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Comment by jhncls | Hacker News Reader

> 39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

How does this need to be rewritten in the sight of Dall-E, Midjourney and friends?

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It doesn't. Consider the first 10k words in my /usr/dict/words equivalent.

They start:

    A
    a
    aa
    aal

and end:

    anticonductor
    anticonfederationist
    anticonformist
    anticonscience

How do you want to describe those with a picture?

(ok, these days one could make a long, thin screen shot, but a non-trivial picture, that doesn't factor through a textual representation? Even representing the 8 strings given here via graphics sounds iffy to me...)

That epigram is referring to a fundamental asymmetry of information between words and pictures. Having a machine that can come up with many different pictures from a few words doesn’t only not say anything about how to make a picture from any 10K words, it somewhat reinforces the epigram’s point.

Those models may be more adequately described by #63: When we write programs that “learn”, it turns out that we do and they don’t.

It doesn't need to be rewritten at all. I can ask Dall-E for a picture that conveys the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, say, or of Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity. Whatever I get will not convey the content that the sermon or the paper convey - not even close.

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