Floating in latent space with Taylor Swift
What do the new AI models mean for society?
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A friend sent me this image. I thought — well, I wonder if I could do better?
“Yeah, the artists are borked”
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How it looks
I’ve been playing with these generative AIs (large language models, or LLM’s) for a while. Could one of the latest models, ‘Stable Diffusion’ could do any better? I refine the prompt: “Taylor swift, renaissance painting, extremely detailed, accurate proportions, realistic face, beautiful eyes, smiling, detailed lips, accurate lips, accurate chin”
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Well yeah, I guess it could. Could we get a bit more specific, like playing the mandolin? Kinda.
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Taylor Swift in a traffic cone hat?
How about riding a tiger, wearing a traffic cone? I tried several of these but it didn’t do well. This was my favourite weird combo. A tiger print traffic cone?
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After refining the prompt a bit I finally got these.
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How it feels
It’s a surreal experience. Yes, the results are mundane. I could have created something similar using Photoshop. But the experience is totally different. There’s a feeling of jamming, going back and forth with something that almost feels intelligent. But more than this I get a feeling of weightlessness, of floating in the unknown. It’s diving into black water. It’s rolling the dice in the dark.
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The future is here
Playing with these models, I’m reminded of William Gibson’s:
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.
I feel like I’m floating, weightless, while the rest of the world remains firmly attached to gravity. It’s a feeling of limitless, strange power and potential. The closest analogy I have is when I first saw the internet working, as a student at Sussex University nearly 30 years ago. I had my mind completely blown when I saw that I could find almost anything, for free. Text and images would download from a server — anywhere in the world, anyone could put up a web page and I could see it, here in this small computer lab in South England. The first thing I started looking for were aliens of course, being a Fortean Times haunted teenager. In the Mosaic browser on a huge Unix machine, an image of a ‘grey alien’ scanned slowly into view, line by line of data emerging from who knew where to form a picture.
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This changes everything
My first thought was: The internet changes everything. This changes all new media, everything about the future, and how we communicate and share. The horrible old big-money controlled media will disappear, and this will take over everything. I was right about everything changing, but totally wrong about the political implications. Peer-to-peer media turned out to be a hellzone when mediated by private companies looking to turn a profit. The Daily Mail is now the biggest news site in the world. But the change coming was real.
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Where are we headed?
I might be completely mis-led, but this is how I feel about the new LLM’s. I don’t know how, but they will change everything. Images now, but soon: Music, animation, video, 3D, VR.
We’re creating models of intelligent processes that will enhance, empower, transform, and perhaps replace vast swathes of human cognition and work. I have no idea how this will pan out. I hope that it will empower and enrich humanity, and enable us to solve our collective crises. My fear is that it will mostly fund a few super yachts for rich white men, while impoverishing the rest of us. The political and collective choices we make over the next decade will decide.
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Try this at home
If you want to have a play yourself, check out these links:
Craiyon — for fun and scrappy creative results
Dreamstudio — ‘Stable Diffusion’s key site and the source of all the images in this article
Midjourney — remarkable (if pricey) image generation through a Discord bot. You’ll need a Discord account to try it.
AI generative tools — an amazing resource if you want to go deeper.
Originally published at https://btribble.com on November 7, 2022.