The art of asking nicely

https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/the-art-of-asking-nicely/

by goranmoomin • 5 years ago

334 53 5 years ago

ai-weirdness.ghost.io

I played around with these notebooks a while back, and wondered what you get if you jointly optimize for several different prompts. Has anyone tried this? (Or is this what the article is about?)

kaoD• 5 years ago

VQGAN+CLIP seem to have this dream-like quality where they generate images that are evocative of your prompts but don't actually picture them.

I find it fascinating because in some cases it's not as obvious as "lump of white fluffy matter" = "sheep" but it still manages to evoke the prompt into our brains.

I'll sometimes get an unrecognizable blob but quickly asking my SO "what is this?" she will get it... unless she consciously looks at it!

Fascinating.

meowface• 5 years ago

quickly asking my SO "what is this?" she will get it... unless she consciously looks at it!

It does make you wonder about hypothetical artificial neural network-like "subconscious" layers and how "more conscious" prefrontal cortex layers potentially adjust predictions and perceptions based on their inputs. (Probably a convenient "just-so" "clockwork universe"-esque narrative unsupported by neuroscience research, though.)

kortex2• 5 years ago

It's definitely "injective but not bijective" or something like that.

Like I look at the prompt "sheep grazing on a hillside by tim burton". I look at the pic. Brain goes, "yup, that checks out". You wouldn't necessarily derive the domain from the range (preimage attack), but I can readily say, "if I fell asleep after watching Wallace and Gromit - Close Shave, and Nightmare Before Christmas, this is what I would dream".

bentcorner• 5 years ago

GAN Theft Auto also had a similar dream-like quality, especially with anything involving collisions (cars and how "big" the road was).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udPY5rQVoW0

napier4• 5 years ago

Prompt design / learning how to talk to and communicate effectively with AIs is going to be the next decade’s programming superpower.

As an aside, are there any good approaches for producing this kind of generative art on a CPU only system that lacks a GPU?

atupis• 5 years ago

It is alreay thing, I mean it is not once or twice when people have watced in awe when I google some obscure thing.

splittingTimes• 5 years ago

This is the precursor of how to talk to and configure a holodeck program.

telesilla• 5 years ago

Just yesterday I was asked if I was worried about losing my job because of AI and I smugly replied that us programmers will be needed even more, as interpreters. This is an excellent article as explanation I'll be sharing!

mirekrusin2• 5 years ago

If you're still seeing people flipping burgers, you should be safe for at least a decade.

mirekrusin2• 5 years ago

Another perspective may be - similar to how people were saying the post will go bust when internet came in with email etc. - but it turned out to be the opposite.

Maybe intelligence will simply become commoditized and programming/creating things with it will require even more programmers.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Prompt design / learning how to talk to and communicate effectively with AIs is going to be the next decade’s programming superpower.

Just how programming was supposed to be the "new literacy"?

napier4• 5 years ago

Well, isn’t it? Except we’re at Middle Ages/ early Renaissance rates of computer science and programming literacy. “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet” and all that.

iamflimflam1• 5 years ago

Very much like the current "being able to google properly" skill.

0xcoffee• 5 years ago

I didn't realize how clever the title was until I finished reading the article. Love it

mineshkumar• 5 years ago

What’s it mean?

kortex2• 5 years ago

I interpret it to mean "adding lots of superfluous adjectives makes the outcome better".

satori99• 5 years ago

My city is in covid lockdown right now so I have been passing some of the time playing with these notebooks.

It is oddly addictive.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/t41uLs3Wogmrgn887

fho• 5 years ago

Definitely not a gun-nerd ... but I got a laugh out of the Dyson AR-15 :-)

yosito• 5 years ago

For those who only read the comments first, this article is about writing effective prompts for AI image generation

qwertox• 5 years ago

Why effective? This is more of an exploration.

monktastic1• 5 years ago

Note that the author indeed asks:

"But the most effective prompt? In terms of producing a realistic but dramatically lit landscape with recognizable mountains and hills and (okay not sheep)?"

himoacs• 5 years ago

You, sir, are doing God's work.

KingOfCoders• 5 years ago

“Would you kindly'… Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase?”

spinningarrow• 5 years ago

@dang: would it be possible to add sub domains for ghost.io (similar to github.io) in the parens after the title?

mimsee• 5 years ago

Is there some reason all subdomains couldn't be shown? Maybe with the exclusion for www.

