Old Man Versus AI

Tag: What is an AI Whisperer

Trusting AI

June 14th, 2023

ChatGPT

I was reading the Malwarebytes newsletter story called Trusting AI not to lie, a few days ago, I’m a big fan of their software and I’m subscribed. It speaks of a lawyer who asked ChatGPT for a list of previous cases that would support their main argument and allow them to continue the lawsuit. “But when the court reviewed the lawyer’s citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated. “

This is the main reason why AI Whisperers are being paid so much money. The AI didn’t lie, I don’t know the details of the story, but I do know that the AI did not lie. I’ve dealt with similar issues over the years when fixing software issues for people. The computer did it, they’ll say, or I didn’t do anything, it just happened.

Computers don’t just do things, they do exactly as they’re told and this is also the case with AI. It will do exactly as it’s told. If asked for a list of cases to support an argument, it will provide them, that’s what you asked for. If you don’t state that they must be real world examples of actual Court cases, why would it give you those?

ChatGPT was wrong, it says confidently, I sincerely doubt that.

Anyone who has ever coded knows the difference a comma in the wrong place can make, well, the same thing is true when speaking to AI. Yesterday I was on Midjourney, trying to find a particular look for an image, the prompt I used first was this:

Beautiful, pensive, wistful woman, pale skin, wearing a bejewelled headdress, detailed close-up, in white, intricate, sophisticated white, luxury, clothing with subtle details, pastel colours, porcelain doll, extraordinary makeup, pink and white clouds of smoke, studio lighting and volumetric lighting Photo taken by Karolina Skorek, taken with a Canon EOS R with a Canon RF 35mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM lens at 1/200 sec, f/2.8 and ISO200, Award-winning photography style, 4k –v 5.1

I removed one sentence and got this:

It gave me exactly what I asked for on both occasions. The woman in the picture does not exist in this world, she is a fictional character made up by the AI. If I wanted an image of a woman who actually exists, I can ask for one, but it won’t just do that, you must be clear about what it is that you want.

The article closes by comparing ChatGPT to a cheap translation AI and states this: “That is an example of exactly this technology coming in and being treated as the arbiter of truth in the sense that there is a cost to how much truth we want.”

They’re confusing apples and oranges with that nonsense. One AI is not the other AI. An AI based on ChatGPT is not ChatGPT. This is the same as me saying that all malware tools are rubbish because I have used one that didn’t meet my expectations. Over the years I’ve heard many complaints about computers which were a worthless waste of time, every time it turned out that the computers had been used improperly and worked perfectly well after some maintenance.

I understand the attitude from people who write and work with code every day and whose living depends on it, but it is a fact that AI writes code 4 times better and far faster than any human can and in a few short years, coders will be obsolete.

For a long time now, the phrase learn how to code was used as a joke when people were made redundant by progress and forced to change careers. That phrase won’t be around much longer.

Perhaps it’s time we all learned how to Whisper.

Cheers,

Old Man
Whispering at AI 2

April 30th, 2023

Stable Diffusion

When using Stable Diffusion with basic prompts, my images were far inferior to those of DALL-E but looking at the images of other users it is obvious that better images can be made.

Clicking on the Wanna create better prompt? section, brings me to the Prompt Search Engine. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I ought to be searching for. I know very well how to use a search engine, but I do not know how to search for prompts.

I have an irritable chat with the Bing Search Engine which tells me to use the prompt search engine to search for prompts. This just annoys me because I do not know what I am searching for. Eventually I ask the question properly and ask for an example of a search term and it tells me to search for “A beautiful sunset over the ocean”

It is not a database for just prompts, though I had the right to assume it was, given the name, it is a database of images with the prompts which generated them attached to each one.

Still annoyed, I search for “a beautiful sunset over the ocean” and get this:

with the prompt underneath:

A beautiful photograph of a detailed ornate steampunk airship flying over a majestic mediterranian port city filled with tiny glowing lanterns with a view of the ocean at sunset, by David Noren, jordan grimmer, tyler edlin, featured on cgsociety

My irritation dissipates at once. This is the kind of thing I expected from the start; dreamy, fantasy images that I want to keep looking at.

