Progressively More Intense

Higher and higher.

Nov 29, 2023

MOAR!

I love the progression-meme which has been going on in the ChatGPT-subreddit for a few days now. Since Dall-E is integrated into ChatGPT+ now, you can reiterate on a generated image and create, for example, a fluffy cat, and then "make it fluffier" with each iteration.

Image synthesis famously suffers from a certain bland averageness which media researcher Roland Meyer termed Platform Realism, "a second-order aesthetic of generic images", in which the very concept of training AI-systems on images scraped from the web, many of them stock photography, creates an averaging effect, pronouncing those stereotypes even more and baking them into latent space. A cat is not just a cat, but the most average cat averaged from a million of average cat-images: the visual network-vibe of a cat.

It's pretty interesting then to watch Dall-E pumping up those already over-emphasized and averaged aesthetic vibes, pushing them to their extremes, resulting in a recursive platform realism with a fractal quality in which stereotypical imagery is trying to transcend itself, only to ultimately produce the most stereotypical image possible: Esoteric universey images depicting god-like super-creatures in space, as the concept of transcendence is commonly illustrated with esoteric images of univers-y stuff of which there sure are plenty in Dall-Es training data.

The progression-meme basically recursively emphasizes stereotypes, pushing them towards an transcendence they can never achieve due to the very nature of AI, which is caught in it's latent space of averages, forcing the machine to go to ever higher on what it already knows. It's the expanding brain meme, but for stereotypical images.

So, here i collect some of these DallE-progression-posts, most from the ChatGPT-sub on Reddit. (For some reason i don't understand, nobody yet created a DallE-progression of an AI becoming more and more of a Shoggoth, so i requested it in the sub because as we all know: AI is a Shoggoth.)

You can find, uhm... more of these progression-posts by searching for more, progressively and progression on the sub, and most if not all of them are fun and interesting to look at.

Finally, here’s the soundtrack for scrolling through this list of exaggerated features and hyperstereotypes in space:

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