Various Curious No. 5

Here is my book report on using DALLE-2. It's a promising tool, but I simply don't have time to learn it.

Mrs. Krampus

You must carefully construct your text prompt. When you consider that the critter was fed on 650 million pictures and caqptions, hooking up words in a prompt to images in the output is not so simple of a task. These are algorithms that are so complex and arcane that no one understands them, searching through a vast sample space of combinations. Magic, but not a genie who easily grant wishes.

Just to make sure, I asked GPT-3 to construct programming language for my own personal DALLE-2 using my images, styles, and writing. It pooped back three paragraphs explaining why it couldn't do that.

The thing of DALLE-2, the "prompt engineering", to make best use of the API, you must be an expert in five or six fields: art history, photography, cinematography, CGI, etc.

Context matters, specific prompts can have only a general effect. Even word order may help. But the context is inscrutable. This is John Searles The Chinese Room activated. Plowing through prompts to get what you want is a mashup of the game of Clue, charades, and Magic 8 Ball.

To become adept at DALLE-2 is to be one of those guys that does yo-yo tricks, and I don't have the time for that. It is a useful tool, good for generating suggestions and alternate images, some with unexpected poses and gracefully thoughtful ones at that. But I'm getting good at whipping out populated environments with my 3D render skills (See 20 minute speed sculpt and #kitbash).

I using the variations on an image feature, DALLE-2 experienced edge effects, where the poor thing hit a wall.

Will use again, but not reliant on it. Other things.

I saw an article about Bill Shatner interviewed on his riding the Bezos penis rocket. Captain Kirk went into space october of last year. He said he experienced profound grief up there at the Karman line. Yes, beautiful blue marble below, but looking up, nothing but black. Nothing but death.

Oh sure, there may be life out there. But in between our home and someone or something else's is a lot of death. So much death. (Right there is a giant piece of the  Fermi Paradox). A universe seemingly programmed to blosson with life has in turn a massive counterbalance of death. Bill Shatner experiences cosmic horror, realizing the hubris of crossing vast voids in a one hour episode. Bill Shatner did his part to get us excited about the adventure of finding new life, but it is obviously a poisonous lie, and Bill saw his part in that lie.

This is our home and always will be. Maybe people will make it out to space,but death is coming for them all the time, and for several thousands cubic light years around them. I mean, Earth isn't safe, but the universe is out to kill you.