What that Afghanistan girl image demonstrates is simply a lack of diversity in Midjourney’s training data. They probably only had a single image categorized as “Afghanistan girl”. So the prompt ended up with an extreme bias towards that particular set of training values.
Having said that, Midjourney’s model is entirely proprietary so I don’t know if it works the same way as other image models.
It’s all about statistics. For example, there were so many quotes and literal copies of the first Harry Potter book in OpenAI’s training set that you could get ChatGPT to spit out something like 70% of the book with a lot of very, very specific prompts.
At the heart of every AI is a random number generator. If you ask it to generate an image of an Afghan girl—and it was only ever trained on a single image—it’s going to output something similar to that one image every single time.
On the other hand, if it had thousands of images of Afghan girls you’d get more varied and original results.
For reference, finding flaws in training data like that “Afghanistan girl” is one of the methods security researchers use to break large language models.
Flaws like this are easy to fix once they’re found. So it’s likely that over time, image models will improve and we’ll see fewer issues like this.
The “creativity” isn’t in the AI model itself, it’s in its use.
I guess the argument is “if the AI mixes enough copied art together so that you can’t tell as easily, it’s being creative like a human” and I just don’t really believe that. Perhaps its a philosophical question.
That vase was made using code (literally just text) I wrote in OpenSCAD. The model file is the result of the code I wrote and the physical object is the output of the 3D printer that I built. The pretty filament was store-bought, however.
If giving a machine instructions doesn’t count as a creative process then programming doesn’t count either. Because that’s all you’re doing when you feed a prompt to an AI: Giving it instructions. It’s just the latest tech for giving instructions to machines.
What that Afghanistan girl image demonstrates is simply a lack of diversity in Midjourney’s training data. They probably only had a single image categorized as “Afghanistan girl”. So the prompt ended up with an extreme bias towards that particular set of training values.
Having said that, Midjourney’s model is entirely proprietary so I don’t know if it works the same way as other image models.
It’s all about statistics. For example, there were so many quotes and literal copies of the first Harry Potter book in OpenAI’s training set that you could get ChatGPT to spit out something like 70% of the book with a lot of very, very specific prompts.
At the heart of every AI is a random number generator. If you ask it to generate an image of an Afghan girl—and it was only ever trained on a single image—it’s going to output something similar to that one image every single time.
On the other hand, if it had thousands of images of Afghan girls you’d get more varied and original results.
For reference, finding flaws in training data like that “Afghanistan girl” is one of the methods security researchers use to break large language models.
Flaws like this are easy to fix once they’re found. So it’s likely that over time, image models will improve and we’ll see fewer issues like this.
The “creativity” isn’t in the AI model itself, it’s in its use.
I guess the argument is “if the AI mixes enough copied art together so that you can’t tell as easily, it’s being creative like a human” and I just don’t really believe that. Perhaps its a philosophical question.
It’s more like this: If you give a machine instructions to construct or do something, is the end result a creative work?
If I design a vase (using nothing but code) that’s meant to be 3D printed, does that count as a creative work?
https://imgur.com/bdxnr27
That vase was made using code (literally just text) I wrote in OpenSCAD. The model file is the result of the code I wrote and the physical object is the output of the 3D printer that I built. The pretty filament was store-bought, however.
If giving a machine instructions doesn’t count as a creative process then programming doesn’t count either. Because that’s all you’re doing when you feed a prompt to an AI: Giving it instructions. It’s just the latest tech for giving instructions to machines.