Imagenuity• 5 years ago

second this idea

lifthrasiir2• 5 years ago

More generally, it seems that any domain on the Public Suffix List [1] should be shown with a third-level domain (or possibly more).

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/

hlasdjlfhalwjk• 5 years ago

I wasn't aware, such a list existed. Thanks for the link!

runnerup• 5 years ago

These are the kind of comments that make me click through to the "favorite" feature in HN so that I can find them for reference later. Thanks for your effort to share this.

masswerk• 5 years ago

I'm kind of fascinated how internet hype speech is taking over categories of image representation and art styles.

[filed under: "ultra cool comment trending as a meme on reddit" ;-) ]

menzoic• 5 years ago

The title is misleading

napier4• 5 years ago

That’s a bit strong. It’s a bit cryptic maybe..

wccrawford• 5 years ago

I honestly thought it would be about not being an asshole to people doing their jobs, and instead how much better asking nicely is. Both for treating them as people, but also for getting what you want.

So I'd say it's pretty misleading.

But with the top comment making it clear what the context is, I'm fine with it after all.

seedless-sensat• 5 years ago

HN loves contextless titles, I'm not sure why really

tobltobs• 5 years ago

HN just prefers the original title to avoid clickbait. The drawback is that sometimes context gets lost. On the bright side this sometimes will make you discover interesting articles which you wouldn't have checked out otherwise.

square_usual• 5 years ago

It provokes curiosity, I guess. It's like good ol' clickbait in that regard: ask a question with the promise of an answer, except the question is usually not explicit, just assumed by the user. Every time I see a contextless title I wonder "Hmm, what could this be about?" and click.

prasenjit_pro3• 5 years ago

Philosophic words have been a part of programmers life sometimes but not misleading. Go in depth and you would get the meaning. I must say it is cleaver use of words.

voiper1• 5 years ago

The related blog entry "AI doesn't understand scale" is hilarious: https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/ai-doesnt-understand-scale/

sooheon• 5 years ago

The fork response was genuinely hilarious.

ourcat• 5 years ago

Loving "a herd of sheep grazing on a lush green hillside by tim burton".

mabbo• 5 years ago

The infancy period of this technology is fascinating.

Think about computer graphics 15 years ago. Beowulf came out in 2007, and was developed in the preceding years- let's call it 15+ years old. And it was right there in the uncanny valley where it didn't look real, but it looks realistic. It was interesting visually, but my brain told me "this isn't correct".

And now some modern game engines are doing more realistic rendering than that in real-time.

Now look at these generative models. Some state of the art ones with humans helping are pretty convincing, but it's slow work. The more general ones like these are making these wonderfully interesting images that our brains immediately say "That's not correct".

But where will this technology be in another 15 years? I think the possibilities for entertainment are really interesting. Imagine a D&D game where the GM is vocally telling the AI what to generate, then making small tweaks, and the players are seeing the results.

yboris• 5 years ago

Here's a video of an "infinite scroll" depiction of a poem using this technology: https://twitter.com/mewo2/status/1414649438581268486

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbn1aJuarIU

nazrulmum10• 5 years ago

Suach a nice work

Delowar776• 5 years ago

Such a good work, love it

oceanofsolaris• 5 years ago

The underlying problem these elaborate prompts seem to solve is that the internet contains many pictures, few of which look very beautiful.

If you look at all internet pictures of sheep, many of them will not be very exciting and depict a low contrast sheep in a foggy landscape.

So to get a picture with strong saturation and clear lines, it helps to put text there that is usually associated with pictures that have these ... like "HD wallpaper" or "made with unreal engine". Most "wallpapers" might be of dubious artistic quality, but muted colors and a lack of saturation will generally not be their problem.

This is of course not the only problem with the model. It doesn't even produce a clear image of a sheep .... but that will probably get better with larger models and more training. Similarly it doesn't seem to have a sense of overall composition and tends towards fractal or tiling-like images. But those problems are probably orthogonal to the fact that the model doesn't per se try to make good pictures ... just average ones for the description you give it.

1MachineElf• 5 years ago

For the age we're living in, these desktop wallpapers are an appropriate clap-back to the famous Windows XP "Bliss" wallpaper.

The art of asking nicely

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