Why is it so laborious for machines to carry the previous to life?
I keep in mind it effectively. The day was January 29, 2022. The first time I attempted an AI picture generator, I tried to create an image of a sabertooth cat. The outcome was a surreal mess of brown and beige that didn’t even resemble an animal. Today, for the primary time, I attempted to get DALL-E 3 to create a sabertooth cat, and the outcomes have been lovely. Sure, the fangs are wonky, and regardless of me mentioning nothing about “tigers” the entire sabertooths got here out with tiger stripes. Nevertheless, the quantity of progress here’s a marvel. (Sorry, Midjourney. After a yr of attempting, I’m nonetheless struggling to get constant, precise saber tooth out of you.)
Indeed, from my perspective as a longtime artist and incurably curious individual, the previous couple of years have seen generative AI evolve at absolute breakneck pace. We basically went from smeary, trippy-looking approximations to polished-looking pictures accessible in nearly any model, together with photorealism, relying on the subject material.
Inputs and Outputs
While the technical talent and output high quality of generative AI remains to be rising by spectacular leaps and bounds, they’ve an issue: the datasets. The mills “study” from “taking a look at” huge portions of pictures, and for many topics, this isn’t an issue. When it involves huge dinosaur names like Tyrannosaurus rex and standard Ice Age creatures like mammoths and sabertooth cats, there’s a considerable amount of materials to work with. AI picture mills are in a position to create recognizable pictures of them as a result of people have already depicted these animals again and again. However, they are going to have bother with any species not already principally saturating the Internet.
Compare with me, if you’ll, some AI output depicting three well-known, extinct prehistoric animals.
Our acquainted “T. rex” (Tyrannosaurus rex), wooly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), and Stegosaurus (Stegosaurus stenops) are depicted in a recognizable means. My paleoartist thoughts in fact needs to…
