My Shoe is Safe

Yesterday's quiz was a toughie. In it, to recap, commenters were encouraged to guess at what the following pieces of art, generated by Substack's own AI image generator, represented. Here, to begin with, are the answers: 

1. Minotaur 

2. Troll

3. Orc

4. Githyanki

5. Kuo-toa

6. Skeleton

7. Kobold

8. Tarrasque

9. Umber hulk

10. Pit fiend

11. Vampire

12. Lich (yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to how it came up with this)

13. Dragon

14. Ogre

15. Manticore

16. Hydra

17. Beholder

Ok, I confess the last one was a bit of a cheat (although a fascinating experiment, in its own way). 

What I find interesting about these kinds of exercises is that they reinforce the point that AI is not 'intelligent'. It doesn't actually 'know' things. It isn't capable of assessing whether what it produces actually looks like what it is supposed to look like, because it isn't capable of assessing anything. It does not see what it produces, because it does not 'see' at all. And it does not exercise judgment because it cannot judge. It has no taste in the most literal sense.

With that said, it does come up with curiosities and some images which are thought-provoking. These pictures are mostly dross - a kind of implausibly well-executed dross, the kind of dross that a human being would never produce (try to imagine a human artist creating a piece that is simultaneously as competently executed and as spectacularly misjudged as the kuo-toa or ogre images above). And the ones that are interesting are interesting mostly because they cause one to reflect on the nature of AI art itself and the way it works - note for instance that the 'minotaur' patently isn't a minotaur, but the programme nonetheless 'knew' that vaguely Grecian columns ought to be involved and it also incorporated what appear to be sheep (which I took to be some sort of mangled intrusion of the cyclops myth).

But there are one or two images which at least spur the imagination - observe, for example, the tiny figure that is standing on top of the 'umber hulk'. Who is that and what is he doing riding around on that thing? And who are those different entities in the 'lich' picture? What is that little homonculus next to the 'vampire' up to? What is that a 'skeleton' of?

I also have to confess I do rather like the 'githyanki'. It looks nothing like a githyanki, but Satan didn't do a bad job with it all the same.