I completely disagree. I think these are taking it a step further than your examples. Dalle2 is not just using the existing Kermit and pasting it in different environments, it's modifying Kermit to fit in that world.

For example, your Star Wars example...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6MebZx-4950/maxresdefault.jpg

It's clearly just an existing photo of Kermit pasted over an image from the film. There are even two sets of arms. I could Photoshop that in a few minutes.

Then, the Dalle2 image...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUEDDm2UEAAO8yb?format=jpg&name=...

I think it's impressive. It looks like Kermit is a character in the Star Wars universe. There are a few issues with the eyes and feet, and it's also hard to tell if it's a creature or a person in a frog suit. However, it gets 90% of the way there, and the pose is great for a frog/human hybrid.

The most exciting thing is how this could be used as a starting point for design. I could take the Dalle2 Kermit image above, fix the eyes/feet, add a few distinctive Kermit features, and have a great piece of concept art in an hour, rather than taking a day or two to create something from scratch. Obviously it can't be applied to all workflows, but for those it's suited for, it'll save vast amounts of time and costs. For that reason, it's already something of real value in its current state. The same can't be said about the Star Wars examples you provided.

I genuinely can't tell if you're trolling. This isn't impressive because the AI model doesn't accurately capture the "feel" of Kermit!?

The computer was asked to produce photos of Kermit the frog. It failed spectacularly at rendering anything resembling Kermit the frog.

Yet, it did produce things which "look like weird designs for the Ninja Turtles movie in the 90s."

In other words, it has done as good a job of costume design, lighting and photographing a live action Kermit as New Line Cinema paid $13.5m to accomplish for TMNT in 1990.

And you know who they got to do those creature designs?

Jim Henson

So maybe we shouldn't be so dismissive.

These are crazy takes honestly

Agreed. They are self-evident, high-quality representations of KtF. When faced with disagreement on that, it's hard to know what to say in response to convince someone other than to point to another canonical representation of KtF and say, "These are the same."

The OP pointed specific examples:

> - For any of the "live action" ones, Kermit should still always be a puppet. - Kermit notoriously has lanky arms, - Kermit never has eye lids - His eyes sit way on top of his head. - He often has his weird neck decoration. - His eyes have a very distinctive pupil shape.

This is something akin to isolated demands for rigor. Apparently these features are not essential to KtF-ness, because most people look at these pictures and see unambiguous KtF.

When it completely does capture the feel of Kermit.

I disagree that this is unimpressive, but do largely agree about AI winter. Dall-E 2 is probably the most impressive AI implementation I can recall in the past 5-10 years and it's still highly specialized problem being solved, and it's unclear what market it really can go after other than freelancing digital artists online who work for tiny commissions. I guess it's also gonna be great for NFTs but I consider that market illusory and will disappear within a few years.

I am definitely going to bet against the "AI winter is returning" idea by investing huge amounts of my time into understanding these algorithms. History doesn't have to repeat, sometimes that's the foolish prediction (the apple newton was made fun of by the simpsons but when the ipad came out the timing was perfect). I don't like overinflating OpenAIs already enormous ego but these are incredible images.

Agree there's no reason it has to come again, just things got so hyped the past 5-10 years I wouldn't be surprised if a reality check on the horizon involves a "winter" of sorts and paring down of investment, as it becomes clear that current techniques are great at highly specialized problems where there is a lot of data. There's lots of firms that have both though so maybe it just keeps chugging along as ROI is found.

Well the investment landscape in general is kinda drying up (innovation is getting harder) and AI is one of the few areas that could or is bearing fruit so that's a big part of it too (even hardware and software is kinda stagnating). If investment is going to go anywhere AI is still one of the few places in the world that could have 100x returns (despite many frauds, yes).

While I think many are over-interpreting the quality of these results, yours is sounding like a clear case of a No True Kermit fallacy.

There are many ways to define what "Kermit the Frog in $MOVIE" means, and the choice the AI made is absolutely valid. There are of course various other valid choices, but this doesn't invalidate the ones presented.

Furthermore, judging by some other examples in this HN thread, it seems that the fact most of the pictures are not puppets is more of a choice of the human choosing the photos, as in other cases DALL-E was indeed adding puppet-like characters in movie-like decors.

I thought I was taking crazy pills, none of them look like kermit bur rather they look like a generic frog. They don't even have the same pattern around his collar.

It is odd, isn't it? It captures "essential" characteristics of all those films in a honestly brilliant way - but it doesn't capture any of the iconic characteristics of Kermit himself!

Your take on Kermit is too literal. Allow some artistic license. And you neglect all of the other thematic elements from the prompt.

> These are honestly not very impressive (no sarcasm here) and further convince me that the next AI Winter will come with this coming recession.

"Sure, this AI can produce high-resolution realistic images leaps and bounds above anything that's been shown before... but there's an aspect which could use improvement. Obviously, this proves that the current AI technology will never amount to anything and we should just give up on it now."

> Again if this was done on someone's laptop it would be really impressive. However the fact that so much talent and resources were poured into pushing AI to it's limits and this is what we get tells me we've hit another brick wall as far as research goes.

You might be missing the point of what OpenAI is doing. The point is to show off the capability of their models in a way that's likely to go viral and lead to more business for OpenAI. Some people laughed at GPT-3's silly demos, but when they launched GitHub Copilot...

... And it's a decent tool?

If people say Dalle can improve the workflow of digital artists, sure, but Copilot hasn't revolutionized programming either, you still have to be a good programmer to finish whatever you are doing:

> A paper accepted for publication in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2022 assessed the security of code generated by Copilot [...] The study found that across these axes in multiple languages, 39.33% of top suggestions and 40.73% of total suggestions lead to code vulnerabilities. Additionally, they found that small, non-semantic (i.e., comments) changes made to code could impact code safety.[14]

> but when they launched GitHub Copilot...

What happened next? Is anyone using copilot for serious work? Has it changed programming in a fundamental way?

I personally have zero use for copilot since the for type of code I write the actual code writing is not a bottle neck, so automating that process is of no value to me. On top of that getting the details exactly right is essential so the ratio of boiler plate to real code is very, very low for me.

I agree with what you say in re: Kermit. Most of these images look to me like a frog that looks like Kermit the Frog but isn't. Metaphorically (and literally) Jim Henson isn't in these images.

However, I don't think you're correct in your assessment of the import of this sort of thing: it's an imagination machine. This isn't a brick wall, it's a foundation on which to build.