Abstinence is a word that frequently applies to me. Alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, drugs, Facebook, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, Bitcoin, stocks, email on smart phone, and lots more: not for me, thanks. I also semi-abstain from various energy/resource-heavy activities. Part of this tendency may have been shaped by the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, where characters Indiana Jones and Marion are tied to a post in the rear of a crowd waiting to see the marvels inside the Ark of the Covenant. Indy had the instinct to shut his eyes, and advised Marion to do the same, which spared them and only them. Just because everybody else is doing it is not reason enough.
In this light, I am practically ashamed to admit to using AI for image creation. It’s not like me. On the text-generation side (chat-bots), while I think it’s a pretty neat stunt they’ve pulled off, I am deeply unimpressed by the milquetoast blather that comes out of ChatGPT and its ilk when asked hard questions. When students tried to use AI to submit answers to questions, I could spot the style from across the room (based on simple formatting). It is not too surprising that nothing remarkable comes out, since the chat-bots are designed to construct sentences very much in the style of what it’s parsed in all its input data. They aren’t producing original thoughts, but function more as an averaging content generator.
But images: I’m more impressed—in that it’s more mysterious to me how it works. The parameter space is much larger than for regimented language. Even so, I think it’s actually somewhat similar to language in that images also have structure, and certain things tend to be close to certain other things, as is true for words as well.
When selecting a copyright-free header image for a Do the Math post, I usually have an idea for what I want it to show, and first look for pre-made content. If I can’t find something via a few channels, I now turn to AI, using the Bing interface to Dall-E. Admittedly, I’m no expert at speaking AI, but I still marvel at how inept it can be in forming an image that a 4-year-old would have little trouble picturing if using the same prompt language.
I was planning to do a post illustrating my failures over time, but was dismayed to learn that my past creations have disappeared on the Bing platform (not unique to me). What’s worse, I no longer have prompt language for the ones I kept. The EXIF information in the JPEG files lack any such prompt text. Why is it that the world is still being designed by unpaid interns?
So, this post isn’t all that I hoped it would be, given that loss. But, as with many things in life, I’ll work with what I have.
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