If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.
You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try:
This is what you got a month ago with the same prompt. (MidJourney v3 vs. v4)
This is a classic case of disruptive technology, in the original Clay Christensen sense 👇
A less capable technology is developing faster than a stable dominant technology (human illustration), and starting to be able to handle more use cases. Except it is happening very quickly
Seriously, everyone whose job touches on writing, images, video, or music should realize that the pace of improvement here is very fast & also, unlike other areas of AI, like robotics, there are not any obvious barriers to improvement.
Also worth looking at the details in the admittedly goofy otter pictures: the lighting looks correct (even streaming through the windows), everything is placed correctly, including the drink, the composition is varied, etc.
And this is without any attempts to refine the prompts.
Some more, again all first attempts with no effort to revise:
🦦 Otters fighting a medieval duel
🦦Otter physicist lamenting the invention of the atomic bomb
🦦Otter inventing the airplane in 1905
🦦Otters playing chess in the fall
(These AIs just came out just a few months ago)
AI image generation can now beat the Lovelace Test, a Turing Test, but for creativity. It challenges AI to equal humans under constrained creativity.
Illustrating “an otter making pizza in Ancient Rome” in a novel, interesting way & as well as an average human is a clear pass!
And I picked otters randomly for fun
But since some comments are pointing out that nonhuman scenes may be easier; here are some of the prompt “doctor on a plane using wifi” - we are good at picking out flaws with illustrations of people, but they are impressive & improving fast.
People keep asking what system I was using: it is MidJourney (I mentioned this in the thread)
If you want to try it, you get 25 uses for free & a guide is below. Be sure to use —v4 at the end of your prompt to use the latest version, which is the one I use throughout the thread.
Here👇 is a thread with more comparisons between MidJourney a month or so ago, compared to MidJourney now. The pace is fast!
If you are trying MidJourney, the way to use the new version is to add --v 4 to the end of your prompt (I have no association with it or any AI company)
Reminder: if you want to use the new MidJourney version 4, rather than the old (from a month ago!) version add “ --v 4” to the end of the prompt. The spaces are vital
Interestingly, version 4 “just works” making it easier for everyone but power users who learned to craft prompts
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AI detectors have high flaw positives & teacher intuition seems to work even worse: “Here we show in two experimental studies that novice and experienced teachers could not identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written texts.”
Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:
🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment.
The invention of the moldboard plow in Europe was at least a millennia closer to the invention of the iPhone than it was to the invention of the moldboard plow in China!
Plus:
🚲The wheel was invented surprisingly late & maybe only once (as anything other than a toy). It came after sailboats & harps, and was not used at all in the Americas
🐴And the horse collar, a simple invention that sped up plowing by 50%, wasn't common in Europe until 1000
I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests
It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone... reddit.com/r/forhire/comm…
Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.
It was actively monitoring the thread to take offers.
One thing business analysts miss is that many of the people at the AI labs are true believers that they are building AGI, and soon.
You don't have to think that they can do it, but, if you don't take their sincere beliefs into account, a lot of their strategy doesn't make sense.
The race for bigger models at the expense of improving existing models, the interlocking alliance deals where companies are funding and cooperating with competitors, the willingness to release models without extensive testing & just take the reputational risk in the short term...
The "its all sales hype" doesn't make a lot of sense upon consideration. Models are pretty fungible, GPT-4 class models prompt in similar ways. Convincing people you are building amazing future models doesn't generate lock-in for current ones & increases risks you don't deliver.
The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.
There are no alternative sources known. From Conway’s Material World: