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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Currently you're totally right. But I'll point out that the reason it takes ten minutes is because right now AI art kinda sucks (so it takes a while to get a prompt that looks okay), and the tech only gets better from here on out.

I don't know if the tech matters too much. There is only so much mind-reading that a computer can do. Any image generator has to be met halfway by someone that has played around with the generator enough to understand how to get useful images out of it.

The value-add of shutterstock is to be able to quickly search through a bunch of generic pictures. Even a curated list of AI generated images would work fine for this value-add.

The guy who currently does this at my company basically searches the tags of an article "inflation, money", and then gets a list of images that match those tags. He quickly visually scans a gallery of images, and then picks out the one he wants. While looking at the images he might spot one that has a building in it that looks like the federal reserve, and he thinks 'oh even better match' and he picks that one.

The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.

There is a very real sense in which Stable Diffusion and its ilk do represent a search process, it's just one over the latent space of images that could be created. The Shutterstock search process is distinct primarily in that it's a much much much more restricted search process that encompasses only a curated set of images.

This isn't (just) a "well technically" kind of language quibble, I'm pointing this out because generative prompt engineering and search prompt engineering are the same kind of activity, distinguished in large part by generative prompts yielding useful results far less frequently, with the search process being far slower as a result.

But this is a temporary (maybe) fact about the current state of the AI tool, not a permanent fact about reality.

I don't know if the tech matters too much. There is only so much mind-reading that a computer can do. Any image generator has to be met halfway by someone that has played around with the generator enough to understand how to get useful images out of it.

But this is equally true of search engines and tagged galleries. When you venture out to find a picture, you have a description, at least in the form of a search query. Text to image models can minimize the difference between this text, treated as a caption, and the output; the ability to minimize FID is how they are evaluated. The best that Shutterstock can do is give you a set of similar images out of a necessarily finite pool of discrete samples. If we account for the time you waste on generations and shuffling through offered options, Shutterstock may have an edge for now due to curation and human common sense and the learned «style» of genericness that has become standard in corporate illustration, partially thanks to such platforms... but that can be learned as well. In the limit, generators will be strictly better at providing the same type of content.

The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.

Incidentally I prefer imageboards and would appreciate a reddit-esque forum with the AIB style of media attachments (also would be nice to add documents). But beggars can't be choosers. Wonder what's that «intelligent internet» Emad talks about.

The guy who currently does this at my company basically searches the tags of an article "inflation, money", and then gets a list of images that match those tags. He quickly visually scans a gallery of images, and then picks out the one he wants. While looking at the images he might spot one that has a building in it that looks like the federal reserve, and he thinks 'oh even better match' and he picks that one.

The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.

Ugh, I hate when websites do that. I don't need a picture of a person smiling while looking at their laptop when I'm reading an article about filing taxes. What is it even doing there? I can't believe there are literally people paid money to find these pointless images.

We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.

My favorite variant of this is reading aggregator rehosted versions of news articles where only some of the inserted images make it in and not necessarily in the correct location or with the correct attribution/caption. The data mismatch being more interesting than the writing quality typically.

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