that's my quote, just want to add a few notes because I originally typed that out quickly in a comment on twitter and didn't expect it to get traction
1. At the time iirc maybe 60% of people meant something like "that's a reasonable symptom to run into from EA thinking, I've had something like it too, it's hard to fix even if you know it's not ideal". Although maybe 20% of people did think it actually just made sense as a way to operate and didn't see it as a big problem
2. I agree it's much less common now. I think it's possibly because EA has shifted more towards longtermism. Although around 2016 I switched to working on AGI safety which is very longtermist, so it's possible that's my local bias
3. Luckily the symptom was short lived, maybe ~4-6 weeks in total while I was also experiencing startup founder anxiety separate of EA. I consider myself maybe a little hurt by EA, but not that traumatized, and I still think it has lots of merits even if I don't identify as an "EA person" anymore
Yeah that’s right. There were very few strictly-bad ones across the entire thread of generations
The rejections were most commonly
1. Kind of just slightly boring or literally drawing the thing rather than being cool and artistic
2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near it in the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse (surreal followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines etc) so it's more fun to scroll through
Whereas a few years ago generative models (GANs etc) would often render like static noise sometimes or completely wrong things. I've only seen that problem once with DALL-E across hundreds or thousands of images now (it generated a fully white image)
> 2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near it in the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse (surreal followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines etc) so it's more fun to scroll through
Has anyone compiled a list of the styles and artists Dall-E "knows"? How niche does it get? Decorative Initial Caps? Florid Victorian Ornaments? Googie Architecture? SFF artists like Michael Whelan, Vincent Di Fate, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, or Jim Burns? Banksy? Sculptors like Bathsheba Grossman or Markus Pierson? Early animation artists like Ub Iwerks or E. C. Segar?
I was experimenting with one of the VQGAN+Clip notebooks a while ago, and it did pretty well with some styles, but not so much with "Heroic Realism" or "Soviet Propaganda Poster" or "Sheppard Fairey", and even worse when I was trying to get it to draw in that style an object that could be construed as implying a style itself like "retro robot" or "50s raygun" (eg. "A retro robot drawn in a heroic realism style" or "A cubist painting of a steampunk pistol"). Is that kind of dissonance a problem for Dall-E?
for that one IIRC I asked for a Robert Moses and one of the cooler ones had giant hands so I put that in the prompt then took two of my favorite from the next batch
Hey everyone, Nick here creator of the linked thread. I just wanted to link to another tweet I have with some details of how I made it.
TLDR it’s not just the bio pasted directly into dall-e and the images are cherry-picked but dall-e is basically doing 95% of the work here. I have no ability to make art myself, and I found I could illustrate basically any bio I wanted in a couple minutes of playing around. My goal was to create illustrations for my friends not create a dall-e gallery but I’m glad it ended up being a good example of what dall-e can do
I'm very conflicted here, because on the one hand these are absolutely fantastic and that's really exciting, but on the other hand, some of these are of a level that I could genuinely call "art" and now I'm questioning everything.
Any technology that had success like Meteor cannot, in good faith, be called bad. All technology have their pros and cons, and Meteor was the appropriate choice in a number of ways, especially a few years ago.