I’m getting the idea that giving the AI the names of artists to mimic brings better results but I know there is more to it than just that, once I change some of the details and see the images.

I try: A beautiful photograph of a detailed witch on a broomstick flying over a majestic mountain range with a village below, with tiny glowing lanterns with a view of the ocean in the distance, at sunset, by David Noren, Jordan Grimmer, Tyler Edlin, featured on cgsociety and get these:

I don’t know who the named artists are but I don’t think that they paint Witches. The landscapes are awesome but the witches are an abomination.

Rather than heading over to CGSociety to find an artist or two with an interest in Witches, I just change the term Witch to Golden Eagle and get these;

Those images are awesome, I am getting this the hang of this, slowly. Some artists are obviously better for landscapes but it seems that if I want a detailed character, I’ll have to add an artist who paints that particular character well, to the list.

Next, I searched “Pixar Characters” and saw a lovely image of a Chinese woman with this prompt:

an epic fantasy comic book style full body portrait painting of a beautiful Chinese woman, long fire hair, cute, character design by Mark Ryden and Pixar and Hayao Miyazaki, unreal 5, DAZ, hyperrealistic, octane render, cosplay, RPG portrait, dynamic lighting, intricate detail, summer vibrancy, cinematic

I really liked it and only changed a few words. I have a soft spot for Koreans because I love the K-pop, so I put:

an epic fantasy comic book style full body portrait painting of a beautiful South Korean singer, long fire hair, cute, character design by Mark Ryden and Pixar and Hayao Miyazaki, unreal 5, hyper realistic, octane render, cosplay, RPG portrait, dynamic lighting, intricate detail, summer vibrancy, cinematic

Two of which I liked more than the original:

These are my favorite so far, I really like them and I’m wondering if I can improve them by adding a background like the one for the Witches so I merge the terms to this:

an epic fantasy comic book style full body portrait painting of a beautiful South Korean singer, long fire hair, cute, character design by Mark Ryden and Pixar and Hayao Miyazaki, unreal 5, standing on a majestic mountain range with a village below, with tiny glowing lanterns with a view of the ocean in the distance, at sunset, by David Noren, Jordan Grimmer, Tyler Edlin, featured on cgsociety

And get something a bit weird but also pretty cool:

I think I need to be more careful with my grammar. I think the weird looking half man is very likely Hayao Miyazaki, from the prompt. The way it’s worded can be interpreted as me asking for him and Unreal to be standing on a majestic mountain range. I’ll have to be more careful in the future.

I like these images as much as I like those from DALL-E but the DALL-E image quality can be achieved with fewer prompt terms. Before I used the Prompt database, I really thought that Microsoft had the edge, and perhaps it does for the casual user but I’ll be spending more time playing with Diffusion than DALL-E for the moment.

My next post will be about Microsoft Designer and perhaps Canva, both of which use AI. I will be using them to design the website oldmanversusai.blog. As it’s a new domain and completely empty apart from two posts, it will be 3 to 5 days before the next one goes up.

I have never used MS Designer or Canva before so it’ll be a learning curve for sure and I’ll have plenty to write about.

See you for the next one,

Cheers,

Old Man
Whispering at AI

April 29th, 2023

I’m on a journey to become an AI Whisperer, from frustration mostly. I know AI is the future, so I’ve tried it out but had little success up until now. I know it’s very clever, and I’m not overly dim, so why am I getting such poor results from it?

It turns out that AI whispering is important.

