a vast herd of cute kittens

The Kitten Effect

One thing I’ve noticed with image-generating algorithms is that the more of something they have to put in an image, the worse it is. I first noticed this with the kitten-generating variant of StyleGAN, which often does okay on one cat: alternative for shocked_pikachu.png but is terrible at a crowd of kittens. A few years …

a message written in tea leaves

Reading tea leaves

DALL-E (and other text-to-image generators) will often add text to their images even when you don’t ask for any. Ask for a picture of a Halifax Pier and it could end up covered in messy writing, variously legible versions of “Halifax” as if it was quietly mumbling “Halifax… Halifax” to itself. Since the AI is …

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Interview with a squirrel

Google’s large language model, LaMDA, has recently been making headlines after a Google engineer (now on administrative leave), claimed to be swayed by an interview in which GPT-3 described the experience of being conscious. Almost everyone else who has used these large text-generating AIs, myself included, is entirely unconvinced. Why? Because these large language models …

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High-Definition Segmentation in Google Meet

Posted by Tingbo Hou and Juhyun Lee, Software Engineers, Google In recent years video conferencing has played an increasingly important role in both work and personal communication for many users. Over the past two years, we have enhanced this experience in Google Meet by introducing privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) powered background features, also known as …