> They absolutely have not taste. And I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way.
applies here.
Would you appreciate more if their model generated cats with 5 legs in 99% of cases, and they cherry picked that 1 in 100 image where it has 4 legs? Do you think doing that would make them more caring and professional?
Not like this is the fault of the AI progress, we could use AI to go beyond the quality what we used to deliver, too. It's just the pace expectations that are now "in the room" ?
We've seen this play out over and over again, in many different sectors. The whole shtick of the old (Bellhead) telecom world was quality at the (literal) expense of price, which didn't work out well for them. Same for CD versus pirated mp3s, DVD versus pirated videos (and, to a lesser extend, theaters versus bootleg cam releases), native texting / GSM calls versus WhatsApp and similar, mainstream newspapers and media versus blogging and social media, traditional electrical appliances versus Chinese-made, and so on.
Because of the innovator's dilemma, In many cases, the cheaper, lower-quality product later surpasses the quality of its more expensive counterpart.
AI is just one more example of this happening. It lets you make more things which otherwise would be far too expensive to make, even if that often means a lower quality product.
With that being said, my understanding of that issue is a few years old, people have always said CFG is a havk until models get better at following prompts on their own. So thee “look” that tools like Nano Banana ends up with could be something else. It may or may not be a necessary artifact of some part of the process.
It is entirely possible to prompt engineer away from that style, but that requires effort and knowledge that said average person does not have, so it's stuck in a feedback loop.
The problem is in the rewards, but it's more how they average across domains and contexts, so AI misapplies them. Actually, in human preference evaluations, most of Gen Z in particular extremely adverse to the common look of AI images.
So it's not the annotators involved in RLHF, it's the models failing to map to human preferences at the task level. The failure rate is also uneven across domains.
Where there are challenges with human annotation, it's not the ability to gauge what's good but rather how to correct what's wrong. Most people can tell when something is off but struggle to articulate why. That's where more domain expertise is required.
For posterity, the memetic ugly food can be controlled and mostly filtered out with prompt engineering. Here's a quick ad hoc test example which (hopefully) uses the new model: https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebf030-9d38-83e8-a103-3509883905...
First image is fine, but attempts to make it more wacky turn it to the AI food slop. So then followup prompts deslopify it, mostly successfully.
I think the way they'll solve it in the end is to create an ultra-high-fidelity simulation of the world including modelling taste and other senses on the level of physics, and then incorporate all of this into the training rewards.
I think this is how the machines know what tasty wheat tasted like.
This kind of content is here to stay and we’re going to see more and more of it. Unfortunately…
I see restaurants post AI flyers and ads to random local Facebook groups and most of the replies are about them being AI slop. I think it’s an uncanny valley problem: People don’t mind if you post a real photo of your food or a cartoon drawing of a pizza or a pig on a spit, but when it’s a weird fake photo with texture issues, it looks gross, especially when it’s food.
I think a lot of people who open restaurants probably aren’t extremely online, partly because it would be physically impossible with the amount of work they have to do, but they definitely pay attention -sometimes too much attention — to public online feedback.
I absolutely do not get the uncanny-valley images. Those all look gross. Besides not actually being representative of the dish, the images have all sorts of weird texture issues, look too glossy, and are just unappetizing. I cannot understand why a restaurant owner would want to put up an ad that has food that looks straight up gross.
I've been seeing "AI slop" stickers posted on things
> I see just everywhere including food menus
The places I have seen it in use are the places that would have a handwritten scribble that was misspelt and would be something mocked by people because it was written by ESOL (or vice versa, English speakers trying, but failing, to write in a different language)
Honestly, I think the AI slop is a step up - I can read the signs clearly, and they are only mildly offensive
Edit: I guess I take the view that - like a pirated movie filmed in a cinema - the only people that use/watch it are people that were never going to pay for the real thing anyway
Generative AI (coding, images, etc.) has only accelerated the atrophy of basic observational skills.
People just hate AI and will find a post hoc justification for their hatred in every situation. The link you gave could have just as easily been someone expressing surprise and delight at the artists choice to not follow traditional physics... but instead be playful in unconstrained ways. Shrug.
the vast majority of people have no idea what they are doing, going on vibes and copying the opinions of their peers
Do you have a link to the numbers that clearly show this?
I suspect people are somewhat hypnotized by the content, in the same way a toddler is hypnotized by Cocomelon. Something about it is enthralling and keeps the attention. I wonder if it's related to the phone game icon / YouTube thumbnail phenomenon of "person's face making an extreme expression with the mouth open." AI generated videos for example still tend to have very exaggerated facial expressions and the mouth is always unusually wide when talking. I also wonder if something about the uncanny smoothness of movement (I assume caused by any form of transition defaulting to "linear") has a hypnotic effect.
I'm not sure how to look into this further. Elsagate is an interesting past example, and what I've learned so far I threw in a blog post a couple months back https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/psychic-attack/
Right now I'm looking into "Lula's army" and the AI generated content they used. I feel like there's something significant and perhaps even dangerous that could be developed bere.