Re:Hypnogram: Create an image from text
by lloyddavis on Thursday November 18, 2021 @05:46AM
(#29264066)
David Weinberger has written here: https://aeon.co/essays/our-world-is-a-black-box-predictable-... about this difficulty of thinking about such systems - as others say, you can look at the code, but I understand the resistance to just accepting it.
Re:Hypnogram: Create an image from text
by micaeked on Monday November 08, 2021 @05:08AM
(#29147749)
I might be getting whooshed here, but if you're serious, there's a couple colab notebooks floating around, you can look at the code that generates it or run it on your own hardware. Here's one: https://is.gd/artmachine
Re:Hypnogram: Create an image from text
by captainmuon on Monday November 08, 2021 @06:12AM
(#29148132)
Thanks! I'm only half joking. I used traditional machine learning in my PhD but never got into modern deep learning techniques. I tried a couple of collab notebooks and tutorials but never succeded with anything more complex than NIST numbers. I think over the holidays I'll give it another shot because I find this stuff really interesting (art generation, style transfer, but also transfer learning in general).
The conspiracy theory is more a jab at the fact that we live in a world with Theranos, NFTs, and clones of Dogecoin. There actually have been a couple of high profile AI fraud schemes, like Augustus Intelligence, where people collected investments and government money and probably never had a product.
I have a conspiracy theory: Somebody found a way to quickly generate pictures in this style in a semi-manual fashion, and hired a bunch of people to fake this, mechanical turk style. I have never found an interactive generator that completely convinced me, neither for images nor for text. Either the results are really bad, or the responses take so long that a person could have made it.
But why would somebody fake something like this? There is a lot of money in AI. It seems totally plausible that someone invests five or six figures to set up a fake demonstration, in order to raise millions in investments.
Now I want to make clear while I get a big Theranos vibe from these kind of demos, I don't want to accuse anybody concretely. I think a lot is technically possible and I do believe a lot of research is real, but I also believe some demos are "fake it till you make it" territory.