Shallow intent is a great way of putting it. I think another part of it is that people don’t like to feel that they are being played or lied to. We consume content we care about; we want authentic, trusted voices and expect effort. When someone realizes a piece of content they’re consuming is AI-generated, because of these markers of shallow intent, they see it as a sort of betrayal of trust that real effort was put into it, and thus perceive it to have less value.
Thanks. I think you have hit on something important. AI as execution is helpful, but the experience and awareness of the creator are essential. Without that, the product is likely to be trivial eye candy and not effective or moving. So in the rush to adopt AI, companies run the risk of eliminating the jobs of the people we need to be using it. To me, it's a bit like the rise of electronic music and turntabling. People can easily create sounds and effects, but without real understanding of music, the results often have been forgettable. That's okay, it can help develop the experience and awareness of the creator with proper feedback like yours, but it shouldn't be assumed to be good at the beginning, just because it's AI.
I've started using AlterAI instead of the better-known options. It is much less biased by mainstream "consensus", and has an option to reduce hallucinations by checking/merging search results with the training data. I'm impressed, and highly recommend it. https://alter.systems/
You have nailed the central problem but it's also the reason LLM art will *never* be good. Art is an attempt at communication. "A picture is worth a thousand words." The non-linguistic medium communicates things that reside in the non-linguistic parts of our mind. For communication - information transfer - to take place, you need an encoding of an intent to communicate, and a decoder that understands the encoding method and can unpack the content. The more successful this process, the more powerful the art.
What can a thing with no mind communicate? Its can be interesting, aesthetically pleasing even, but ultimately of no more interest than the mandlebrot set. All the intent that was ever in it is what is written in the user's prompt. Stochastic fill has no intent; it's noise. Noise can be aesthetic - film grain, paint spatter - but never adds information, only removes it in attempt to enhance aesthetic.
So your LLM generated image is not worth a thousand words, it's worth a hundred, less the words lost to the algorithm and stochastic drift. You create something even shallower than your original thought. Your Mesopotamian image wastes a book worth of potential information to communicate a summary caption worth of thought. You wasted the viewer's time, frustrated his attempt at interpretation, asked him to dive head first into your puddle.
More elaborate noise algorithms won't fix this. You need a mind, not a crude mathematical facsimile, to make art. If there's a way to give magic sand a mind, we haven't figured it out yet and there's no guarantee we will.
Shallow intent is a great way of putting it. I think another part of it is that people don’t like to feel that they are being played or lied to. We consume content we care about; we want authentic, trusted voices and expect effort. When someone realizes a piece of content they’re consuming is AI-generated, because of these markers of shallow intent, they see it as a sort of betrayal of trust that real effort was put into it, and thus perceive it to have less value.
Thanks. I think you have hit on something important. AI as execution is helpful, but the experience and awareness of the creator are essential. Without that, the product is likely to be trivial eye candy and not effective or moving. So in the rush to adopt AI, companies run the risk of eliminating the jobs of the people we need to be using it. To me, it's a bit like the rise of electronic music and turntabling. People can easily create sounds and effects, but without real understanding of music, the results often have been forgettable. That's okay, it can help develop the experience and awareness of the creator with proper feedback like yours, but it shouldn't be assumed to be good at the beginning, just because it's AI.
I've started using AlterAI instead of the better-known options. It is much less biased by mainstream "consensus", and has an option to reduce hallucinations by checking/merging search results with the training data. I'm impressed, and highly recommend it. https://alter.systems/
Thanks!
A brave post. Well executed and stated
Frankly, I don't like any of them they're all too dense and overly complicated.
You have nailed the central problem but it's also the reason LLM art will *never* be good. Art is an attempt at communication. "A picture is worth a thousand words." The non-linguistic medium communicates things that reside in the non-linguistic parts of our mind. For communication - information transfer - to take place, you need an encoding of an intent to communicate, and a decoder that understands the encoding method and can unpack the content. The more successful this process, the more powerful the art.
What can a thing with no mind communicate? Its can be interesting, aesthetically pleasing even, but ultimately of no more interest than the mandlebrot set. All the intent that was ever in it is what is written in the user's prompt. Stochastic fill has no intent; it's noise. Noise can be aesthetic - film grain, paint spatter - but never adds information, only removes it in attempt to enhance aesthetic.
So your LLM generated image is not worth a thousand words, it's worth a hundred, less the words lost to the algorithm and stochastic drift. You create something even shallower than your original thought. Your Mesopotamian image wastes a book worth of potential information to communicate a summary caption worth of thought. You wasted the viewer's time, frustrated his attempt at interpretation, asked him to dive head first into your puddle.
More elaborate noise algorithms won't fix this. You need a mind, not a crude mathematical facsimile, to make art. If there's a way to give magic sand a mind, we haven't figured it out yet and there's no guarantee we will.
Igor 4th.