this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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[–] demlet 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hmm, I think there can be a huge amount of intentionality behind photography. It's really not about the representation, it's about all the choices made. AI can represent a scene perfectly and still have no intentionality. Of course, at the extreme that gets us into thorny issues like solipsism. How can I know that anyone besides me has intentionality? Maybe everyone else is just a meat machine with no awareness at all. Or maybe everything at a certain complexity has intentionality...

[–] severien 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The intentionality is provided as a prompt by the human author.

[–] demlet 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's fair. It's hard to pinpoint what feels lacking with it, but it does feel lacking somehow to me. I guess for me there's probably a tipping point where it's no longer human enough. Like, just telling an AI to make a candy forest isn't enough. But that's a straw man argument in a way. Of course someone could put a huge amount of effort into getting an AI to render exactly what they're imagining. In the end, it could be seen as just another medium. I have no doubt people are going to find incredible ways of utilizing it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

to render exactly what they’re imagining

Honestly... no. In practice it doesn't work like that because while messing about and getting the AI got generate what you want you look at tons of adjacent stuff the AI comes up with which then influences what you want to see. And I bet that's a thing that even the 4k nude stunning woman with (large breasts:1.6) faction experiences, it's practically impossible to not enter a dialogue with the tool.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've done a bit of image synthesis, and I think the notion that it's without intentionality is a bit of a myth.

I wanted an image of a gorilla dressed in a polo shirt and khakis, so I prompted stable diffusion to generate some gorillas in a variety of poses, then drew a shirt on, which looked like an MS Paint drawing. Then, I ran it back through Stable Diffusion to make the crude shirt look photo realistic. I then cut the gorilla out and used it in a photo collage.

I'm not using this example to claim that I've performed art or demonstrated any skill, but the final image is definitely the intentional result of trying to take a very specific image in my head and put it on the screen.

[–] demlet 2 points 1 year ago

I made a similar point in response to someone else in the thread. I agree. It's a very interesting situation to ponder. In some ways it's just another medium. The intentionality is in the people trying to produce what they're imagining via the AI. I will be curious to see what sorts of things people come up with over time.