The Stages of Evolution of HPC

I think today’s image speaks for itself really 😁

I thought I’d share a little about my experience with AI of creating it though. Worried that AI is about to replace you? Think that it can understand what you’re saying? 

Errr no. It’s a long way from both. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great productivity boost. It does in no way shape or form understand anything though.

Here’s the prompt I initially gave it for the image I actually wanted:

"Another new image. This should be in a widescreen aspect ratio. It should be based as a meme of the images that show the evolution of mankind but it should instead show the evolution of HPC. 

The stages of evolutions should be:

1) A single person using an abacus to calculate

2) That single person using a larger abacus

3) 5 people all using a large abacus to compute

4) three groups of five people computing separately on their own abacus without sharing

5) those three groups all sharing a much larger number of abacuses instead

6) those three people sharing the abacuses but also having access to an even larger shared pool of abacuses which are in a cloud."

I’m pretty certain that if I gave the prompt to any human artist I’d get back something that is better than this interpretation from ChatGPT

It drew this because it takes the words in my prompt and mashes them together into an image. It has no real understanding of what it is that I want. It’s simply, to quote Emily Bender, a stochastic parrot. It took the words in my prompt, converted them to tokens and then drew something that had all those tokens present in the image. It didn’t understand any of the explanation. 

This is further confirmed by my subsequent prompt:

“that's not what i was looking for. it should be a single line of evolution, not multiple with the images in the order and depicting what i specified above”

To which it responded with:

Losing most of the original context of the first prompt. I tried to correct it again:

“those pictures don't depict the original prompt. Here it is again: 

1) A single person using an abacus to calculate

2) That single person using a larger abacus

3) 5 people all using a large abacus to compute

4) three groups of five people computing separately on their own abacus without sharing

5) those three groups all sharing a much larger number of abacuses instead

6) those three groups sharing the abacuses but also having access to an even larger shared pool of abacuses which are in a cloud and shared with even more groups of people”

And got this:

So I prompted it again:

“ok, lets try again... start over.

Draw me an image in widescreen format against a sunny blue background. The image should contain from left to right depictions of the following things, increasing in size as you go from left to right:

1) A single person using an abacus to calculate

2) That single person using a larger abacus

3) 5 people all using a large abacus to compute

4) three groups of five people computing separately on their own abacus without sharing

5) those three groups all sharing a much larger number of abacuses instead

6) those three groups sharing the abacuses but also having access to an even larger shared pool of abacuses and shared with even more groups of people. There is a cloud above this last group.”

and got this:

😮‍💨

At this point I gave up and so you have the image at the top of this article instead!