Comment by ben_w
1 day ago
> In that case we'd expect a human with perfect drawing skills and perfect knowledge about bikes and birds to output such a simple drawing correctly 100% of the time.
Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
You claim those are drawn by people with "perfect knowledge about bikes" and "perfect drawing skills"?
More that "these models work … like humans" (discretely or otherwise) does not imply the quotation.
Most humans do not have perfect drawing skills and perfect knowledge about bikes and birds, they do not output such a simple drawing correctly 100% of the time.
"Average human" is a much lower bar than most people want to believe, mainly because most of us are average on most skills, and also overestimate our own competence — the modal human has just a handful of things they're good at, and one of those is the language they use, another is their day job.
Most of us can't draw, and demonstrably can't remember (or figure out from first principles) how a bike works. But this also applies to "smart" subsets of the population: physicists have https://xkcd.com/793/, and there's this famous rocket scientist who weighed in on rescuing kids from a flooded cave, they come up with some nonsense about a submarine.
It’s not that humans have perfect drawing skills, it’s that humans can judge their performance and get better over time.
Ask 100 random people to draw a bike and in 10 minutes and they’ll on average suck while still beating the LLM’s here. Give em an incentive and 10 months and the average person is going to be able to make at least one quite decent drawing of a bike.
The cost and speed advantage of LLM’s is real as long as you’re fine with extremely low quality. Ask a model for 10,000 drawings so you can pick the best and you get a marginal improvements based on random chance at a steep price.
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That blog post is a 10/10. Oh dear I miss the old internet.