<story><title>Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships?</title><url>https://www.unite.ai/is-dall-e-2-just-gluing-things-together-without-understanding-their-relationships/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gojomo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE&amp;#x2F;GPT&amp;#x2F;etc is just a &amp;#x27;mirror&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;parrot&amp;#x27; – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments.&lt;p&gt;They just assert it as axiomatic, whistling-past all the ways that they themselves – unless they believe in supernatural mechanisms – are also the product of a finite physical-world system (a biological mind) and a finite amount of prior training input (their life so far).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m beginning to wonder if the entities making this argument are conscious! It seems they don&amp;#x27;t truly understand the issues in question, in a way they could articulate recognizably to others. They&amp;#x27;re just repeating comforting articles-of-faith that others have programmed into them.</text></item><item><author>blooperdeoo</author><text>“ It actually knows what a giraffe is.”&lt;p&gt;No. You know what a giraffe is, Dall•E simply creates pixel groups which correlate to the text pattern you submitted.&lt;p&gt;Watching people discuss a logical mirror scares me that most people are not themselves conscious.</text></item><item><author>orlp</author><text>The most important thing I think DALL-E shows is that it has a model of our world and culture. It&amp;#x27;s not intelligence, but it is knowledge.&lt;p&gt;Google can give you endless pictures of giraffes if you search for it. But it can only connect you to what exists. It doesn&amp;#x27;t know things, it knows OF things.&lt;p&gt;DALL-E has knowledge of the concept of a giraffe, and can synthesize an endless amount of never-before seen giraffes for you. It actually knows what a giraffe is.</text></item><item><author>vannevar</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure it is, but &amp;quot;gluing things together&amp;quot; coherently in response to a text prompt is a stupendous achievement. It&amp;#x27;s not AGI, but it&amp;#x27;s miles ahead of where we were even a few years ago and opens the door to automating a class of jobs I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone back then believed could be automated, short of AGI.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bglazer</author><text>I can give a random string of letters as a prompt and DALLE will generate coherent images based on that. To me, that is as clear a signal as any that there is no reasoning or even a consistent world model embodied in DALLE. It’s simply a high dimensional latent mapping between characters and pixels. Like OP said, that is a stupendous achievement, but it is just a very complex and impressive mirror. If it wasn’t just a mapping between characters and pixels, and instead DALLE had intelligence that “understood” the symbols it manipulated, then I would expect it to generate nothing, or white noise in response to random letters.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships?</title><url>https://www.unite.ai/is-dall-e-2-just-gluing-things-together-without-understanding-their-relationships/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gojomo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE&amp;#x2F;GPT&amp;#x2F;etc is just a &amp;#x27;mirror&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;parrot&amp;#x27; – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments.&lt;p&gt;They just assert it as axiomatic, whistling-past all the ways that they themselves – unless they believe in supernatural mechanisms – are also the product of a finite physical-world system (a biological mind) and a finite amount of prior training input (their life so far).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m beginning to wonder if the entities making this argument are conscious! It seems they don&amp;#x27;t truly understand the issues in question, in a way they could articulate recognizably to others. They&amp;#x27;re just repeating comforting articles-of-faith that others have programmed into them.</text></item><item><author>blooperdeoo</author><text>“ It actually knows what a giraffe is.”&lt;p&gt;No. You know what a giraffe is, Dall•E simply creates pixel groups which correlate to the text pattern you submitted.&lt;p&gt;Watching people discuss a logical mirror scares me that most people are not themselves conscious.</text></item><item><author>orlp</author><text>The most important thing I think DALL-E shows is that it has a model of our world and culture. It&amp;#x27;s not intelligence, but it is knowledge.&lt;p&gt;Google can give you endless pictures of giraffes if you search for it. But it can only connect you to what exists. It doesn&amp;#x27;t know things, it knows OF things.&lt;p&gt;DALL-E has knowledge of the concept of a giraffe, and can synthesize an endless amount of never-before seen giraffes for you. It actually knows what a giraffe is.</text></item><item><author>vannevar</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure it is, but &amp;quot;gluing things together&amp;quot; coherently in response to a text prompt is a stupendous achievement. It&amp;#x27;s not AGI, but it&amp;#x27;s miles ahead of where we were even a few years ago and opens the door to automating a class of jobs I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone back then believed could be automated, short of AGI.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meroes</author><text>And don’t blame others for not finding this satisfactory either. Many many mathematicians think abstract objects exist outside of physical reality. Chomsky says “physical” hasn’t been well defined for 200 years. And finite physical processes do not seem adequate to explain the infinite character of language and mathematical infinity. Or if they are, then go inform the mathematical realists infinity isn’t real because all proofs are finite yet Godel believed in actual infinity.</text></comment>