Here's another experiment from the Midjourney AI art bot. The prompt was "Robert E. Lee and Pope John Paul II laughing and wearing sunglasses."
I love the facial expressions, but I can only tell which one is Lee because the image of JPII is pretty close. What's more, it looks like General Lee is now pope. Hmm. Which one takes precedence? Is he Pope General or General Pope?
In the upper left, he's wearing what looks like a Confederate uniform, but it's got a Roman collar. Hilarious!
In another prompt, I tried this one: "a princess in a green gown is watching two knights in plate armor fight with swords on horseback." The result had everyone waving things that might have been swords around and all three were wearing a mix of green gowns and armor. Err, no. I tried a similar prompt, using parentheses to try to get the thing to recognize which descriptors belonged to which nouns, but it still didn't work.
Midjourney has no idea what it's drawing.
ChatGPT v4
There's a new release of ChatGPT and it's supposed to be a major upgrade. I've read where it's now able to pass various professional exams. I've played with it a bit and its product is much better than what I was getting a month ago.
I'm fighting some minor depression right now, so finding the energy to write is pretty tough. I'm beginning to think I really need to retire. Maybe the market is rebounding and I don't need the paycheck. Let's see here...
HOLY MACKERAL! CREDIT SUISSE, TOO?
Dang.
I suspect that the problem the software is having with Lee, is that it doesn't have any pictures of him laughing for reference. I don't believe I have ever seen a photo or painting of R. E. Lee with any expression other than stern stoicism.
ReplyDeleteAnd the software has a completely unreal impression of how many teeth humans have, and how wide their mouths open. I'm counting up to 15 easily visible teeth in just the upper jaw on a couple of these. When I open my mouth wide like that*, there are only 6 upper teeth visible, so these guys either have freakishly wide mouths or have 2-3 times more teeth than an actual human.
*Well, not actually like that. They look like their mouths gape wide enough to swallow a softball. They're reminding me of this lady:
https://youtu.be/UhkRYVpxNrQ
I'm not buying that. There are filters that can turn a face into any expression. And what's with General Lee looking like a bishop/pope?
ReplyDeleteThe problem is the AI doesn't understand concepts. It's just gluing things together based on words.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, is a marvel. I did some writing with it this morning and the results were much better than last month. Not only that, it understood the moods of the characters. It was repetitive and the prose is 6th grade stuff, but the software behind it is the work of geniuses.
Tim,
ReplyDeleteOf course there aren’t any pictures of Lee smiling (or anyone else from that time). The photographic emulsions of the time were too slow. Thus all photos were posed and essentially a time lapse photo. Experience taught the photographers that smiling was too hard to hold, so straight faces were the order of the day.