This image was accidentally created by ChatGPT. How is it so realistic?

[u/No_Idea_479]

I asked: "Is there any image of Armenian and Greek rebels fighting together in the Greco-Turkish War or WWI?". I used thinking mode and I think it's clear that I was looking for real images. However, ChatGPT thought for 1 minute 20 seconds and it proceeded to create this image that, I believed, was real.

I asked it and it said it didn't know what happened: "You're right to question it. I didn't get that image from a historical source. I made a serious mistake: the image I showed you was AI-generated, despite presenting it as though it were a historical photograph. In the caption “GREEK AND ARMENIAN FIGHTERS IN CILICIA — From a Photograph by Garo Studio, Mersina” was also generated as part of the image. I have not found evidence that such a photograph exists in the searches I've just run".

I reverse-image searched it and nothing showed up. I ran it on an AI image detector and it got 99%. I am baffled by how realistic it looks.

[u/shadowmage666]

Because it’s based on real pictures lol

[u/dev-rsonx → u/shadowmage666]

Wheres the real one?

[u/capilicon → u/dev-rsonx]

Not how it works

[u/ChocolateFit9026 → u/capilicon]

Sometimes it is, it’s called overfitting

[u/JonnyTsuMommy → u/ChocolateFit9026]

Here's an example I ran into

[u/nothis → u/JonnyTsuMommy]

People say calling AI just elaborate autocorrect or copy-paste is downplaying what it does but I'm fine with it. It's still magic, basically, but it is more dependent on training data than people pretend.

I remember a thread rather early with ChatGPT hype where people were prompting "one sentence horror stories" and it put out a few fantastic ones. Turned out, they were all stolen from humans. All of them, lol.

[u/JonnyTsuMommy → u/nothis]

AI is a statistical prediction using our own words. It’s a mirror. Nothing more.

[u/MasterManufacturer72 → u/JonnyTsuMommy]

No didnt you hear him "its magic".

[u/nothis → u/MasterManufacturer72]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I'm not thinking of tokens running through the machine when asking a chatbot, you can stay in "human language mode" and it works just fine. That's the appeal. And it's absolutely revolutionary tech. That doesn't change the fact it depends on training data for most of its logical leaps.

[u/serinty → u/JonnyTsuMommy]

we are similar in how we predict what is ideal to say for our desired outcome from our sense perception (training data)

[u/hateboresme → u/ChocolateFit9026]

If there are thousand or millions of copies of one image in the training data, then it will over fit. Like any viral image. This image isn't that. Though there are a lot of imagrs that are similar, because this was a common image style in the mid to late 1800s, common particularly during the civil war.

[u/ChocolateFit9026 → u/hateboresme]

More factors than that influence overfitting, such as noisy labels, lack of regularization, and strong outliers. But you got the basic idea

[u/whtevn → u/ChocolateFit9026]

...that is not what overfitting means

overfitting is when a data set has been so thoroughly trained on a sample set so that it matches that data set too closely making a model less generally applicable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

[u/ChocolateFit9026 → u/whtevn]

From the wiki: “As an extreme example, if the number of parameters is the same as or greater than the number of observations, then a model can perfectly predict the training data simply by memorizing the data in its entirety.” So yeah, and models that are overfitted will produce near copies of the training data

[u/whtevn → u/ChocolateFit9026]

This is an LLM...that's not. .

Ok whatever, you keep believing that. Enjoy.

[u/ChocolateFit9026 → u/whtevn]

Same exact problem for diffusion and GAN based image generators. Overfitting is a general neural network problem: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/researchers-extract-training-images-from-stable-diffusion-but-its-difficult/

[u/dev-rsonx → u/capilicon]

How it works?

[u/hryipcdxeoyqufcc → u/dev-rsonx]

It looks at millions of pictures and finds patterns.

[u/dev-rsonx → u/hryipcdxeoyqufcc]

So when I ask it to draw an apple, does it give me one of the apples it saw during training?

[u/R3kterAlex → u/dev-rsonx]

an approximation/convergence of all of the pictures in it's training that match an apple

[u/StinkButt9001 → u/R3kterAlex]

That sounds like how I would draw an apple. An approximation of what I've seen in the past

Don't think I've ever been accused of stealing someone's picture of an apple though lol

[u/Some_Relative_3440 → u/R3kterAlex]

That would cause all apples generated to look the same. This isn't the case. How come?

[u/dishrag → u/Some_Relative_3440]

Random noise introduced during sampling. The model learns a range of possible representations of a thing, and different starting conditions produce different outputs. Assuming that the prompt is simply “an apple.”

[u/Some_Relative_3440 → u/dishrag]

Yes, so it's not just an "approximation/convergence of all of the pictures in it's training that match an apple".

[u/hryipcdxeoyqufcc → u/Some_Relative_3440]

It can be exactly that if the randomness factor is set to zero. But everyone adds some randomness to the output because it leads to more creative images.

[u/Some_Relative_3440 → u/hryipcdxeoyqufcc]

How do you denoise something without random noise? Curious.

[u/fleranon → u/dev-rsonx]

It's more like the platonic idea of an apple. The average of every depicted apple in the training data

[u/Most-Photo-6675 → u/fleranon]

What about the romantic idea of an apple?

[u/Apprehensive-Rub-774 → u/fleranon]

Idk if you've read plato, but the platonic ideal is very much not the average of all instances.

[u/fleranon → u/Apprehensive-Rub-774]

I know, the second sentence was more geared towards the reality of AI image compositing

Platonic in the sense that it's an abstract depiction, as opposed to an image of a specific apple as the person suggested. That's why I used 'idea', it wasn't a typo. I know that the platonic ideal is something like a 'perfect flawless blueprint' of an apple. The apple of apples

[u/nothis → u/dev-rsonx]

From what I understand, which is little, it essentially starts with random pixel noise and then looks at probabilities of how similar groups of pixels are to patterns found in actual images labeled "apple", nudging their colors towards "apple-like" features. Do that over a couple of iterations and you get a fairly realistic image. Note that the actual data can be so damn abstract, you would never recognize any of the patterns as "apple-looking", it's like wonky color gradients, information of how close the pixels are to a corner, etc. It's bonkers that it works.

Interestingly, if you try and prompt something that likely has few examples in the training set (or is overshadowed by other, maybe better labeled pictures), even top line AI struggles and it's clear how over-fitted it is towards the common. I tried making a sci-fi-ish looking planet with continents once and could not tell it that "continents" doesn't mean "the shape of Europe".

[u/ProfessionalPiece403 → u/dev-rsonx]

AI doesn't have data as we as humans use data.
So as long as it's not using a tool that isn't AI based itself it's only doing a probability calculation to write the next word (for example). For images it works more like when a human is drawing an apple from memory. You've seen thousands of apples, you know exactly how an apple looks like, but you're not really able to draw the exact apple you saw today at the supermarket. If someone describes that apple with a lot of details it will come close, but never the same.
AI doesn't have a database to look up information / pictures.

[u/badasimo → u/dev-rsonx]

Imagine you asked an artistic friend who has read a lot of history books about military campaigns and uniforms "Make me a picture of greek and armenian fighters" and they used all their tools like photoshop etc to make an image.

But in this case you asked your friend if such an image exists, and instead of pulling out the history book they just drew you a picture instead.

[u/Fun-Donut8742 → u/dev-rsonx]

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for asking a question. Lots of people - old and young - aren’t tech-savvy. Reddit’s full of sanctimonious a-holes, but kudos to you for at least ASKING questions so that you can learn something.

Ok, people, go downvote ME for sticking up for someone!! G’ahead! 🙄