Monday 5 June 2023

Art for AI's sake

In which I continue to experiment with AI so you don't have to...

I read recently about a website called Night Cafe that enables users to generate all manner of pictures, in all manner of styles, without ever picking up a pencil or paintbrush. I had to have a play, of course, in my continuing but most likely futile attempt to be ready for the eventual takeover of our robot overlords.

It's pretty good, actually. You provide it with a text prompt of what you want to draw (the irony here being that you don't actually do any drawing), select a rendering model and processing algorithm, and click 'Create' (the irony here being that ... oh, you get the idea by now).

I thought I would try to create something that would never be seen otherwise, so entered a prompt of "Morrissey eating a hambuger". Here is the result:

There are, of course, a couple of things to note here. I cannot draw this well, for starters. But it's not perfect. For a start, it hasn't followed the brief: SPM is holding the burger here, not eating it. And finally, from this and other experimentations I can tell you that Night Cafe, at least, struggles with hands, their angle, their positioning, even (sometimes) the number of fingers and having two right hands and no left. Look at SPM's left hand here, for example. So it struggles with complexity ... for now, at least. I might try this again in a year's time... Tip the author

21 comments:

  1. I have to calm down now for the sake of my blood pressure. As someone who makes their living from - and loves - drawing/painting/imagining scenarios that don't exist in real life and then rendering them, I cannot bear the thought of fking AI replacing real art by real people. It really is the beginning of the end.
    But relieved to see those appalling hands! Mind you people can be so dumb now I wonder if anyone else would even notice.

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    1. I should also add a word of thanks for doing the experiment for us - I couldn't ever bring myself to do so.

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    2. It's a genuine worry, and I can only imagine how it feels for you as a creative to see this kind of thing. It's coming for us all, I'm afraid. It may take a little while for AI to be really good at most things, but that little while won't be as long as we might imagine. And it will all be dressed up as being an enabler, freeing up our time to do other things. But there's a real risk that it will disempower - how many "other things" can you do if you have no income because AI took your job, for example. This article AI threats: Can The Matrix and other sci-fi films teach us anything? is in interesting read too - not hard to imagine a near future in which people are enfeebled, mentally and physically, as in Wall-E.

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  2. As soon as I saw this, I thought of C.

    Call me a luddite, but this just makes me want to smash the looms.

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    1. I'm a tech-head and my job (my whole career, if you can call it that) has been based around IT. But this still worries and angers me.

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    2. I was talking with a colleague who teaches IT today, and he was basically saying the same thing. He thinks IT teachers will need to change more than most subjects, since everything about their subject will change. As an English teacher, it bothers me greatly, but I can see ways to minimise the impact, particularly in the environment I work in.

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    3. Jon Stewart of Sleeper tells the tale of how one of his final-year degree students submitted an essay and got 85% for it on his way to a first ... only for it later to come to light that it had been written by ChatGPT...

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  3. The Luddites get a bad press- they were right, the machines did take their jobs.

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  4. I have my suspicions about 1 piece of history coursework that was submitted this year

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    1. It'll soon be more than one, if it isn't already.

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    2. Going to need AI to detect the use of AI...

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  5. Yes, the publicity about AI "creating" art also made me think of C but those weird hands have me reassured.

    Sadly Mr WIAA's profession, small-scale sculpting, has been under threat for some time. The 3D printers have taken away much of his work but it has meant he has had to embrace the technology himself - oh the irony, he's had to learn how to do something with a machine that he can do manually, a rare skill nowadays.

    As for my old job of turning data into Management Information, using analysis paper and an adding machine (going back a bit here!), that went a long time ago - sigh, I miss those days.

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    1. Google already means we don't have to remember anything, CHATGPT will soon mean we don't have to think anything, and now AI will take away our creativity too. What will be left for us? Still, progress, eh?

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    2. The human race has inadvertently proven to itself just how pointless its existence is! It's like the punchline to a sick joke...

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    3. You know Ouroboros, the mythical snake that ate its own tail? That's the human race, right now.

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  6. Morrissey joins King Charles in Sausage Fingers Saga

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  7. Slightly off at a tangent but to return to creativity as a thing to celebrate and nurture, I found this interesting article yesterday https://creativeyatra.com/culture/leading-thinkers-creativity-common-cultural-misconceptions-shroud-word/

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    1. That is interesting. I would happily see brainstorming consigned to the bin.

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