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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

I've always been bothered by app names getting invaded by keyword vomit.

"Firefox, fast and free"

It feels like going to get a movie, and the title is "Casablanca, super attractive lead actor" or something. It just cheapens the value of the work like it's a low budget film from the adult section.

But what weirds me out is how much of that is needed to get a desired result. "Unreal engine 4k resolution".

What happens when 4k isn't enough? What about twenty years later when all our buzzwords are meaningless, and unreal engine no longer exists? Or what if AI appropriates the word, and that becomes the new definition?

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It hasn't got anything to do with the keywords actual meaning really... all of this is just to map the 7000-dimensional internal description space in SD to something we meagre humans can input and output. You can leave it free, but then you have to accept the result can be anything. Normally you do want to leverage some control of the process.

The keyword "4k" doesn't "mean" anything to the model, it maps to the internal space through the language model depending on its training on captions earlier. You could just as well have used any other way of assigning some parts of this 7000-dimensional vector, it just turns out these keywords are usable shortcut, just like specifying a camera model or an artist name in essence acts as a "macro" to the internal space.

Right right. It just seems like a way that could evolve language in a dystopian way.

If 4k doesn't really "mean" anything to the algorithm, will it still have meaning for us? Or will our usage of the word start to reflect how the algorithm interprets it?

Just like YouTube face. It starts out as us influencing the algorithms, it ends with the algorithms influencing us.

I wouldn't worry about it. You could try asking a random person in a bar what they think "4k" means, I'd bet a decent portion of people would say something along the lines of "high quality", and very few would give you the precise pixel count.

4k doesn’t have a precise pixel count. If you’re bringing precision into the picture then the reality is 4k is a family of resolutions around 4000 pixels wide. UHD has a precise defined size.

It doesn’t have a precise meaning to this model though - because everything it trained on was downscaled anyway, and because an image on the internet with “UHD” in the caption wasn’t necessarily UHD.

No, because these style prompts are just dumb interfaces to a model. They're very stupid and we will not be using them like this in the (likely near) future. There are many other ways one could query a model for stylistic modifications.

Yeah there is already textual inversion and other ways to "prompt" the models coming up. I do think pure human-level text will stay (and evolve) as a way though. Stability AI already released an updated CLIP model (the language model used in many of these) for example, also the model in the current SD was intentionally made simple so the whole system could fit in consumer GPUs VRAM, it was not state of the art.

There might be some interesting statistical analyses possible at the end of the day btw, like trying to figure out how many commonly widespread "artistic styles" there are in the world's total of art and photography so far. After all that is what a lot of the prompt engineering is about. Sort of a principal component analysis of the dominant 100 styles or something...

I'm reminded of the hackernews who said that their 3-year-old daughter used "don't forget to like and subscribe!" as a form of goodbye e.g., when relatives left the house.

"Trending on artstation" is even more strange. I do think these text prompts will outlive their original context; like the floppy disk "save" icon or the "hang up" icon.

The generated images are rarely larger than 512x512 pixels. The prompt says "4k" to bias the style of generated images toward the kind that are labelled 4k in the input data set.

For now, we use prompts to explore latent space. I don't know that we'll always use prompts. They're better than trying to carefully twiddle hundreds of dimensions manually, but I can't help but think there's a better, more tunable approach yet to be invented.

There may be something much better, but in many places it's difficult to come up with a form of communication more efficient for the user than textual language. It could be a very tall order to do that in this area.

There are ways to nudge out dimensions with specific meaning (or create dimensions with specific meaning, since you can have a exactly equivalent space with some linear transform) - I recall seeing research for adjusting face generation models to have explicit sliders for certain categories like length of hair, masculinity, shape of nose, etc; so it should be reasonably straightforward (as in, require a bunch of work and tuning but no breakthroughs) to have a specific explicitly tunable "high-res vs low-res" or "detailed vs sketch" or "photorealistic vs drawn" parameters in addition to the prompt.

The prompt keywords are better thought of as "cheat codes" where the AI knows that those keywords strongly correlate with good imagery.

The best way to think of prompts are as somewhat equivalent to search engine queries. Perhaps the most fascinating part of these transform models are how they resemble the process of memory recall and association.

In a 4GB space is embedded potentially millions of images to tokens which correlate with language descriptions. So indicating the desired result somewhat simulates this process of recall and association.

The process lacks any internal emotional motivation to construct any "desired" outcome that a human would, so it needs both a "seed" number and description of the desired recall elements to achieve a specific result.

> Or what if AI appropriates the word, and that becomes the new definition?

Or what if it appropriates your name as a style, and puts you out of business?

It's like the old prediction that well-known actors could sell their faces and voices for producers to CGI up new films with, except you don't pay the actor.

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