Puffer-pope reality check

post by Neil (neil-warren) · 2023-07-05T09:27:11.200Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

2 comments

This post is humor. It's meant to be entertaining and nothing more.                                          tl;dr: nothing quite summarizes the weirdness of the 21rst century as well as this picture.

I was sorting through my mind dump recently and found a "first-principles rant" on the widely circulated image of the pope in a puffer jacket. 

This image was: 

1. Built using technology that effectively amounts to magic.
2. Magic controlled by a guy on shrooms. The talking space monkeys that we are have developed magic, only to use it to make silly-looking pictures as we chemically disrupt our brains for the fun of it. 
3. Was generated thousands of kilometers away from where its high creator came up with the prompt. (For free.)
4. The idea behind computers is essentially: "what if we put lightning through a maze? If the maze is built in just the right way we can make the lightning do math, because that's how geometry works apparently."
5. This image was generated blindly through multiplying matrices. It is purely the result of calculations, nothing more. 
6. While it took a ton of fine-tuning to get here, we frankly have no idea how Midjourney works. Fine: by changing the geometry of the universe we are capable of making it generate puffer-pope pictures for us; but we're not sure how it works exactly because we're training our models at the macro-level (and the micro-level is really really complex, and not as efficient as it could be, but that doesn't matter to us because we have a lot of spare compute). 
7. The Pope is a figure that most people on Earth know. Why? Because we have this thing called religion. Religion is a meme which relies on believing--without evidence-- that the universe is essentially sentient and came up with us on purpose. 
8. Religion is really viral apparently. The drippy guy in the pic is the spiritual leader ("") of over 1,300 million humans, distributed all over the planet.
9. Human language is oddly efficient. The Midjourney prompt was a single sentence long: "Pope Francis in a puffer jacket walking through the streets of Rome".^[1]  This reminds me that you can also get incredibly specific results with just 5 words or so on Google. 
10. I've seen this picture and you've seen this picture and somehow this picture has become famous on a global scale. We're really damn interconnected aren't we? 

1. ^{^}

   Upon further research, I discovered that the original prompt may have had extra directions, like what filter to apply and the right lighting conditions. That doesn't change this point much, however. In just a few dozen words instead of 12, this incredibly specific image was dragged out of the entropic depths of the universe's white noise. 

2 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.