Man wins competition with AI-generated artwork – and some people aren't happy
- Reference: 1662191530
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/03/in_brief_ai/
- Source link:
The image, titled Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, looks like an impressive painting of an opera scene with performers on stage, and an abstract audience in the background with a huge moon-like window of some sort. It was created by Jason Allen, who went through hundreds of iterations of written descriptions fed into text-to-image generator [1]Midjourey before the software emitted the picture he wanted.
He won first prize, and $300, after he submitted a printed version of the image to the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition. His achievement, however, has raised eyebrows and divided opinions.
TL;DR — Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize.Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty. [2]pic.twitter.com/vjn1IdJcsL — Genel Jumalon ✈️ Nan Desu Kan (@GenelJumalon) [3]August 30, 2022
"I knew this would be controversial," Allen said in the Midjourney Discord server on Tuesday, [4]according to Vice. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?"
[5]
Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, who covered the brouhaha [6]here , raised an interesting point: "People once saw photography as cheating, too – just pushing a button – and now we realize the best creations rely on skilled composition, judgment, and tone," he [7]tweeted .
[8]
[9]
"Will we one day regard AI art in the same way?"
Footy, footy, footy
DeepMind has trained virtual agents to play football – the soccer kind – using reinforcement learning to control their motor and team work skills.
Football is a fine game to test software's planning skills in a physical domain as it requires bots to learn how to move and coordinate their computer body parts alongside others to achieve a goal. These capabilities will prove useful in the future for real robots and will be a necessary part of artificial general intelligence.
"Football is a great domain to explore this very general problem," DeepMind researchers and co-authors of a [10]paper published in Science Robotics this week told The Register . "It requires planning at the level of skills such as tackling, dribbling or passing, but also longer-term concerns such as clearing the ball or positioning.
[11]
"Humans can do this without actively thinking at the level of high frequency motor control or individual muscle movements. We don't know how planning is best organized at such different scales, and achieving this with AI is an active open problem for research."
At first, the humanoids move their limbs in a virtual environment randomly and gradually learn to run, tackle, and score using imitation and reinforcement learning over time.
They were pitted against each other in teams of two. You can see a demonstration in the video below.
[12]
[13]Youtube Video
People are using AI to generate NSFW images
It was only a matter of time before someone went and built a viral text-to-image tool to generate pornographic images.
[14]Stable Diffusion is taking the AI world by storm. The software – including the source code, model and its weights – has been released publicly, allowing anyone with some level of coding skills to tailor their own system to a specific use case. One developer has built and released Porn Pen to the world, with which users can choose a series of tags, like "babe" or "chubby," to generate a NSFW image.
"I think it's somewhat inevitable that this would come to exist when [OpenAI's] DALL-E did," Os Keyes, a PhD candidate at Seattle University, [15]told TechCrunch. "But it's still depressing how both the options and defaults replicate a very heteronormative and male gaze."
It's unclear how this will affect the sex industry, and many are concerned text-to-image tools could be driven to create deepfakes of someone or pushed to produce illegal content. These systems have sometimes struggled to visualize human anatomy correctly.
People have noticed these ML models adding nipples on random parts of the body or sometimes an extra arm or something is poking out somewhere. All of this is rather creepy.
Can AI decode your cat's meows?
There's a mobile app that claims it can translate the meaning of a cat's meows into plain English using machine-learning algorithms.
Aptly named MeowTalk, the app analyses recordings of cat noises to predict their mood and interprets what they might be trying to say. It tells owners if their pet felines are happy, resting, or hunting, and may translate this into phrases such as "let me rest" or "hey, I'm so happy to see you," for example.
"We're trying to understand what cats are saying and give them a voice" Javier Sanchez, a founder of MeowTalk, [16]told the New York Times. "We want to use this to help people build better and stronger relationships with their cats," he added. Code using machine learning algorithms to decode and study animal communication, however, isn't always reliable.
MeowTalk doesn't interpret the intent of purring very well, and sometimes the text translation of cat noises are very odd. When a reporter picked up her cat and she meowed, the app apparently thought she told her owner: "Hey baby, let's go somewhere private!"
