Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of seeing DALL·E /Stable Diffusion posts?
Every other posts this week seems to be about the aforementioned. The novelty and breakthrough in generative art is understandable, but what are other use cases are there for the greater collective good?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadHave we ever seen such progress in 3rd party code before? It's only a week and it seems like a lot of innovations came up chaotically from the userbase...?
Think about everything else that was a thing everyone posted about and frame it the same way. "what are other use cases are there for the greater collective good?" And you'll see how silly this sounds
I understand how it works, but I can't help thinking 'woah...' every time I see it!
A huge milestone in the journey to AI which is of course the future of everything
It's just that all the deep thinkers won't stop complaining about safety problems that don't exist, and won't stop pushing for solar, which has burned literal tens of literal trillions of dollars without succeeding, when 2t is all you need to finish the job with nuclear
Uh okay, it's just everything we need, the safest, the cheapest, and one of only three zero-carbon options (the other of which is drying up in the heat, and the third of which has never scaled past 0.1%)
Sure, it's been delivering 25% of our grid for 70 years basically without a hiccup, but it's "not a silver bullet" in some undescribed way
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"Allowing fuel reprocessing in the US"
Completely unnecessary
Don't checklist opposition. We can go without with no problems
To avoid relatively catastrophic scenarios, we need to not only cut our new emissions to near zero very quickly, but we actually need to go strongly negative. It will take a mix of many different sequestration efforts to reach the required amounts. And all of this will be expensive, and added onto the effort to deal with large numbers of displaced people as developed areas become untenable to maintain, and crop failures get worse.
A big fission build-out would help a lot, I'm a huge proponent of it, but it's not a silver bullet, and empirically, we have a very hard time with it, at least in the US.
I think a phased-in revenue-neutral carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet option. But we'd have to get used to less material consumption as we work to shift things over, because things would be a lot more expensive for a while. The bright side, for most, is that a large portion would be borne by the rich. Things would be more expensive for everyone, though, and populations usually don't react very well to large sudden drops in living standards, though, especially if they identify a particular group as being to blame for it.
A slightly higher order application of the DALL-E/SD/MidJourney primitives.
Now after having read, I think it is good to have one odd post here and there as there are always some people not in the know, but I agree we are seeing too many of those.
I think that's worth a few HN posts.
https://www.expedia.com/taap-registration
Travel agents use Expedia Artists use Stable Diffusion
this metaphor is apt because it reveals that the gloom and doomers haven't actually taken the time to understand the industry that they're decrying the death of
Like how mcdonald's disrupted the Michelin restaurants industry
It might change a very small subset of art creation, it's still far away from anything actually usable. ie it's cool to generate your DnD scenes for your weekend sessions, it won't replace an actual illustrator for a paid projects or fine art
In this case, it's not that there won't be any demand for art, but that the lower end of art jobs may become more like working at McDonalds.
[1] https://uswhip.com/our-products/buggy-whip/
This is some of the best art I've ever seen, to my tastes (found in a previous hn comment yesterday): https://youtu.be/Nz_n0qxqoPg
edit: Ironically, I just came across this article https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwo...
At some point, we will be talking about the pre DALL-E world vs the one after.
Actually this might not be for the greater collective good. It might be bad.
I would not equate being able to reproduce something with ML, to understanding something logically
I mind them just about everywhere else. I have a hard time to describe it and I seem to be somewhat alone in it, but the images coming out of these algorithms generally tend to trigger some revulsion reactions in me. It's possibly just an uncanny valley relative, but sometimes that revulsion hits notes of true, disgusting horror. The images tend to smell too much like nightmares for my comfort. That simile is about the best I can explain it, I think, they all smell too much like nightmares to me.
I've dropped/blocked people and bots on social media for posting lots of generated images without CWs. I've threatened to drop more. I hate how much Facebook's algorithm tends to surface posts with photos over other content in general, but especially in this moment where many of those photos are these generated things that give me the creeps. There's no good way to set a filter to never show me a DALL-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion image ever again.
TL;DR: I don't mind conversing about these algorithms in HN, but please stop posting the images themselves.
I wonder if you are hitting uncanny valley, if your knowledge about the black box leads you to interpret the images unfavorably or if you can smell the eldritch horror of a soulless computational demon masquerading as silly pictures.
I appreciate intellectually that so much of our foundational understanding of Statistics (and its core formulas and vocabulary) originates from mathematicians such as Boole, Pascal, Bayes, and others that thought that through probabilities they could find their God. Of all of the maths there is none that its history is so collectively tied up into Christian notions of the search for God and especially 18th Century Gnostic/Pseudo-Gnosticism ideas of Christian morality and ethics.
It has always struck me as somewhat funny in counterpoint that Einstein's alleged gut reaction to early Quantum Mechanics was "God does not play dice with the universe" given how many such mathematicians studied dice precisely with the idea of trying to find their God. There was a lot of nuance in Einstein's actual public reaction to Quantum Mechanics from which that paraphrased quote is often pulled out of context, and I think it speaks to a heart of the contradiction in the heart of Statistics as a theological field: "many of the same early Statisticians hoping to find their God among the probabilities were often morally opposed to gambling and casinos and thought those to be possibly tools of their Devil". Einstein seemed to grapple with that instinct that "physical laws" that revolved around luck seemed morally more associated with demons than a Just God.
I don't know if Statistics can ever find a god among the numbers, but I have no doubt that in this Age of Vastly Applied Sparkling Statistics we keep finding all sorts of new demons and monsters. To be fair, most of these demons seem to be "soylent": at the end of the day they still seem to be made of people (plagiarized from our collective worst qualities). But overall they still seem to be demons in the worst moral and ethical sense and we should maybe be fighting against them rather than let them consume the internet. It doesn't take a grand sense of irony to wonder if the science intended to prove the number of Angels that can dance on the head of pin might instead be much better at finding all the demons in the world, given enough computation (big enough casinos).
I do sometimes worry about the existential horror that so many of our story traditions warn us to beware of magic mirrors and portals to the fairy/demo/spirit realms, and yet here we are in a time where almost all of us just casually carry a magic mirror in our pockets and handbags at all times with its near instantaneous access to the internet which sometimes seems a far larger, more deeply connected fairy realm than even those stories warned us about.
Philosophers in the 1970s worried that with the rapid progression of technology an increasing number of people might have to grapple with "future shock" of living in the future, I think from this perspective we've proven that we've successfully "boiled the frog" versus those 1970s fears (for better and worse) and today's "normal" doesn't look anything like "future shock", rather it's just "normal"/pedestrian/mundane. Everyone has a phone, it connects wirelessly to the largest network of inter-connected computers in history, most people use it pass around photos of cats and complain about restaurants, and don't notice any weird significance to that or all the "future technologies" it takes to make it all work. It's simple magic that lives in their pockets and handbags.
I don't know what to do with that subtle horror realization that maybe we've built the kind of fairy realm that our myths and legends and fairy tales warned us about and almost everyone today just thinks it is a normal feature of the world. I mostly just try to cope with it, and try my best professionally to bring what morality and ethics skills I can to the small bits of the overall fairy realm that I&#x...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32764447
Good native ad team though.
Per the guidelines[1], you can flag a post if you'd like.
Personally, the generative art part is pretty exciting to me. It's a good way to come up with new ideas. I don't see that usefulness going away.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742
They tend to claim they are worried about open source. Really they are worried about a smaller sub-culture of open source who doesn’t want their code used for profit without being paid.
To put it another way, why should we have to treat Microsoft's EULA and licenses as ironclad while Microsoft gets to ignore licensing terms of code they want to use for their own products? Seems like an imbalance that's only possible because one side is more well-funded than the other.
Saying that this is uninteresting because art does not advance the collective good is a pretty narrow view of humanity.