Thread

Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)

56 points · 33 comments · peter_d_sherman

krapp · 1790736562 · focus · HN ↗
Oh shit, actual human talent!
1. raldi · 1790738709 · focus · HN ↗
  These are the original illustrations with just the text changed.
  1. krapp · 1790738910 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes and nowadays no one would even bother put in that much effort. They would have an AI generate the box art and the jokes. The jokes wouldn't even be funny, but no one would care because "human jokes aren't usually funny."
    Apocryphon · 1790740806 · focus · HN ↗
    tbh, there is some novelty when AI first imitates a distinct human style. And then it gets old immediately after not unlike when VC Twitter discovered AI could imitate Studio Ghibli art.
    krapp · 1790742539 · focus · HN ↗
    I've said more than once that no matter how much Ghibli stuff you train an AI on, it's never going to spontaneously come up with a Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. People don't realize there's an aspect to creativity that dwells within the human brain and the morass of personal visceral human experience that can't be reconstructed and simulated from expression alone - it's a lossy process. And there's more to it than mere randomness and novelty.
    That's why no matter how good AI gets, it's only ever as good as the human effort put into it. It's very good at being very technically mediocre.
    RugnirViking · 1790775938 · focus · HN ↗
    > People don't realize there's an aspect to creativity that dwells within the human brain and the morass of personal visceral human experience that can't be reconstructed
    Your point here seems to be based more on faith than anything concrete. It is a sibling with the idea humans have "immortal souls" and the like - something we would like to be true more than anything that actually is.
    This being said, I do think AI systems are very bad at creativity. But I don't think that it's impossible that they could be, nor do I have any idea why, specifically, they are bad at creativity. At this point in interpretability research, anyone telling you they do know is lying.
    krapp · 1790781100 · focus · HN ↗
    >Your point here seems to be based more on faith than anything concrete. It is a sibling with the idea humans have "immortal souls" and the like - something we would like to be true more than anything that actually is.
    No, I'm not invoking the concept of an immortal soul, and it's incredibly frustrating that this is the go-to assumption anyone makes when criticism of AI's creative capabilities.
    It's entirely possible to be a pure physicalist while also believing AIs aren't capable of creativity because they aren't capable of being human, and don't have the necessary human experience to inform the processes they simulate, because creativity is fundamentally a means of human communication. That isn't actually an argument from the supernatural, and unless you believe it's possible to derive a brain simulation of Hayao Miyazaki complete with his lived experiences and memories simply by studying the specific technical aspects of his animation style in aggregate, then I think the why of AI's limitations in this regard should be obvious.
    jhbadger · 1790843231 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is that they used to say that about chess. In the 1980s it was thought that grandmaster-level chess wasn't just algorithically looking at the board and computing scores for moves as chess programs did but something that required the intuitive powers of the human mind. After all, it's clear that Kasparov wasn't computing the scores of millions of possible moves across future board states in his head but simply "saw" the right one to take by a process he couldn't explain. And yet he was eventually beaten by a machine - not even one using a clever algorithm - just a machine that did pretty much what any stupid chess program did but faster. It turned out that human "intuition" wasn't needed.
    cubefox · 1790744199 · focus · HN ↗
    Exception: Gwern's AI-assisted cartoons include some funny ones. <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/comics/index" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/comics/index (scroll down)
    Lerc · 1790745365 · focus · HN ↗
    It depends on what the joke is. I can see people making an image for a joke that they already have in their head. Or they can AI generate an image and think up with a caption to make whatever it generated is funny (partially clips does exactly this with clipart). Sometimes it can be completely AI generated because the humour comes from seeing how the model misconstrued what it was supposed to do. A lot of these require humans to do the work of curation.
    I'd be kind of tempted to give these box art images to an AI and ask it to make the game. I suspect there would be much amusement to be had in seeing how they do at a cursed task like that.
    kraquepype · 1790745622 · focus · HN ↗
    I wish we were still in the "haha funny" era of AI, and we could laugh at the absurdity it came up with. Fun times.
    One of my favorites: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/i3kr2z/humor_someone_forced_a_bot_to_watch_over_1000/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/i3kr2z/humor_...
    WithinReason · 1790751973 · focus · HN ↗
    This is obviously human written
    Cpoll · 1790760812 · focus · HN ↗
    Can confirm. I'm pretty sure it's Keaton Patti's writing, "forced a bot to watch 1000 hours of..." is his shtick. It's all hand written to read like an exaggerated, comedic Markov chain output.

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