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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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.