Neural networks creating images from text isn't new. I wrote about it in 2019 when AI self-portraits were going viral.
Mauro Martino via YouTube
Just like VR is getting a new lease on life, despite its age, AI-generated art is getting another 15-minutes of fame.
This past week, a new model called Dall-E Mini went viral. It creates images based on the text prompts you give it – and it's surprisingly good. You even can give Dall-E absurd prompts, and it will do its best to hybridize them (for example, a kangaroo made of cheese).
Unfortunately, like our current reality, Dall-E may not be able to produce cheap gas prices. Nonetheless, it is fun to try. Click the image to enter the concepts you want Dall-E to attempt to represent.
via Dall-E mini
While the images themselves aren't fantastic, the tool's goal is to understand and translate text into a coherent graphic response. The capabilities of tools like this are growing exponentially (and reflect a massive improvement since I last talked about AI-generated images).
Part of the improvement is organic (better hardware, software, algorithmic evolution, etc.), while another part comes from stacking. For example, Dall-E's use of GPT-3 has vastly increased its ability to process language.
However, the algorithms still don't "understand" the meaning of the images the way we do ... they are guessing based on what they've "seen" before. That means it's biased by the data it was fed and can easily get stumped. The Dall-E website's "Bias and Limitations" section acknowledges that it was trained on unfiltered internet data, which means it has a known, but unintended, bias to be offensive or stereotypical against minority groups.
It's not the first time, and it won't be the last, that an internet-trained AI will be offensive.
Currently, most AI is essentially a brute force application of math masquerading as intelligence and computer science. Fortunately, it provides a lot of value even in that regard.
The uses continue to get more elegant and complex as time passes ... but we're still coding the elegance.
Onwards!
Top 10 Most Overhyped Technologies (From 2008)
Just because something is overhyped, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Gartner's hype cycle is a great example of this. Every technology goes through inflated expectations and a trough of disillusionment, regardless of whether they're a success or failure. Sometimes a fad is more than a fad.
Humans are pretty bad at exponential thinking. We're not bad at recognizing periods of inflection, but we're very bad at recognizing the winners and losers of these regime changes.
There are countless examples. Here's a funny one from Maximum PC Magazine in 2008. It shows that hype isn't always a sign of mistaken excess. This list purported to show things that were getting too much attention in 2008. Instead of being a list of has-beens and failures, many of these things rightfully deserved the attention.
It's been 14 years since this came out. How did the predictions hold up?
Facebook has become Meta, and is one of the big five. The iPhone has sold more than 2.2 billion phones, and accounts for more than half of Apple's total revenue. And the list keeps going. Multiple GPU video cards, HD, 64-bit computing, and downloading movies from the internet ...
It's hard to believe how poorly this image aged.
The trend is your friend while it continues. Just because something is overhyped - doesn't mean you shouldn't be excited about it.
Onwards!
Posted at 08:49 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Gadgets, Games, Ideas, Just for Fun, Market Commentary, Science, Trading, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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