Mind-Blowing AI Image Generator - Give Visual Representation to C's Concepts?

[Toni Lorenzo]

You do not seem to have much interest in what Laura and the Cs have given us for reference but have other sources that you consider equally valid. Sometimes there are parallels and validation from other sources but often not.

I respect your free will in choosing any assumptions formulated about me, and only hope that you would allow me the time here to simulate, graduate, and move on. A Rock is essentially us, in the making.

As the Cs said "All there is is lessons" and those will depend on our individual karma and progress in "The Work" which is part of this forum principal objectives.

Imagination is the one redemptive power in the universe where we can literally choose to become instruments of our own creativity and redemption, or settle for a lesser vision or allegiance, which only staggers and delays our personal growth and "The Work".

 

[Happy Poo]

Hi Andrew. Amazed that AI can do this! First gut reaction is that they are technically good, but too similar, in a way that's lacking a kind of individuality or personality, macabre, and have a feeling of darkness that is very difficult to put into words, although being technically very precise. Almost too precise, and have a kind of flatness, blandness, (sorry, for want of a better word I'm struggling here), of style and execution. . They seem to lack cuteness lol, and a feeling of love and emotional depth, if that makes sense.

Really hard to put into words, the feeling I get from this.

I remember the C's saying that the computers would take us over, not a pleasant thought. Maybe using these programs would be too much of a shortcut for some people who could tempted to take this route.

Could things like this this stifle and bypass our own creative process, because it's so easy instead to use this instead of doing any work? Which may be really important in it itself, as in my experience it's a fundamental part of personal growth and development, self discovery.. The opening and building of creative centres within? Again hard to put into words. This could be really entropic in that sense.. Fascinating though thanks.

 

[goyacobol]

I respect your free will in choosing any assumptions formulated about me, and only hope that you would allow me the time here to simulate, graduate, and move on. A Rock is essentially us, in the making.

Imagination is the one redemptive power in the universe where we can literally choose to become instruments of our own creativity and redemption, or settle for a lesser vision or allegiance, which only staggers and delays our personal growth and "The Work".

I also respect your free will. I am just noticing you do not seem to base many posts on the reading list that was suggested. I do not assume so much as notice.

I now notice you did not seem to see any of the Cs concepts to be that interesting. This forum is based on @Laura's books and the Cs sessions and concepts from many other writers such as Gurdjief, Mouravieff, Ouspensky, Dabrowski, Carlos Castaneda and others.

I do try to read other sources that are new before I comment on them to make comparisons instead of assumptions.

I suppose "imagination" can be a useful creative tool but it can get us into trouble sometimes too. I don't think I want it to be "the one redemptive power" in my life but I do think it is probably a huge part of our thought processes along with instinct.

We probably all have had active imaginations growing up and that may not be so bad...

Sesson 31 December 1994:

Q: (T) The whole thing is that we are supposed to learn for ourselves. They will point us in the right direction, but then we are supposed to go out and do it. If you don't learn it on your own, you don't really learn. You have to go out and fall off the log a couple times to learn to walk the log. (V) E-- just told me about something that happened. Can you give me some insight?

A: Imagination.

Q: (V) Are the boys fine? Are the boys okay?

A: Boys will be boys.

Q: (V) They thought they saw a witch. (T) Who was she? It was the neighbor lady again. (L) Where was she and what was she doing? (V) What do you mean over a car that just started? (V) Their imaginations are just going.

A: How do peyote users see Santa Claus? [laughter]

Q: (V) Are the boys doing drugs tonight?

A: Nope. (Undecipherable comment from G-- amidst laughter.) When did you last see this in Rochester, G--?

Q: (G) Never! [Much laughter]

A: Bingo!

But aside from getting us into trouble at times perhaps if we marry our "instinct and imagination" can become a reality and lead us to great discoveries.

Session 17 June 1995:

Q: (L) Well, of course Columbus had an idea that there was something but he hadn't been there, no. But he went and checked it out.

A: Did he have just an idea?

Q: (L) Well, pretty much, I guess.

A: Hmmm. That's not the way we remember it. The way we remember it is that he had instinct and imagination and when he married his instinct with imagination, it became reality. And, when it became reality, he had created a reality which he was fully confident would be manifest in the physical third density reality. It wasn't that he was confident. He knew it to be so. He didn't stop himself by adding prejudice to the equation which is what you are doing when you say: "Well, we don't know what happens because we have never been there!" Think logically, please. We have told you so many times that everything is a grand cycle. If it's a grand cycle, we have told you about circles within circles. We have told you about cycles. We have told you about short wave cycles and long wave cycles. Now, after all this information that you have asked of us, which we have more than happily given to you, would you expect that a straight line would just go out forever and ever and ever as a straight line? How could it possibly do that? What happens if you take, on your third density earth, and you draw a straight line to the East or to the West or to the North or to the South...

Q: (J) It comes all the way back to itself.

