Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagMidjourney

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Large Language Models - Generative AI illustration

Can We Trust Large Language Models? Depends on How Truthful They Are

Just because a piece of tech is highly sophisticated doesn't mean it's more trustworthy

The trust we put in Large Language Models (LLMs) ought to depend on their truthfulness. So how truthful are LLMs? For many routine queries, they seem accurate enough. What’s the capital of North Dakota? To this query, ChatGPT4 just now gave me the answer Bismarck. That’s right. But what about less routine queries? Recently I was exploring the use of design inferences to detect plagiarism and data falsification. Some big academic misconduct cases had in the last 12 months gotten widespread public attention, not least the plagiarism scandal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the data falsification scandal of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These scandals were so damaging to these individuals and their institutions that neither is a university president any longer.  When I queried Read More ›

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Skull Assorted Poison Bottles

Artists Strike Back!: New Tool “Poisons” Images Pirated by AI

Nightshade, developed by University of Chicago computer science prof Ben Zhao, makes the AI generator keep giving you a cat when you ask for a dog
Overall, Nightshade may prove more useful than lawsuits to artists. It is embedded in pixels, visible only to AI, not to humans. Read More ›
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Funny pixelated boss sunglasses on new blue background. Gangster, Black thug life meme glasses . Pixel 8bit style. Color of the Year 2022. Very Peri

From Memes to Hodgepodge

AI again makes an odd mish-mash out of images, this time with memes
If you go through the slideshow provided at the Gizmodo link, you'll see the blatant distortions in the human faces to the point they're almost unrecognizable. Read More ›
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Say What? AI Doesn’t Understand Anything 

Is that supposed to be a cat, Mr. AI?

Whenever I look at AI generated content, whether it be pictures or text, they all have the same flaw. The AI cannot comprehend what it is making.  Let me explain.  When we humans draw a picture, we are drawing a concept. We are drawing something like “cat climbs a tree” or “cowboy riding into the sunset”. It seems like this is what is happening with a picture drawing AI. We give it a prompt, and it draws an associated picture.  On second thought, maybe not…  When AI draws the picture, what is really going on is it is finding individual-colored pixels that correlate with the letters we typed in its massive database stored in the neural network. Very different than how we draw. We Read More ›

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Aerial view of the Pentagon and the United States Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia

Fake Fire at the Pentagon

An AI image of a fire near Pentagon stokes panic

An AI-generated image showing a billowing fire near the U.S. Pentagon caused panic this week. False alarms of an explosion started to proliferate across social media, with even a Russian state outlet reporting on the situation, according to TMZ. Nonetheless, the image showed various distortions and was quickly dismantled as a hoax by a number of vigilant viewers. Even so, the image looks realistic at first glance, and was enough to ignite concern; the incident occurs amidst legislative talks on Capitol Hill over AI regulation. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (which was originally funded by Elon Musk) testified before Congress and noted that while he sees great benefits in new AI systems, the possibilities of their abuses are evident. The Read More ›

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Deepfake deep learning fake news generator modern internet technology concept.

“Suddenly There’s No More Reality”

The deepfakes and AI scams abound

With the proliferation of AI text and images, the issue of deepfakes is of deepening concern. The better AI gets at refashioning reality, will the already murky waters of the Internet become too surreal to navigate? Even real videos, when divorced from their proper context, can be deeply misleading. When entire clips are artificially contrived, then, it seems like the line between fact and fiction dissolves entirely. Some folks are already worried. Victor Tangermann writes at Futurism, [Given] recent developments, the situation is likely to get worse before it can get better. AI tools are making it easier to generate deepfakes every year. These days, an AI can be trained on a relatively small stockpile of audiovisual data to convincingly Read More ›

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hands

Observing and Communing

What human art and literature do that AI can't

AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E are generally adept at capturing the accuracy of the human form. The concerns over copyright, job infringement, and general degradation of the visual arts via such AI are ongoing concerns for many artists and practitioners. However, a new New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka identifies a noticeable flaw in AI artwork: human hands. Missing the Big Picture Chayka begins by recalling an art class where he was asked to draw his own hand. It’s an assignment for beginners, and as behooves a novice, tempts the artist to focus more on the specific contours of the hand instead of the overall structure and form. The forest gets lost in the trees, so to speak. Read More ›

