Comment by jauntywundrkind

Comment by jauntywundrkind a day ago

7 replies

Its kind of funny that everyone is harping this way or that way about IP.

This is a kind of strange comment for me to read. Because imby tone it sounds like a rebuttal? But by content, it agrees with a core thing I said about myself:

> and as someone who thinks IP is itself incredibly ripping off humanity & should be vastly scoped down, it's important to me to not rest my arguments on IP violations

What's just such a nightmare to me is that the tech is so normative. So horribly normative. This article shows that AI again and again reproduced only the known, only the already imagined. Its not that it's IP theft that rubs me so so wrong, it's that it's entirely bankrupt & uncreative, so very stuck. All this power! And yet!

You speak at what disgusts me yourself!

> When are we allowed to remix, recreate and expand on this like humanity has done

The machine could be imagining all kinds of Indianas. Of all different remixed recreated expanded forms. But this pictures are 100% anything but that. They're Indiana frozen in Carbonite. They are the driest saddest prison of the past. And call into question the validity of AI entirely, show something greviously missing.

sothatsit a day ago

> All this power! And yet!

You are completely ignoring the fact that you can provide so much more information to the LLMs to get what you want. If you truly want novel images, ChatGPT can absolutely provide them, but you have to provide a better starting point than "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip".

If you just provide a teensy bit more information, the results dramatically change. Try out "An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". Or give it an input image to work with.

From just adding a couple words, ChatGPT produces an entirely new character. It's so easy to get it to produce novel images. It is so easy in fact, that it makes a lot of posts like this one feel like strawmen, intentionally providing so little information to the LLMs that the generic character is the only obvious output that you would expect.

Now, would it be better if it didn't default to these common movie tropes? Sure. But the fact that it can follow these tropes doesn't mean that it cannot also be used to produce entirely new images filled with your imagination as well. You just have to actually ask it for that.

  • jauntywundrkind 17 hours ago

    You're again failing to read my top post. Badly.

    • sothatsit 9 hours ago

      No, I am not. Read my comment again. You can literally just ask AI for whatever you want. It has such an incredible breadth of what it can produce that calling it uncreative because the default thing that it produces is the most common image you'd expect is both lazy, and motivated thinking.

      • sothatsit 6 hours ago

        Okay, I just read your top comment, and I agree with you on that. But it still doesn't take much to nudge these models off of the "default guy". So to write an entire melodramatic comment about how these models crush creativity is incredibly reductive. These models provide so much room for people to inject their own creativity into its outputs.

        So yes, the models are not creative on their own. But equally, these models are definitely capable of helping people to express their own creativity, and so calling them "uncreative", and especially "bankrupt", rings hollow. It speaks like you are expecting the models to be artists, when in fact they are just tools to be used however people see fit.

        And so, the "default guy" or "default style" that ChatGPT outputs will become recognisable and boring. But anyone who wants to inject their own style into their prompts, either using text or input images, can do so. And in doing so, they skip over all of your concerns.

dcow a day ago

It strikes me that perhaps the prompts are not expansive or expressive enough. If you look at some of the prompts our new wave of prompt artists use to generate images in communities like midjourney, a single sentence doesn't cut it.

If AI is just compression, then decompressing a generic pop-culture-seeking prompt will yield a generic uninspired image.

  • sejje 9 hours ago

    Exactly. The AI understands that reference. It gives you what you asked for, it doesn't try to divine that it's a weird test for IP violations. If it made up a different image, that would be exactly the thing we're mad about with "hallucinations" when we want serious, accurate responses.

lupusreal 16 hours ago

I have given detailed descriptions of my own novel ideas to these image generators and they have faithfully implemented my ideas. I don't need the bot to be creative, I can do that myself. The bot is a paint brush. Give it to somebody who isn't creative and you won't get anything creative out of it. That isn't the tool's fault, it's merely an inadequacy of the user.