I’ve tried to use the new Bing AI search engine but I find it quite annoying that I don’t get the answers I want and I know it’s because I’m not asking the questions properly. Hence my foray into the world of AI Whispering, which is simply a phrase meaning; the proper use of specific terms that AI can understand to answer your questions or provide you with what you’ve asked for. It sounds easy but it takes some time to find out how to do that. Search engines don’t bring me the results that I want so I know that the only way I’ll learn is by doing. Here is my doing;

I start with the Stable Diffusion image generators Stable Diffusion Online (stablediffusionweb.com) and use basic terms which I found online, for creation;

A girl, makoto shinkai style, anime, japan animation’s background, 200mm camera lens, wide angle, night view, city, building, edge, high detail

It’s not bad but… there’s no girl and it’s not what I expected and doesn’t really justify the hype that we keep hearing about AI.

I went to Microsoft’s DALL-E which you can find in the sidebar of the Edge Browser (if you don’t have it, go and get it, it is the best browser by far) or here: DALL·E 2 (openai.com) and pasted in the same term as above and got this:

I got three other images too but this is the one I liked best.

The next term was;

Anthropomorphic majestic eagle knight, portrait, finely detailed armor, cinematic lighting, intricate filigree metal design, 4k, unreal engine, octane

Stable Diffusion:

Pretty nice I thought but using the same term in DALL-E:

The AI’s have different ideas about what an Eagle Knight is but I really like the latter.

Next term:

An airport with modern landscape architectural design for industrialpunk, water in the middle, dramatic lighting and composition, octane render, unreal engine 5

DALL-E:

Kinda cool but not as good as DALL-E:

This one brings some of my favourite results, first Stable Diffusion;

beautiful Pikachu, pencil art, ultra realistic

I liked this one until I used the same term in DALL-E and got these, I’ll post two as I like them so much;

On the next one I used a prompt that I thought would yield better results, it’s more descriptive and quite detailed but what I got wasn’t very impressive, first from Stable Diffusion;

A scribe, copying an exotic spell from one spell book into another. Perhaps a cat or a small magical animal is looking on. The library is dark, with an ornate and expensive candle stick lighting the room. He is surrounded by books – both on high shelves and piled on the desk around them, some of the books laying opened on the table.

DALL-E;

Neither of them are much to look at, despite the amount of detail that was given, there is more to the whispering than descriptive detail.

This next one gets good results from both AI’s. First Stable Diffusion;

A colorful panda playing in forest, oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci, highly detailed

When it’s given an artist style to follow, it gives a better result.

DALL-E gave me four of the same Panda doing different things, all of them were the same high quality;

The next one is a bit of fun for those of us who enjoy Anime, first Stable Diffusion;

Uzumaki Naruto vs Goku, anime fight, ultra realistic, 8k

At this point I’m thinking that DALL-E is a much better option for everyone because the quality of the images is so much higher but this isn’t the case. There is a reason why there are jobs with high salaries for AI Whisperers, I will get to it but enjoy the images for now:

DALL-E;

Stable Diffusion;

A monochrome forest of ebony trees, octane rendered

DALL-E;

For those who are not familiar with rendering, Octane is an engine that makes images from 3d models and Unreal is a game engine that makes games for Play Station and X Box which also creates (renders) images from 3d models.

I had high hopes for this next one as Studio Ghibli was used in the prompt but I didn’t find either of them particularly impressive. First Stable Diffusion;

A contemporary house in the woods, anime, oil painting, high resolution, ghibli inspired, 4k

DALL-E;

I used a few more prompts and got the same results each time, Stable Diffusion gave me (mostly) unimpressive results and DALL-E gave great results. I then scrolled through the Stable Diffusion site to the Wanna create better prompt? section. I did wanna create a better prompt and so I clicked on it and found, after a chat with the Bing search engine, that I could indeed create a better prompt.

Because of the images, this is already a long post so I’ll continue this in the next post which will be up in the next day or so. I will be giving the prompts which yield good results along with the images themselves.

I will then be getting into Microsoft Designer, which seems very impressive and the new Canva AI, both of which can be used for free.

I’m also looking forward to seeing what kind of literature a good prompt can yield. I’ll be a whisperer in no time!

I am very much enjoying this and look forward to the next one, join me then.

Cheers,

Old Man