well, manipulation is more about intent, rather than technique... I think it doesn't matter if you chose the correct "door" if you're trying to get someone to operate against their own interests.
As a young math researcher, my mentor definitely did not believe that Math was the absolute descriptor of the universe.
You can definitely imagine a scenario where the world does not operate perfectly mathematically correct though Math still exists - as an abstract separate entity.
You can do this such that everytime you recognize a new quirk in the world, then you can invent some new math/logical framework to match/approximate the current understanding. I don't know if this is the reality of this world, but when you look at things like complexity theory you have to wonder "okay... maybe we designed a useful system rather than discovering a true law of reality"
I guess it's kinda nicely genuine that the "four panel comic strip" has some errors in it (misunderstanding caption + cat high-fiving itself in the bonus fifth panel)
1. The text ”Imagen 4 is now generally available!” is still spoken, not a caption.
2. ”low latency” -> ”low-laten”
(3. Has that ugly gpt-image-1 trademark yellow filter requiring work in post to avoid.)
I didn’t bring up the ”retro comic look” thing. I certainly think it’s an issue with Imagen 4’s version. It doesn’t look very old school at all. But I can’t judge the OpenAI one either on that, I’m no comic book expert, so I just skipped that one.
The pervasive yellow tinge indicates that that is almost assuredly `gpt-image-1` - OpenAI's flagship model and (aesthetics aside) the highest scoring model in terms of strict prompt adherence that I've seen.
With images and video, it's less clear exactly what they're doing, but it's watermarking on the pixel leve. From one of their blog posts:
Videos are composed of individual frames or still images. So we developed a watermarking technique inspired by our SynthID for image tool. This technique embeds a watermark directly into the pixels of every video frame, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification.
synthid used to be a waitlist-only tool but you can now check to see if images are made by imagen in google’s cloud console. You have to have a Vertex billing account to use it.
> I didn’t bring up the ”retro comic look” thing. (…) I’m no comic book expert, so I just skipped that one.
I’m no Scott McCloud, but the OpenAI version definitely does a better job with the retro style. The yellow filter you criticised actually helps to sell the illusion. The Imagen version utterly fails in the retro area, that style is very much modern.
But there are other important flaws in the OpenAI version. The fourth panel has a different cat (the head shape and stripes are wrong) and it bleeds into the previous panel. Technically that could be a stylistic choice, except that the floor/table is inconsistent, making it clear it was a mistake.
1. it's very difficult to verify how a llm will behave without running it
2. there is an intentional ignorance around the security issues of running models
I think this research makes the speculative concrete
LaTeX will have a special spot in my heart, but it's pretty bloated (even minimalist distributions) and suffers from being an early pass at a problem.