I don't know, i think its pretty pretentious to nitpick what a "good" picture is, when its really irrelavent to the topic at hand and quite frankly not an interesting conversation since it is very subjective. The link isn't to an art contest.
I dunno, I thought that was the most interesting part of this story, personally -- the question of what style algorithms should aim for.
Having skimmed the paper, the results didn't seem that different to me than asking Midjourney to produce "blah blah blah, photorealistic, fine art style, 4k". It just seems to target a particular aesthetic. In the experiments they did, they put their version next to some other AI version and asked people to select which one they "preferred". I'm sure the fine-art version will look vaguely "better" to someone, especially if they're judging dozens of pictures at a time with no real direction.
But that doesn't mean the style/look is appropriate for every situation. Sometimes you want it to look like amateur manga, or like a candid photo, or whatever artistic expression you want it to have.
There isn't just one single "good" style of pictures, and I think that's a fascinating question, regardless of what training sets and algorithms they've used. Maybe you disagree, and that's fine, but y'know... people have different interests!
> There isn't just one single "good" style of pictures, and I think that's a fascinating question, regardless of what training sets and algorithms they've used. Maybe you disagree, and that's fine, but y'know... people have different interests!
Its not that i disagree that its an interesting question - i disagree that its relavent to the paper. It is not a question that the paper really attempts to answer or comment on. It feels unfair to claim the paper is doing art wrong, when its not trying to do "art", its trying to make the AI pick images that are slightly prettier to the average person and describing a process to optimize for that pattern. That's a far cry from doing high art in my mind. This is more like creating an autofocus feature to make "better" images. So if the criticism is that this isn't fine art, my response is basically, no duh.
The paper is about generating art. The paper makes claims about the subjective value of the art.
Seems central. If the art is not good, but commercial kitsch, then that matters.
Now that software engineers are in the business of making software that generates art, get ready to have these conversations, pretentious or not, whatever is meant by that.
The authors operationalized "highly aesthetic quality" and grounded it in composition, lighting, color and contrast, subject and background, and "additional subjective assessments."
There's zero citations in this section related to accessing artistic quality, operationalization, or grounding.
A LOT of programmers are going to hate this, but if you're doing soft-sciences work(which this is), you should be knowledgeable in that area and cite some sources that indicate you've at least considered what you're doing.
The lack of citations in this area is an unknowing admittance of that ignorance. I don't care if they cite a paper just to disagree with it, but to not know that they don't know is simply unacceptable. This is basic undergrad material in other relevant fields.
People have been reasoning about this stuff for thousands of years and SWEs act like they can just make shit up. Same for psychology of mind and consciousness.
AI has thrust the tech industry into fields they've been ignoring, and now the tendency is to just continue to ignore them, pretending they don't exist, and filling the void with naive garbarge.
Soft isn't so soft anymore -- and never was, always has been, always will be hard.
