Booooooom

The classic example is that nobody can remember the basic shape of a bicycle: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

This is great, especially the SF example as it reminds me of Brian Lotti's paintings [1] A common technique for painters is to establish areas of colour in the scene that are similar even though the eye perceives them differently. For example the shade beneath a tree - while complex in reality - can be easily represented with a single stroke of darker colour. Zooming in to the SF example [2] you begin to see how this scene could be painted, which makes me think this tool could be a useful guide in painting tutorials. [1] https://www.booooooom.com/2015/04/08/artist-profile-painter-brian-lott… [2] https://github.com/RH12503/triangula/blob/main/assets/output/sf.png

Maybe that makes them human.. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

LLM source data sets may have millions of data points for what a bike frame looks like, yet they still fail drawing them correctly. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

> a fairly simple shape Bike frames are very hard to draw unless you've already consciously internalized the basic shape, see https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

I don't say I draw nice drawings. I am referring to this art/experiment: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a… I don't draw impossible bikes. Because I know what bikes are. That is what I mean. Not that I can make nice or even photographically correct images of them.

For those who haven't seen this little gem before: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

Someone else posted this article about how people draw bicycles: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a… You can see that some people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how bicycles work, and this misunderstanding does not stem from the complex 3D shape of bicycles. Don't you think drawing a hand is a bit of an unfair "gotcha" for an AI that can accurately draw thousands of other things? Humans have hands and they're one of the most important parts of the body; humans use hands for everything. And yet, all but the most artistic humans cannot draw human hands accurately. An AI doesn't have hands. Hands make up a small part of its training data. Why should we consider the hand the standard upon which to judge the quality of the AI?

Are you familiar with the empirical results that have been observed when you ask a human to 'draw a bicycle'? https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a… People draw bicycle-like shapes, that don't quite work - they miss important details, or connect things that shouldn't be connected.

I think what OP is referring to with the bicycle example is that even when asked to draw a simple line drawing of a bike people connect the wrong pieces together in a way which makes no sense, while if they’re looking at a bike in front of them they can easily connect the proper components with lines. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a…

Another commenter provided a link that I should have[1]. My point is not about drawing ability but that having access to pictures dramatically changes the kind of things people draw. Unless you're a bike mechanic, or unusually attentive, you probably don't really know what a bike looks like or how it works. You have some of the basic ideas but not enough to wire it together. So, when people draw a bicycle from memory what they draw doesn't really make sense from a mechanical perspective. The bikes they draw couldn't work. It's not about being good or bad at drawing, it's a question of "are you poorly drawing a workable bike, or are you poorly drawing a nonsense contraption?" If you could visualize a bike then you'd be drawing a poorly drawn bike that was fundamentally correct. As you cannot you just draw the same abstractions that I might. e.g. I know there are handlebars, pedals, wheels, connected together by metal poles. The fact that your drawing would be very different if you had a photo of the bike in front of you when you were drawing, no matter the objective quality, tells me that you probably don't have a picture of the bike available to you in your mind. Regarding your one eyed friend, the solution is pretty simple. Demonstrate what you can do with binocular vision that he cannot with ocular vision. I assume you could estimate distances better, throw more accurately, similarly describe three-d visuals as someone else, etc. If you couldn't actually do…

Related but also not: One of the most interesting aspects about a "shroom" trip is the incredible ability to visualize. Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally, but if you really try to picture something in your head -- specific faces, the design of a bicycle, the layout of a room -- it's quickly evident that we are actually terrible at it (it's hard to reverse information from that neural network). Even if you're drawing it's often an iterative process where each line drives the next. Maybe other people are better at it, but when self-interrogating and inspecting one's own vision, it just completely falls apart. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-a… Normally. I can only speak to personal experience, but under the influence of psilocybin I find that closing my eyes and visualizing complex environments and machines -- of literally inspecting and walking through gearing systems, for instance, and rationalizing their operation -- with complex lighting, etc, leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity. It literally feels like looking into another universe, the construction of the reality simply too complex to be imagined and visualized. I've actually felt my head to ensure I'm not overheating, contemplating the process like the mind was a GPU.