Animal the Cannibal
AI turns foody animals into autophagic creatures which eat themselves
I’m working on a longer piece about the whole AI explosion going on. I have no real idea when the piece will be finished, but while I’m on it, enjoy this little bit of AI weirdness.
I’m following the developments very closely at the moment, especially when it comes to computer vision and image generators and I just stumbled upon a quirky and hilarious phenomenon which is as of yet completely undocumented: Dall-E 2 turns animals into cannibals.
Let me explain.
There is a weird design thing going on when it comes to the illustration of logos for butchers and restaurants which like to illustrate their businesses with the food they are offering. Often, a butcher shows off a pig which happily cuts through its own meat, or eats itself. Stuff like this is documented in the more or less defunct blog Suicide Food, in the Cut me little servant-Collection or the Flickr-Set Anthropomorphic Cannibalism (via BB). Here’s a Pig Butcher with Big Smile holding Fresh meat from a stock-image-service.
Now, a redditor posted his Dall-E 2-creations of “animals enjoying food” and as you can see in the examples above and below, there is a Donald-like duck eating a duckling, the pigs seem to enjoy a plate of pork sausages and the dog is eating a Hot Dog.
Clearly, Dall-E 2 is pushing animals to become cannibals, because the language model associates them both with the object and the subject of the prompt. A dog enjoying food will most likely generate food that is associated with a dog, which would be a hot dog, and thus, a duck will most likely eat ducks and a pig will most likely eat pork. (Weirdly, the turkey below does not eat turkey.)
I guess, the very nature of language model-based image generators gives animals cannibalistic tendencys, when the prompt is combined with “eating food”.
If this is true, then this is the most hilarious and/or disgusting AI-hickup I've ever seen.