Stavros Ntalampiras, a computer scientist at the University of Milan, who was called to help the MeowTalk founders, admitted that "a lot of translations are kind of creatively presented to the user," and said "it's not pure science at this stage." ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/david_holz_midjourney/
[2] https://t.co/vjn1IdJcsL
[3] https://twitter.com/GenelJumalon/status/1564651635602853889?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[4] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwork-won-first-place-at-a-state-fair-fine-arts-competition-and-artists-are-pissed
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YxMltiFVzkctuCeyAhcLMAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/midjourney-artificial-intelligence-state-fair-colorado/
[7] https://twitter.com/drewharwell/status/1565725780277067778
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YxMltiFVzkctuCeyAhcLMAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YxMltiFVzkctuCeyAhcLMAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/scirobotics.abo0235
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YxMltiFVzkctuCeyAhcLMAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YxMltiFVzkctuCeyAhcLMAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWnGTtbOK7I
[14] https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
[15] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/02/ai-is-getting-better-at-generating-porn-we-might-not-be-prepared-for-the-consequences/
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/science/cats-pets-ommunication-artificial-intelligence.html
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Understanding my cat
There is a bit more.
Let me go outside (1 minute later) yowling to be let in.
But basically the cats aim in life “enslave all humans “ but if the humans has dreamies then all they want is feeding.
What do they put in dreamies?
I know years ago that they used to use chicken gastric juices to keep them loyal to a certain brand…..
The parallel to photography is quite appropriate. I've played around with these text-to-image tools. Getting something pretty out of them is not easy. There's also often some photoshopping involved to e.g. eliminate nonsensical details, or at least that's what I did when I wanted to actually show the pictures to someone.
The stunning "AI-generated" images you see around on the Internet are an enormous selection bias, they are maybe the best 1% of what the tool actually does, and may have been altered after generation.
> The stunning "AI-generated" images you see around on the Internet are an enormous selection bias, they are maybe the best 1% of what the tool actually does
TBF, the same applies to human-generated art, too, much of which turns a £30 blank, stretched, canvas into a £20 "artwork". However, it seems to me that what makes it into galleries and is considered "good" art by critics, is more a victory for its marketing and promotion, than of the skill of the creator.
The same applies to other "artistic" endeavours, too: acting, writing - success being largely random.
Read this elsewhere and said
Mark my words. Some poncey "artist" WILL generate several of these "art works" and then display them in a gallery in London or other big city and sell them for lots of money to poncey rich people.
Much like Richard Prince did with people's Instagram posts. Just copied them and sold them as his own work and got away with it.
This is why I dislike the art world. In school I was a copy artist. Would copy drawings freehand but never make out they were my own work. This was back in the 80s-90s. During one art lesson we were talking about this issue with the art world & in fact Mark Gattis said this on the Richard Herring podcast recently "Who decides that someone's childish scrawl is worth millions and another childish scrawl is just a childish scrawl?". During our lesson we told the teacher our work was the work of one of the art teachers she liked and his work was ours. She said his work wasn't very good (thinking it was ours) and that our work was really good (thinking it was his). It proved our point.
There are people on YouTube I see who can do almost photo quality pencil work but make no money. My girlfriend's cousin can do near photo quality pencil work but makes no money. Yet a poncy "artist" in London can draw colour boxes and make millions. Then we have Bankys. Blek le Rat was doing VERY similar work but never made it big, Bankys seemed to essentially copy most his work and makes millions from it.
Re: Read this elsewhere and said
That applies to nearly every walk of life. Skill and ability at the thing you're claiming to be are rarely the most important factors to success. The ability that matters is the ability to make people think you have skill and ability. Look at politics, almost everybody in management, and the millions of shameless self-promoters on social media making careers out of almost nothing but a willingness to say they're great.
As a society we're extremely bad at judging the worth of anything, we have always preferred to let people tell us. Maybe this is because, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
Commodity
The use of tools to generate "art" is simply making the work a commodity. In contrast, usually "art" is created by a closed group of craftsmen. Now any one can start typing and generate as they please.
Just like the article states, the photographer is more than a button pusher. A musician is more than playing that old or classic instrument. Just like a real artist is more than putting streaks on a canvas. But complaining that a new group now has access to creating "art" is like saying that inventing the wheel destroyed the manual labourers' work carrying stuff.
I for one would be very happy to use these new tools (yes, they are tools ). My artistic drawing skills are abysmal, but my descriptive ability and programming are reasonable and fine. Now I too can make nice images for projects that can be improved with some nice images.
Understanding my cat
It's easy
" Hey, human, I'm bloody starving here. Feed me before I die. "
(human provides Felix and crunchies and a quick rub between the ears)
Five minutes later...
" Hey, human, I'm bloody starving here. Feed me before I die. "