A.I. Is Over My Head

I am a writer. I wrangle words, attempting to force them to tell intriguing stories in interesting ways. Writing can be brain-exhaustifying, as I’m sure many of you know, so I am always looking for fun ways to untangle the neural pathways which serve me so well. And while data-whatsit-manipulatizing is totally NOT in my wheelhouse, there’s a new pastime I just came across, on the HuggingFace.co website.

HuggingFace.co

What is HuggingFace.co, you ask? Well, I asked that same question. And I’m still asking it. Kind of a Luddite here, I will admit it freely. The Home page of HuggingFace.co proclaims that it is:

Nice! But I’m still kind of lost. The Golden.wiki says, “Hugging Face is a company which develops social AI-run chatbot applications. It was established in 2016 by Clement Delangue and Julien Chaumond.” Yeah, so…I’m not too proud to admit that I have only the vaguest idea what a chatbot is. Lazy, yes. I never wanted to know how my PC worked, just that it came on and did stuff to help me write stories. (That reminds me: I need to take my laptop in and find out why it DOESN’T COME ON, after being repaired three times!) So, I pulled up another article about it, which explains, “In the world of data science, Hugging Face is a startup in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, offering its library of models for use by some of the A-listers including Apple and Bing.” I’ve watched my share of Big Bang Theory episodes, so I can kinda-sorta grasp this, if I don’t push my brain too hard.

I’m no dummy, but my brain is wired for creativity, fantasy, mythology, and—above all else—storying. So, when the above-referenced article went on to use phrases like, “Masked Language Modeling (MLM),” “Next Sentence Prediction (NSP)”, and “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT),” my brain just kind of shut down. All this is just too technical for me to grasp.

But the thing is, the HuggingFace community has a lot of very tech-savvy brainiacs doing awesome things with programming, which no doubt will rocket humanity into the Twenty-Fifth Century (cue spacy music here). And being open-source, these geniuses share their developments with the community and—by extension—the world.

The open-source community is doing all kinds of neat things to Move Artificial Intelligence Forward, which—for people who comprehend things other than how mulberry paper is made, or what motivates the behavioral imperatives of dragons, or how to tame a feral kitten—find incredibly fascinating. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. I just came here to HuggingFace.co to play, to entertain myself. And this brings me to…

DALL·E mini

I am just dipping a toe in, kind of trying to see if I can find a new way to relax my neurons and have some fun. Can I find it here? Well...

There’s this guy named Boris Dayma who developed this app called DALL·E mini. The app is described thusly:

“DALL·E mini is an AI model that generates images from any prompt you give!” BTW I can appreciate a guy who’s so enthusiastic about his work that he gives it an exclamation point. That shows confidence. You simply type some random words into the text bar and the AI combines images from the Web to create a…something. For my first try, I typed in “Chewbacca wheelbarrow,” and hit the RUN button.

Sadly, I got the error message, “An embedded page at hf.space says, ‘Too much traffic, please try again.’” Twice. Three times. I kept hitting the RUN button until I finally managed to get space to process my request. (It probably didn’t help that I first started trying to use the app at 3:30 on a Monday afternoon.)

When you hit the RUN button (and finally get a response) a 3x3 grid of image boxes shows up, which displays variations on the image generated by your prompt. You can then click on one box to bring up a larger image and run through all of the images generated by clicking through the thumbnails at the bottom.

Here’s what I got for the prompt, “wind chime teacup mask”:

And here’s what happened with “ice cream monster”:

The AI-generated images weren't as scary as I'd hoped for. And the resolution is pretty bad. Here's the best one in the large size:

Kind of cute, but it leaves a lot to be desired. I tried one more prompt, to see if anything interesting would result. This last prompt was "shark tree," and I hoped for sharks merged with trees, or sharks stuck in trees, or something cool. But instead, all I got were some awesome tree trunks sans sharks:

Overall, the app needs work. But aside from the delay in getting a prompt processed, it's an interesting idea.

In Conclusion

Why did I write this piece? That’s simple: I was bored, and it was too hot outside to do anything more strenuous than to try a bit of random storying. Or playing online. This is obviously a very early version of the DALL-E mini app, which should hopefully improve as time goes on.

People who thrive on learning new stuff, on using their brain cells to make real valuable progress in the world inside a computer, will probably appreciate the HuggingFace.co site. People like me, with no comprehension whatsoever of what bytes and microprocessors and [other random computer-related words] are, will have fun making wicked-awesome images for laughs. If they have a lot of patience and don't mind low-res.

It takes all kinds.

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Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished.

Author’s Note: If you are interested in well-developed AI art programs, try the Wombo.art app, Wombo Dream, which I wrote about in a piece of fiction (naturally!) about a dragon. Very satisfying results and a lot of fun! I’ll link to my story below so that you can see what type of images I generated with the app.

References:

HuggingFace.co website: https://huggingface.co/

HuggingFace.co Spaces: DALL-E mini app: https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini?fbclid=IwAR1j1ZFiUSORHgbVOcHcyX33Ki_emeqnCh4-cDZGwXehOfnSrTiVkY4Mh6M

Golden Wiki: https://golden.com/wiki/Hugging_Face-39P6RJJ

Hugging Face: A Step Towards Democratizing NLP, by Anuj Syal: https://towardsdatascience.com/hugging-face-a-step-towards-democratizing-nlp-2c79f258c951#:~:text=Hugging%20Face%2C%20a%20company%20that,swiftly%20develop%20language%20processing%20expertise.

You can read my story about a dragon learning to use the Wombo.art app here: