Scary story

I read this morning of a toy created by Google called Imagen, the object of which seems to be to generate images from a small chunk of text, with the sample above taken from reference 2.

One part of the toy is a lot of clever computer code, no doubt needing a lot of clever people to write it and a lot of computer power to run it. The other part is a lot of text and image data drawn from the Internet, the raw material, as it were. I dare say a subset of these images is labelled, to help the clever computer code along, to help it learn its business. So you might have an image involving a wheelbarrow and the labels would pop the wheelbarrow out from the rest of  the image and maybe identify and name the parts. The sort of thing you appear to get with the COCO dataset from Microsoft - although I found the official website at reference 3 unhelpful. Perhaps only intended for the experts.

One catch is that while such a toy can be used to create more or less harmless images of animals doing human things, they can also be used to create unpleasant images and worse. What would the code that produced the snake made of maize (top left) make of the keys 'lynching a nigger', 'savages barbecuing a missionary' or 'metropolitan policeman raping a drunken reveller'?  Does the code include powerful enough filters, to weed that sort of stuff out?

And then, is it any more than a toy? Would one use such a thing to generate images to put in a children's story book? What else might one use it for? Clearly something to ponder about in the morning to come.

In the meantime, I find it slightly depressing that, given all that is wrong with our world, so much energy is being spent on such things. 

References

Reference 1: The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images: Google Brain has revealed its own image-making AI, called Imagen. But don't expect to see anything that isn't wholesome - Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review - 2022.

Reference 2: https://imagen.research.google/.

Reference 3a: https://cocodataset.org/#home.

Reference 3b: https://cocodataset.org/#explore.