Sundar

Tech-utopia was often portrayed (by enthusiasts) in the past as one where the robots took care of the mundane boring tasks, leaving the human masters to sit in leisure and pursue their creative artistic endeavours.

From that background, it’s ironic that some of the first successful mass applications of AI have been in fiction-writing and art, which are among the first things people think of as creative endeavours.

#TechUtopia #AIArt #DALLE #StableDiffusion #novelAI #GPT3

Nov 4, 2022 at 1:27pmWeb
Show threadVertex RageNov 4, 2022
@digital_carver I wouldn't call those "first successful mass applications of AI". Google search, targeted advertisement, social media recommendations, netflix recommendations, fraud detection in banks, etc. etc. The list goes on. AI algorithms have been omni-present in our lives for decades now...
Show threadSundarNov 5, 2022
@vertexrage
Yeah that part of the post was tough to word correctly, what I meant was popular use of AI by common people, AI that everyone knows to be AI and knowingly uses. For a lot of non-tech people, I think GPT-3 (via AI dungeon) and DALL-E/stable diffusion (via NovelAI and others) was the first AI system they knowingly used, their first taste of AI they could get their hands on and try.
Show threadMr. TeatimeNov 5, 2022

@digital_carver
Fiction writing?
I've seen some script enacted and read a few things made by AI (deep neiral networks, more precisely), and they're, shall we say ... abstract?

There's a lot in image recognition/synthesis, although the results are often still not quite there. OTOH, Chess and Go are firmly in "AI" hands, of course. Otherwise, NNs seem to be mostly in the "quick decision" category: modelling stuff that doesn't have to be 100% but is too difficult or slow without NNs.

Show threadSundarNov 5, 2022

@Mr_Teatime
True 😀 I was thinking in terms of availability (i.e. everyone could try them out), but in terms of results they’re not quite on par with the Chess or Go AIs. People have posted impressive specimens from AI Dungeon and so forth, but those are the rare fully-coherent ones among the many “abstract” ones as you put it 😁

What kind of NN applications do you have in mind that’s in the “quick decision” category?

Show threadMr. TeatimeNov 5, 2022
@digital_carver
A colleague was using them for response surfaces (produce training data with complicated expensive model, then use NN as predictor in optimisation loops), and there's of course real-time image recognition, where programming the thing directly is hard and would take ages (if possible at all). Same thing with chess or go: explicit programming takes ages, but NNs can usually pick a move good enough to beat a human, even if you're never sure it's the perfect move.
Show threadMr. TeatimeNov 5, 2022

@digital_carver
I came to NNs from the angle of respone surfaces (technically, curve fitting counts as "machine learning"...), and they basically allow a trade-off between accuracy, evaluation speed and inpit data volume that was not possoble before.

I mostly did Kriging and similar "Bayesian" modelling of noisy data, but once you have a certain amount of (nonlinear) data, NNs become hard to ignore. Effectively, image synthesis is "interpolating" images, too.

Show threadMr. TeatimeNov 5, 2022
@digital_carver
hmm... now that I think of it: How come there is no NN-based video compression yet? You train a NN on the frames of the video, and then it "predicts" the look of the video at any point in time... with the right choice of neuron types, you could even get slow-motion interpolation for free.
Show threadceolnNov 7, 2022
@digital_carver I get the thought! On the other hand, these AI test and image generator things also do help “the human masters to sit in leisure and pursue their creative artistic endeavors”. I can make cool images now, with my paltry visual skills…
Show threadSundarNov 7, 2022
@ceoln
That’s true, and an interesting way to look at it. These tools take away the mundane part of struggling with pixels and lines or spelling and grammar, and allow you to express your creativity more directly. I like it!