this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
409 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
60102 readers
2881 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AI ingesting the output of AI ingesting the output of AI...
Isn't this causing a huge degradation in quality? It's like compressing an image over and over again. Those "AI" models can only generate things on what they know, and already have a very real issue of looking samey because of it. So if we train models on that, and then another model on the new model, and repeat this over and over again, we'd end up with less and less quality & variety for each model, no?
I suppose the AI images submitted are done so because they turned out good, so there’s still a human selection process there. It’s not as bad at automatically feeding random generated images into the training.
But are they? The amount must be minuscle as searching and selecting costs time. What impact can thoughtful selected images have?
Adobe trains on images submitted to their stock image marketplace. Deciding to submit is the first selection step. Then there is some quality control by Adobe; mainly AI powered, I'd guess. Adobe also has the sales data (again, human selection) and additional tracking data; how many people clicked a thumbnail and so on.
What people imagine here about quality loss is completely divorced from reality.
Well that's what human knowledge is lol. This is the AI Internet 😂 My guess is they will begin to diverge from human interest/comprehension if they don't have enough of their training data be human created.
That's not what anyone would do in reality, though. In reality, when you train an AI model on AI output you get a quality increase, because the model learns to be better at doing the things it's supposed to do, while forgetting the irrelevant. Where output looks samey, it's because different people are chasing the same mainstream taste.
How do you get a quality increase if you by definition cut down on the variety of the generative aspects? That doesn't make any sense.
Put like this, because too much variety is the biggest problem in terms of quality. People don't want variety in terms of, say, number of limps or fingers. People have something specific in mind when they prompt an AI. They only want very limited and specific variability.
In a sense, limiting variety is the whole point of the AI. There is a vast number of possible images. Most of them would be simply indistinguishable noise to us. The proportion we would consider a sensible picture is tiny. We want to constrain the variety to within this tiny segment.
But "AI" generated images don't suffer from too much variety, they suffer from looking samey. It's the opposite of what you're arguing about. Limbs aren't really the issue here since this is about Midjourney, which handles that part fairly well already.
Adobe trained its AI "Firefly" on its stock library (and other images). Their library contains AI images. It's unlikely that these are all from Midjourney.
I'm not sure what you mean by samey. As I said, people chase the same mainstream taste. If the images from one service looks samey, then they probably figure that's what the customers want. It's also possible that you only recognize this type of image as AI generated.
This actually leads to more conformist images with more errors, over time. Basically if an ai takes images from us, its gets loads of creativity, outputs less creativity, and more errors. So do they a couple of rounds and you indeed end up with utter crap.