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1. dzink · 1789752442 · focus · HN ↗

   You are a photographer from the olden age. Taking a photo back then took forever. You are standing on a hill trying to get the perfect picture of a sunset. You measure and sort and calculate angles and light. A tourist stands next to you with an high-speed iphone auto-settings camera. They spin around and get thousands of photos from different angles while you are thinking and measuring your one shot. That’s what AI does. It gives you many shots at the same problem. The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more. Make and filter now may be a better approach than overthink and try only once.

   1. granfalloon · 1789755440 · focus · HN ↗

      I think this analogy works with respect to stuff like coding, engineering, etc, where the AI is capable of validating the success of its own efforts and where the result just has to "work", regardless of its elegance or aesthetic quality.

      I also think the analogy works if we're talking about average photographs, or even very good photographs, that are conventionally well-composed, balanced, etc, but lack the special spark that we associate with true art.

      But if the photographer on the hill is a real artist, it's hard for me to imagine a current frontier LLM winning the contest. I suppose it may stumble upon a winning photo sooner than a roomful of monkeys would, but I believe the number of attempts would still be so vast that it would be more efficient for the human to make one single attempt at taking a photo, rather than dealing with prompts and sorting through the millions of AI-generated options.

      EDIT: I also think it's very easy to underestimate the size of the nearly limitless set of possible "solutions" to the photograph, and also easy to overlook the constant feedback loop in the artist's mind as he considers each option and looks through the viewfinder, while the LLM is shooting blind the entire time.

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