Posted by SweetSoftPillow 1 day ago
LLMs and image generators are cross pollinating human language and human visual information -- both really fuzzy mediums.
I think learning how to 'use this instrument' and 'finding the perfect brush stroke' are part of how they are supposed to work (at least in their current form). I also don't know that just because they are showing good outputs from the inputs that this is framing the narrative as one-and-done... I think the rest of the owl is kind in of implied.
Of course it's a ridiculous index in most use cases (like in self-driving car. Your 4th guess is that you need to brake? Cool...). But somehow people in ML normalized it.
I'm more worried about the cases that aren't trying to be info diagrams. There's all this "safety" discourse around not letting people generate NSFW, and around image copyrights etc. but nobody talks about the potential to use things like #11 for fraud. "Disinformation" always gets approached from a political angle instead of one of personal gain.
I think a bigger problem is the "artifacts" you describe (worse than that sounds to me).
There used to be a job people would do, where they'd go around in the morning and wake people up so they could get to work on time. They were called a "knocker-up". When the alarm clock was invented, these people lose their jobs to other knockers-up with alarm clocks, they lost their jobs to alarm clocks.
You can paint your own walls or fix your own plumbing, but people pay others instead. You can cook your food, but you order take-out. It's not hard to sew your own clothes, but...
So no, I don't think it's as simple as that. A lot of people will not want the mental burden of learning a new tool and will have no problem paying someone else to do it. The main thing is that the price structure will change. You won't be able to charge $1,000 for a project that takes you a couple of days. Instead, you will need to charge $20 for stuff you can crank out in 20 minutes with gen AI.
That said, I'm pretty sure the market for professional photographers shrank after the digital camera revolution.
The Gemini models save me about an hour a day.
VHS, online payments, video streaming... As the old song say it "the internet is porn"
I read your comment before checking the site and then I saw case one was a child followed by a sexy maid and I thought "oh no dear god" before I realized they weren't combining them into a single image.
Careful not to project your own ideas onto prehistoric sculpture.
What are you referring to?
> but nobody denies that they are naked female figures.
No, but the suggestion above that they were the prehistoric equivalent to cartoons of school girls lifting their skirts hasn't been the dominant theory for about thirty years.
> And the critiques don't seem to have found much purchase among archeologists.
This is simply incorrect. They became part of the general archeological discourse as far back as the 1990s and are now a normal part of any such discussion. Multiple theories now coexist and to frame those critical of the original Venus ideas as being somehow more fringe than the fertility/pornography theories is just misleading.
There are multiple theories yes, but they aren't substantially varied.
We also have a whole lineage of art from the prehistoric age to today and more figures than we did in the 1990s. Art from every period includes nude representations of women. The more recent art (which we are able to say more about)have connections to goddesses and fertility/reproduction/sex. The continuity of art suggests there should be a continuity of explanation. But the McCoid theory handles the oldest art as a special case different in kind from art that didn't come long after.
Even among the competing hypotheses, they're more closely related than many people realize. This is because religion, sex and fertility were more closely related in the ancient world than they are today. See, for example, temple prostitution.
The one outlier among the current theories I'm aware of is that the figures are supposed to show you what obese people look like. The evidence for that isn't great. For example the 2012 Dixson paper is based on having college students rate the statues for attractiveness, which seems like it's going to tell you nothing useful about the statues. But even they say the statues were about survival and reproduction, e.g.
> They may, instead, have symbolized the hope for survival and for the attainment of a well-nourished (and thus reproductively successful) maturity, during the harshest period of the major glaciation in Europe.
Amongst others.
> That is still talked about, but I'm not aware of it being taken seriously as a theory.
I'm not sure what to say to this because you're essentially arguing that your own ignorance is representative of the reality in the field. You recognise that these questions have been part of the discourse now for a third of a century but at the same time suggest it's all done in jest? I really don't know how to read this.
> We also have a whole lineage of art from the prehistoric age to today
We very much do not. There are many gaps, especially significant ones in pre-history and you're skipping multiple millennia to stretch a connection to temple prostitution, as well as ignoring the very clearly evident variation in the representations of women more recently across geographies.
> Even among the competing hypotheses...
Well we can end it here because the salient point is that pornographic representations of women is no longer the dominant theory and you seem to accept that.
These arguments are so tiring, always arguing in bad faith. It's government-level "think of the children" arguments when it's about a simple drawing.
...the technical graphics (especially text) is generally wrong. Case 16 is an annotated heart and the anatomy is nonsensical. Case 28 with the tallest buildings has the decent images, but has the wrong names, locations, and years.
Case 8 Substitute for ControlNet
The two characters in the final image are VERY obviously not in the instructed set of poses.