art in the style of X" just comes down to familiarity/marketing. Art develops the way food does with fads, standards, cycles, and with technology and circumstance enabling new things. I think evolution is a pretty good analogy although it's driven by a certain amount of creativity, personal preference, and intent in addition to randomness and natural selection.
Computers could output random noise and in the process eventually end up creating an art style, but it'd take a human to recognize anything valuable and artists to incorporate it into other works. Right now what passes for AI is just remixing existing art created by humans which makes it more likely to blindly stumble into creating some output we like, but inspiration can come from anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the "AI Slop" art style wasn't already inspiring human artists. Maybe there are already painters out there doing portraits of people with the wrong number of fingers. As AI is increasingly consuming it's own slop things could get weird enough to inspire new styles, or alternately homogenized into nothing but blandness.
People adopt art styles because they like something about them, the aesthetic or what they represent. I don't think there are enough human artists who like AI slop (they tend to despise it categorically) enough to want to imitate it, unless it's as some form of satire. They aren't going to do so simply because it exists.
There are now dozens of copyright safe image and video models: Adobe, MoonValley, etc.
We technically never need human works again. We can generate everything synthetically (unreal engine, cameras on a turn table, etc.)
The physics of optics is just incredibly easy to evolve.
Not sure about that. Humans are doing almost all the work now still.
Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours.
It's easy to hate on LLMs and AI hype, but image models are changing the world and impacting every visual industry.
At the low, low cost of burning incredible amounts of energy!
This is also he same logic as “lost sale” software piracy calculations. 90% of those claimed hours would not have been spent if the tool did not exist. Most of the generated images are idle throwaways that no human would bother with creating.
Your arguments sound to me as if you're saying the cotton gin is a bad idea because 90% of that cotton wouldn't have been picked.
Lay people have been starved from being able to visually articulate themselves. We're entering into a world where everyone will have spatial articulation. That's a good thing.
Don't be the latin clergy arguing the populace shouldn't be able to read or have books.
I don't think you're being fair here at all. The technology has demonstrable positive use cases.
Conscious intelligence has not.
As another argument, we've had mathematical descriptions of optics, drawing algorithms, fixed function pipeline, ray tracing, and so much more rich math for drawing and animating.
Smart, thinking machines? We haven't the faintest idea.
Progress on Generative Images >> LLMs
Three times, something like intelligence has evolved - in mammals, octopuses, and corvids. Completely different neural architectures in those unrelated speces.
Even with what we've got, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to invent indoor plumbing.
Vision, I still submit, is much simpler than "intelligence". It's evolved independently almost a hundred times.
It's also hypothesized that it takes as few as a hundred thousand years to evolve advanced eye optics:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.004...
Even plants can sense the visual and physical world. Three dimensional spatial relationships and paths and rays through them are not hard.
[1] https://homepage.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/Nieder%20(2...
You are now marvelling at someone taking the collective output of humans around the world, then training a model on it with massive, massive compute… and then having a single human compete with that model.
Without the human output on the Internet, none of this would be possible. ImageNet was positively small compared to this.
But yeah, what you call “imagination” is basically perturbations and exploration across a model that you have in your head, which imposes constraints (eg gravity etc) that you learned. Obviously we can remix things now that they’re on the Internet.
Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim.
I know you're probably talking about analog clocks, but people when dreaming have trouble representing stable digits on clocks. It's one of the methods to tell if you are dreaming.