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portrait of a woman in a black hat on a black background black and white photo

Photographer Who Used Midjourney Calls His Own Bluff

The lifelike portraits gained attention, but alas, weren't real

Joe Avery started posting portraits on his Instagram page in 2022, getting attention and gaining followers at a surprising pace. His pictures were aesthetically pleasing, rendered in black and white, and given captions that assumed the faces in the pictures were legitimately human except, oops. Turns out, they were all AI-generated. Richard Whiddington writes at Artnet News, The problem, one Avery struggled to disclose to his 28,000 followers, was that he was creating the images using Midjourney, an A.I. image generator. Avery made the images by entering a text prompt into Midjourney and then fine-tuning them using Photoshop.” -Richard Whiddington, A Photographer Who Found Instagram Fame for His Striking Portraits Has Confessed His Images Were Actually A.I.-Generated (artnet.com) Avery claimed the images Read More ›

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Artificial Intelligence and the Love of Jesus

The "He Gets Us" video ends with the declaration "Jesus' love was never artificial"

How does artificial intelligence deal with the teachings of Jesus Christ? Apparently quite well in some cases.   Super Bowl ads this year included two about Jesus from the ministry He Gets Us.  There are more thought-provoking videos at their web site HeGetsUs.com. One, linked here, is about AI.  An artificial intelligence image synthesizer  Midjourney was asked by He Gets It to generate images about love from simple text prompts. The video shows generated images using software from the company Midjourney. When prompted to synthesize an image from the prompt “love”,  the response was pictures containing hearts – the kind you might see on a cheesy valentine day’s card.   Then the AI was asked to  visualize love the way Read More ›

Techno adam and God
Disintegrating reaching hands concept illustration in vaporwave style color palette isolated on blue background.

What is Art Without the Human Mind?

AI art tools can wow us with technical skill, but fail to generate meaning

There’s no doubt that tools like OpenAI can create impressive, detailed renderings of images. Type in “Master Yoda riding a musk ox in Taiwan” and you’ll get…something. A friend of mine sent me a two-headed bunny dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi and a few other comic horrors, and I knew he’d been playing around with an AI art tool. But, it doesn’t take much reflection to feel that something important is missing in these artificially generated images. Sure, they’re detailed and colorful, and accurate. You can type in a scene and have it pop up on command. However, what do actual human artists think of these tools, and what do they essentially miss? Artist Peter Mohrbacher gave a balanced assessment of Read More ›

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AI-generated digital art of a wooden board

AI Art Is Not “AI-Generated Art.” It is Engineer-Generated Art

The computers aren’t taking over the art world. The engineers are. Just the way engineers have taken over the music world with modern electronic music

Creativity is a mysterious thing. Our world economy is powered by creativity, yet despite the best efforts of our best engineers, creativity has not been captured by a machine. Until recently. With the new school of AI things have changed. We now have GPT-3 that can digress at length about any topic you give it. Even more remarkable, we have the likes of Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. These phenomenal AI algorithms have scaled the peak of human creativity. AI can now create art that has never been seen before: The new artistic AI has become so successful the image social networks have become flooded with their artwork. Some communities have even banned the AI art. But the AI art Read More ›

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cozy domestic christmas interior with window, bed, candles and fireplace - neural network generated art, picture produced with ai in 2022

What Can AI Text-to-Image Generators Do for Artists?

Developer David Holz discusses his Midjourney generator in terms of the communities that grow up around art generated from words or phrases

In an interview with David Holz, founder of Midjourney, Verge senior reporter James Vincent asks about the new text-to-art AI image generators that are shaking up the illustration market: Generally, the “few dozen” current versions — which rely on combining materials from across the internet — work reasonably well but here are the drawbacks Vincent notes: They’re tricky and expensive to create, requiring access to millions of images used to train the system (it looks for patterns in the pictures and copies them) and a great deal of computational grunt (for which costs vary, but a million-dollar price tag isn’t out of the question). James Vincent, “‘An engine for the imagination’: The rise of AI image generators” at The Verge Read More ›