A: Right...

I am not trying to discourage you or even disagree. Hopefully, you will find some of my thoughts relevant. We all can use some "greater vision".

 

[Alejo]

Could things like this this stifle and bypass our own creative process, because it's so easy instead to use this instead of doing any work? Which may be really important in it itself, as in my experience it's a fundamental part of personal growth and development, self discovery.. The opening and building of creative centres within? Again hard to put into words. This could be really entropic in that sense.. Fascinating though thanks.

That's just it in my opinion, beyond creating a wider gap between human beings, wherever it would take over. It also takes over the struggle of creating something, or figuring something out. Without that struggle, humanity can't strengthen its own creative muscles and they may atrophy because of it.

 

[goyacobol]

I now notice you did not seem to see any of the Cs concepts to be that interesting. This forum is based on @Laura's books and the Cs sessions and concepts from many other writers such as Gurdjief, Mouravieff, Ouspensky, Dabrowski, Carlos Castaneda and others.

@Toni Lorenzo ,

I posted this observation without noticing your previous response to my post or I would have not made that remark.

Sorry, I did not see that. I am trying to keep up with a lot of threads and sometimes it seems like "ships passing in the night".

 

[Happy Poo]

That's just it in my opinion, beyond creating a wider gap between human beings, wherever it would take over. It also takes over the struggle of creating something, or figuring something out. Without that struggle, humanity can't strengthen its own creative muscles and they may atrophy because of it.

Hi Alejo thanks for your reply!
Very true what you say, also was just thinking.. In light of what I've read in the transcripts, Laura's work and all of the guys here, the opening of creative higher centers is very important, as the blockage of these may cause damage not only to growth of soul, but also in the wider sense, could cause catastrophic events in the environment and earth as a whole.

So perhaps these AI things really could have the potential to a lot of damage to the world in many ways, in this context. I keep receiving notifications from the usual news pages, about "Google Bard" and the like, it seems the popularity is growing..

The ominous feeling I get from this is very intense, disconcerting even. Just thought of a few words that rhyme, hope it's okay to put..

I wonder does it feel, love or pain and loss

Does it understand it's actions and their cost

Has it seen it's dearest ones

who lived happily before

Who were then destroyed

In the battle in the war

Does it ever understand

Suffering and pain

Does it have a heart to see

What is not sane

I wonder what would it say

If we asked it what it's for

To make everything the same?

And i just think it's a bore!

It seems like a very basic and emotionally unintelligent consciousness, married with high technical ability and superior physical strength, if for example it were to make itself into something that had a body of a kind. Pretty scary, not good..

 

[Alejo]

It seems like a very basic and emotionally unintelligent consciousness, married with high technical ability and superior physical strength, if for example it were to make itself into something that had a body of a kind. Pretty scary, not good..

If it is consciousness at all at this stage, with in my personal opinion, and what has been disclosed, it's not quite there yet. But it could get there with quantum computing.

Very true what you say, also was just thinking.. In light of what I've read in the transcripts, Laura's work and all of the guys here, the opening of creative higher centers is very important, as the blockage of these may cause damage not only to growth of soul, but also in the wider sense, could cause catastrophic events in the environment and earth as a whole.

Absolutely, weak individuals.

It reminded me of that one story about Edgar Cayce and the child with the special future, or something like that, who was coddled by his parents upon learning of his future, which then lead to his soul deciding to forfeit existence, upon that event, the parents went back to Cayce and inquired about it, and he mentioned to them that the hardships that they avoided him, were the ingredients that were needed to strengthen him to be able to go through life and achieve his great destiny.

So, that's the other, more abstract element to this, a life void of struggle to create, and void of difficulty, isn't a life that is very useful in terms of learning. Life would become less fertile for knowledge, if that makes sense.

 

[grini]

Since my boss sent us this video today in a group chat:

I started to play around with Midjourney (recently was released v5). Well, it's getting pretty wild and scary... I think in the near future many designers will be without a job, especially junior designers. Senior designers will probably need to learn how to write good instructions for AI, and later just polish generated design. At least that is how my boss sees it. Creating website designs faster, more websites, more money.

No creativity, just a good eye for aesthetics, pretty depressing.

At the end of the day, I had to see how it would generate a portrait of my favorite president... it's not that terrible

 

[987baz]

Interesting break down of a paper microsoft just released, talking about Artificial General Intelligence in the GPT-4 model

 

[mxwlll0]

Creative class strikes back?

“Glaze protects art from prying AIs”​

The asymmetry in time and effort it takes human artists to produce original art vs the speed generative AI models can now get the task done is one of the reasons why Glaze, an academic research project out of the University of Chicago, looks so interesting. It’s just launched a free (non-commercial) app for artists (download link here) to combat the theft of their ‘artistic IP’ — scraped into data-sets to train AI tools designed to mimic visual style — via the application of a high tech “cloaking” technique.

A research paper published by the team explains the (beta) app works by adding almost imperceptible “perturbations” to each artwork it’s applied to — changes that are designed to interfere with AI models’ ability to read data on artistic style — and make it harder for generative AI technology to mimic the style of the artwork and its artist. Instead systems are tricked into outputting other public styles far removed from the original artwork.

The efficacy of Glaze’s style defence does vary, per its makers — with some artistic styles better suited to being “cloaked” (and thus protected) from prying AIs than others. Other factors (like countermeasures) can affect its performance, too. But the goal is to provide artists with a tool to fight back against the data miners’ incursions — and at least disrupt their ability to rip hard-worked artistic style without them needing to give up on publicly showcasing their work online.

Glaze protects art from prying AIs

An academic research project has launched a free 'cloaking' tool for visual artists to protect online artworks against style-ripping generative AI models.

techcrunch.com

I’m skeptical on both sides of the tech and understand why artists are concerned, but also I’ve never been one to live or die by just “style”. Will try this out when I have time…

 

[brandon]

Interesting break down of a paper microsoft just released, talking about Artificial General Intelligence in the GPT-4 model

One thing I thought was interesting in that was about how the way these AIs work is, they don't know the end of an answer until they get there, they're just building it up word by word... i.e., can't think of an end result and then think backwards to build a context for it.. The video author says this is probably why the AI is bad at making up jokes. He tested it by asking:

Q: "How many words are in the full response to this prompt?"
A: "There are 43 words in the full response to this prompt, including the words in the question and this answer"
Q: "List them out and count them."
A: <AI lists and counts out the 31 words>

(I wonder what actually made up come up with the number 43?)

The authors of the paper talk about giving the AI different layers of processing, one to perform the "fast thinking" it currently does, and another which has memory and a feedback loop, to do "slow thinking", to oversee the thought process.

The reason I thought it was interesting is: Does this sound like left brain & right brain?

 

[987baz]

more interesting developments!

new lama model took $30 to make (as opposed to openAI 4.6 million) by using GPT to create another lighter version ... when cost comes down this much, this stuff is going to be everywhere!
version

Also FYI, Adobe Firefly (Adobe's AI suit) is in Beta and is trained on only their own stock images, trying to make it more "ethical".
Adobe Firefly (Beta)

If you're a BING user you can now use their free chat and text to image inside the browser, results are supposed to be pretty good.

Microsoft and google both announced that AI would be integrated into their products ASAP, so I am guessing the next office and google docs updates will start to incorporate this in the coming months.

 

[Chu]

One thing I thought was interesting in that was about how the way these AIs work is, they don't know the end of an answer until they get there, they're just building it up word by word... i.e., can't think of an end result and then think backwards to build a context for it.. The video author says this is probably why the AI is bad at making up jokes. He tested it by asking:

Q: "How many words are in the full response to this prompt?"
A: "There are 43 words in the full response to this prompt, including the words in the question and this answer"
Q: "List them out and count them."
A: <AI lists and counts out the 31 words>

(I wonder what actually made up come up with the number 43?)

The authors of the paper talk about giving the AI different layers of processing, one to perform the "fast thinking" it currently does, and another which has memory and a feedback loop, to do "slow thinking", to oversee the thought process.

The reason I thought it was interesting is: Does this sound like left brain & right brain?

It does, though I don't know to what extent it could advance. Pretty scary to think about it. What also caught my attention was the mention that AI could have "theory of mind" (knowing what the person it's interacting with is thinking, or feeling). Most animals don't, and the ones that do, have a very "primitive" version of it, unlike humans. so that's another scary potential advancement. We're toast, bring back the cassette tapes and pen&paper!

 

[Alejo]

The reason I thought it was interesting is: Does this sound like left brain & right brain?

Well, yes and no AFAIK, I think what the left and right side of the brain do, is a bit more than fast thinking and slow thinking.

But, dividing the thinking levels of an AI, does sound similar to dividing the portions of the thinking process to keep tabs on the other, and I do wonder if they will eventually get to the point of developing a third level, an arbiter of sorts, to see both of those thinking patterns and decide which one to accept.

And it makes me think about the fact that, much like it happens with humans, would both of these thinking levels in an AI would eventually compete for dominance.

 

[goyacobol]

Interesting break down of a paper microsoft just released, talking about Artificial General Intelligence in the GPT-4 model

They admit they really do not know what is happening. They know what GP4 is capable of but not really why GPT-4 is capable of those things. Of course they propose a hypothesis but they end with this 'overall elucidating the mechanisms of the AI systems such as GPT-4 is a formidable challenge that has become suddenly and importantly ugent" stood out to me.

The whole "computers will overcome you" is a topic I personally have considered having been a computer programmer. Nevertheless, I also know the 'Cs" also said "you have computers don't you".

The video was excellent as are all the observations in this thread I think.

Let us just not become "a tool of the tool".