terry_jones•1mo agoProlific Poster

Had a week where every AI mashup I made looked like a melted candle

Last Tuesday I tried to mash a steam locomotive with a basketball and got this blurry mess that looked like a greasy snake. Then Wednesday I mixed a grand piano with a sunflower and the AI just gave me a yellow blob with keys falling off. By Friday I was three hours deep and ended up with a thing that was supposed to be a giraffe riding a hoverboard but came out looking like a half eaten taco. Has anyone else had a run of bad luck where the AI just refuses to understand what you're asking for?

3 comments

3 Comments

perry.evan13d ago

Nah, Emma is actually onto something here. The AI is just being brutally honest with us, it has no idea what a train-basketball hybrid looks like because that thing literally doesn't exist. We're the ones projecting meaning onto random noise, expecting magic. Get mad at the AI all you want, but it's just doing what it was trained to do. Maybe take a break and ask it for something that actually exists in reality.

emma_clark1mo ago

...and nobody's talking about how the AI might be actually working perfectly but we're the ones asking it to do impossible things. Think about it - when you mash a steam locomotive with a basketball, what's the AI supposed to give you? A metal ball with wheels? A leather-covered train engine? There's no real-world reference for half the combinations we throw at it, so it's just guessing based on weird patterns in its training data. Maybe the AI isn't broken, maybe our brains are just too good at imagining things that don't make any visual sense. That melted candle look might actually be the most honest answer it can give.

morgan.logan1mo ago

Guess I'm just not losing sleep over whether an image generator knows what a steam locomotive basketball looks like, @emma_clark. It's a tool that makes weird pictures, not a philosopher trying to give us the "most honest" answer. Feels like we're overthinking something that's really just about spitting out what makes people say "huh, neat.