I’m tired of the worthless AI-generated art that writers here put in their posts and comments. Some might not be able to relate, but the way my brain works, I have to exert focus for a few seconds to suppress the effects of having seen the image before I can continue to engage with the writer’s words. It is quite mentally effortful.
I agree. The problem with AI-generated images is that any image you can generate with a prompt like “robot looking at chessboard” is going to contain, almost by definition, no more information than that prompt did, but it takes a lot longer than reading the prompt to look at the image and ascertain that it contains no information and is just AI-generated imagery added ‘to look nice’. This is particularly jarring on a site like LW2 where, for better or worse, images are rarely present and usually highly-informative and dense with information when present.
Worse, they usually don’t ‘look nice’ either. Most of the time, people who use AI images can’t even be bothered to sample one without blatant artifacts, or to do some inpainting to fix up the worst anomalies, or figure out an appropriate style. The samples look bad to begin with, and a year later, they’re going to look even worse and more horribly dated, and make the post look much worse, like a spammer wrote it. (Almost all images from DALL-E 2 are already hopelessly nasty looking, and stuff from Midjourney-v1--3 and SD1.x likewise, and SD2/SD-XL/Midjourneyv4/5 are ailing.) It would be better if the authors of such posts could just insert text like [imagine 'a robot looking at a chessboard' here] if they are unable to suppress their addiction to SEO images; I can imagine that better than they can generate it, it seems.
So my advice would be that if you want some writing to still be read in a year and it to look good, then you should learn how to use the tools and spend at least an hour per image; and if you can’t do that, then don’t spend time on generating images at all (unless you’re writing about image generation, I suppose). Quickies are fine for funny tweets or groupchats, but serious readers deserve better. Meaningless images don’t need to be included, and the image generators will be much better in a year or two anyway and you can go back and add them if you really feel the need.
For Gwern.net, I’m satisfied with the images I’ve generated for my dropcap fonts or as thumbnail previews for a couple of my pages like “Suzanne Delage” or “Screwfly Solution” (where I believe they serve a useful ‘iconic’ summary role in popups & social media previews), but I also put in a lot of work: I typically generate scores to hundreds of images in both MJv5/6 & DALL-E 3, varying them heavily and randomizing as much as possible, before inpainting or tweaking them. (I generally select at a 1:4 or less ratio, and then select out of a few dozen; I archive a lot of the first-stage images in my Midjourney & DALL-E 3 tag-directories if you want to browse them.) It takes hours. But I am confident I will still like them years from now.
Now that the risks of AI are getting mainstream traction, we can expect the people who want to rush forward with AI research to increase their efforts to influence public opinion. In particular, most people will come to rely heavily on large language models to get information much like they rely heavily on search engines today, and the most popular large language models (LLMs) will probably be tuned so as to downplay the risks of AI research (particularly the argument that AI research is so dangerous that it should be halted for a few decades). It is not too early to think about how to counter that.
I quality-downvoted it for being silly, but agree-upvoted it because AFAICT that string does indeed contain all the (lowercase) letters of the English alphabet.
I’m tired of the worthless AI-generated art that writers here put in their posts and comments. Some might not be able to relate, but the way my brain works, I have to exert focus for a few seconds to suppress the effects of having seen the image before I can continue to engage with the writer’s words. It is quite mentally effortful.
I agree. The problem with AI-generated images is that any image you can generate with a prompt like “robot looking at chessboard” is going to contain, almost by definition, no more information than that prompt did, but it takes a lot longer than reading the prompt to look at the image and ascertain that it contains no information and is just AI-generated imagery added ‘to look nice’. This is particularly jarring on a site like LW2 where, for better or worse, images are rarely present and usually highly-informative and dense with information when present.
Worse, they usually don’t ‘look nice’ either. Most of the time, people who use AI images can’t even be bothered to sample one without blatant artifacts, or to do some inpainting to fix up the worst anomalies, or figure out an appropriate style. The samples look bad to begin with, and a year later, they’re going to look even worse and more horribly dated, and make the post look much worse, like a spammer wrote it. (Almost all images from DALL-E 2 are already hopelessly nasty looking, and stuff from Midjourney-v1--3 and SD1.x likewise, and SD2/SD-XL/Midjourneyv4/5 are ailing.) It would be better if the authors of such posts could just insert text like
[imagine 'a robot looking at a chessboard' here]if they are unable to suppress their addiction to SEO images; I can imagine that better than they can generate it, it seems.So my advice would be that if you want some writing to still be read in a year and it to look good, then you should learn how to use the tools and spend at least an hour per image; and if you can’t do that, then don’t spend time on generating images at all (unless you’re writing about image generation, I suppose). Quickies are fine for funny tweets or groupchats, but serious readers deserve better. Meaningless images don’t need to be included, and the image generators will be much better in a year or two anyway and you can go back and add them if you really feel the need.
For Gwern.net, I’m satisfied with the images I’ve generated for my dropcap fonts or as thumbnail previews for a couple of my pages like “Suzanne Delage” or “Screwfly Solution” (where I believe they serve a useful ‘iconic’ summary role in popups & social media previews), but I also put in a lot of work: I typically generate scores to hundreds of images in both MJv5/6 & DALL-E 3, varying them heavily and randomizing as much as possible, before inpainting or tweaking them. (I generally select at a 1:4 or less ratio, and then select out of a few dozen; I archive a lot of the first-stage images in my Midjourney & DALL-E 3 tag-directories if you want to browse them.) It takes hours. But I am confident I will still like them years from now.
I like them sometimes, but a lot of them are IMO not executed well-enough. I did like them in Owen CB’s latest posts.
I also find them irksome for some reason. They feel like pollution. Like AI generated websites in my Google results.
An exception was the ghost cartoon here. The AI spelling errors added to the humor, similar to the bad spelling of lolcats.
We will soon learn how to make machines that are better at planning and better at reality than we are. That is a big problem.
Now that the risks of AI are getting mainstream traction, we can expect the people who want to rush forward with AI research to increase their efforts to influence public opinion. In particular, most people will come to rely heavily on large language models to get information much like they rely heavily on search engines today, and the most popular large language models (LLMs) will probably be tuned so as to downplay the risks of AI research (particularly the argument that AI research is so dangerous that it should be halted for a few decades). It is not too early to think about how to counter that.
Here are all the letters of the (English) alphabet: hrtmbvyxfoiazkpnqldjucsweg
Is the order (pseudo-)random? Does it have a hidden meaning I might not be aware of? What’s your purpose sharing this?
Yes, the order is random. No. To see whether it gets voted down (or up, but that would be surprising.)
I quality-downvoted it for being silly, but agree-upvoted it because AFAICT that string does indeed contain all the (lowercase) letters of the English alphabet.