There's a cursed world of fully-AI generated SEO spam websites now

Special thanks to @irisvanrooij.bsky.social, whose article on reclaiming AI for cogsci whose table gave me the idea for defining AI as a "history of practices reflecting different ideas of AI." link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

Ooh I wish this paper had been out when I was writing my thesis! Systematization is a concept that I was grasping for when trying to talk about how AI research fails to handle subjectivity. Especially this observation.

Oh I meant in the art theory sense, like the arrangement of shapes, light vs. dark, focal points, etc. Most professional paintings or photos have very deliberate compositions which give a visual rhythm and organizational unity to the art.

But AI art made with earlier models that work differently look totally different (and imo 100% better). E.g. the work of Helena Sarin, which (I think) is made with a GAN trained on only her own paintings/drawings x.com/NeuralBricol...

I find it easier to see if I blur the images. Like, look how weird the composition is. There's also often a weird vignetting effect, where the edges are darker than they should be. Since all these AI images come from the same kinds of generators, we learn these tells.

Oh this is related to my research. Generative models like this learn to take a random noise image (like tv static) and repeatedly reduce the noise, iteratively making the details more like a training image and more like the associated text prompt. A middle stage might look like these

Turns out you can't. They're not equivalent. They just look kinda similar so people use the easier algorithm instead because it's discrete and little differences don't matter as much as speed.

(image from Noah Snavley's very helpful computer vision course slides)

While I don't know what the future holds, scaling is clearly not the only way towards better AI systems. DenseNet had ~5% of the parameters of VGG and performed better. Brains do all the same things on way less power. Clearly there are better ways out there, they just don't fit corporate timelines.

I'm teaching image processing this semester using this photo of Cornelius instead of the infamous Lena image

Cornelius and Pocket

Do you have an idea for an app, website, device or computational system? Would you be interested in a team of computer scientists and engineers make your project a reality?

Stonehill Computer Science is looking for capstone project pitches! Details in images below.

My specific language (fwiw)