86
A photo of Iran’s bombed schoolgirl graveyard went viral. Why did AI say it wasn’t real? | AI (artificial intelligence) (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/world
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

So what? It never sees the text you type either. You called it “text-only”, but that’s not true in any way for multimodal models. In the strictest sense, transformer models are vector embedding only. The model itself can only work with a series of vectors, so everything you give it needs to be turned into vectors, even text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning)

What vectors you give it is entirely dependent on the application and how it was trained, and pretty much anything can be turned into a vector embedding. Anything with semantic meaning at least (otherwise you can’t make an embedding). The attention mechanism can work on literally any series of vectors with semantic meaning.

Saying that the model isn’t “seeing” the image just because the image was transformed into a compressed set of vectors is akin to saying a human isn’t “seeing” an image when they’re looking at a JPEG (since a JPEG is a compressed set of cosine exponents).

Why not just admit that you were wrong?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Why not just admit that you were wrong?

    Because I'm not convinced that I am. My layman's explanation might not get every technical detail exactly right, but I think the core point is factual.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Since you really don’t believe me, here is an experiment to show how accurately a vector embedding represents the real image:

    Original:

    Output from the LLM:

    Clearly, what the LLM is seeing is an incredibly detailed and accurate representation of the real image. Practically the same quality as a JPEG. (Not quite, as you can see in the garbled text on the tag, but nearly the same quality.)

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Okay, after spending way too much time researching this, I've come to the conclusion that my original statement was wrong - and I finally also got my chosen AI assistant to agree with me.

    My original claim: “The AI said the picture was fake because it can’t even see the picture. It only got a description from a vision model.”

    My revised explanation: “It got it wrong because the image embedding it received didn’t contain the relevant information to make that distinction.”

    So yes. While it's true that the LLM can't see the picture in the human sense of vision, that's not what I was talking about. It can "see" the image well enough to tell the difference. It simply doesn't know what to look for. It's not really the LLM's fault - it's because the image encoder wasn't trained on enough pictures labeled as AI-generated.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent