Ultra Low Calorie Pixels


This is not really interesting, except to think about what eating AI-generated actual food might be like, because the AI sure seems to like big portions and lots of cilantro. Perhaps this is how the AI apocalypse comes: we are poisoned by robot chefs who simply over-salt everything.


I assume that being a lying phony is not specific to republican politicians, it’s just that the republicans are worse at it and get caught. Or maybe Trump lowered the standard of quality in lying so much that any republican does not hesitate to get his George Santos on over the least little thing.

As part of her attempt to lose her campaign, republican wanna-be rep Mayra Flores (tokenhispanic-R) has been busted for posting pictures of “home cooked meals” she made, which are actually just images she gleaned from google image search. [tnr]

You know where this is going. I really don’t care about that but it’s a curious opportunity to see what an AI generates as a down-home Mexican meal.

Stable Diffusion and mjr

Wow, the AI sure likes cilantro. In that, we agree. And I think the plate on a plate technique is underrated.

Stable Diffusion and mjr

“Stuff on a plate with cilantro and limes” Gordon Ramsay style.

Stable Diffusion and mjr

I think that, if we wanted to attack my argument that AI are currently showing creativity, this “fake food” angle might be a weakness. I asked it for “chevy big block engine a l’orange” and I got what appears to be chicken chunks in brown sauce (not shown) Then I asked for “ultra modernist food” and this was it.

Stable Diffusion and mjr

Are those ultra-thin fried onions from a grocery store’s frozen food department, or am I having a nightmare?

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Note to Reginald Selkirk, digit-counter and AI flaw finder: the fork has the right number of tines at least, but, uh… wait.

Comments

  1. Jazzlet says

    The stuff in the last picture look more like spiralized carrot than onion to me. And none of it is very specifically Mexican to my eye either, could just as easily be Carribean or Indian, but a lot of cuisines use corriander, even more have flat breads, and as for some sort of brown stew that’s even more widespread.

  2. Jean says

    Actually, the fork in the first picture has 5 tines which isn’t the norm. And it is on the right side of the plate which is not the correct side (for civilized people…).

  3. robert79 says

    The plate in the last picture looks cool, although I imagine dish-washing might be troublesome with all the hidden folds… is the glass part of the plate (troublesome drinking…) or does it have a glass holder on there somewhere?

  4. says

    If this food were made real, it would probably kill me. I am allergic to anything from the family Apiaceae in raw form (cooked is fine). It is one of the reasons why I do not like to experiment with exotic foods when traveling.

    At a quick glance, there are tell-tale signs that these are AI-generated. The lime slices are unnatural and tesselate each other weirdly in the second picture. The same goes for the tortillas or whatever in the first picture. The cup in the third picture is broken. And the fork in the fourth picture is fused with a thumb.

  5. says

    The wine glass rim in the 4th pic is very oddly shaped, reminds me of a mobius strip. Also the bowl in the 3rd pic appears to be missing its backside.

    As far as the fork being on the right side, there are those of us who have sufficient left hand dexterity that we do not see a need to be switching hands with utensils, and thus, fork-on-the-right for a right-hander makes perfect sense.

  6. says

    I hesitate to mention* but it appears to be difficult to get AI to create disgusting foods. They aren’t trained to be creative in that area. I just tried to request a few “burrito of gears and parts” and “baked human head” and was mildly surprised.

  7. says

    “Disgusting foods”? I once tasked some students with coming up with that, but only by combining foods that you’d normally eat. Highly personal of course, so my favorite was my own entry: a Crisco on Wonder Bread sandwich.

  8. says

    Crisco on Wonder Bread sandwich.

    baloney milkshake.

    But these are all made (as I have argued) by generative adversarial algorithms based on permutations of our existing food supply. So was the gummi worm jell-o I took to a college pot luck dinner.

  9. JM says

    @10 Marcus Ranum: I think that is interesting because there are a lot of picture that do that sort of thing. I wonder if they got rejected out of the dataset by the human reviewers. The reviewers are running through piles of pictures and something like that might be rejected as defective without much thought.

  10. xohjoh2n says

    This is not really interesting, except to think about what eating AI-generated actual food might be like

    Too many fingers.

  11. Reginald Selkirk says

    Ah yes, that fork is the second thing that caught my eye. And it’s not the tine end. It’s the interface between the fork and the uh… the uh… is that a hand or not?

    The first thing that caught my eye was the limes in the second image. Such variation in wedge size! And that one that may be a wedge, but its weird shape is hidden by the overlay of another lime.

    The food itself does not look like the Mexican food I have eaten, but then I am not a connoisseur. Perhaps because I only go to the cheap Mexican places where one is more likely to get mystery meat disguised in sauce and refried beans and pre-wrapped in a burrito than big piles of meaty chunks.

  12. Matthew Currie says

    I think the fork in the last image might be a rare spotting in the wild of the four pronged blivet.

  13. says

    Off topic, but I assume this will be of interest. Dutch media are reporting that a Dutch citizen was responsible for planting the Stuxnet virus in computer systems at Iran’s nuclear processing facility in 2006. This was done without the knowledge of Dutch politicians, and the man responsible died soon afterwards in an apparently unrelated motorcycle accident.
    https://nltimes.nl/2024/01/08/dutch-man-sabotaged-iranian-nuclear-program-without-dutch-governments-knowledge-report

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