Replicate evolve the image…
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From r/chatgpt:
I tried the "Create the exact replica of this image, don't change a thing" 101 times, but with Dwayne Johnson
byu/Foreign_Builder_2238 inChatGPT
Similar headshot evolutions have been around for a while, but this is the first one that I've seen morphing into "modernism".
For some reason, the analogous evolution of text or speech passages doesn't seem to be a thing, though it certainly ought to be possible. Maybe people haven't done it because there's no linguistic equivalent of immediate visual perception?
Update — Following up on the notes in the comments about the "telephone game", I found this recent paper: Jérémy Perez et al., "When LLMs play the telephone game: Cumulative changes and attractors in iterated cultural transmissions", arXiv preprint 2024:
As large language models (LLMs) start interacting with each other and generating an increasing amount of text online, it becomes crucial to better understand how information is transformed as it passes from one LLM to the next. While significant research has examined individual LLM behaviors, existing studies have largely overlooked the collective behaviors and information distortions arising from iterated LLM interactions. Small biases, negligible at the single output level, risk being amplified in iterated interactions, potentially leading the content to evolve towards attractor states. In a series of telephone game experiments, we apply a transmission chain design borrowed from the human cultural evolution literature: LLM agents iteratively receive, produce, and transmit texts from the previous to the next agent in the chain. By tracking the evolution of text toxicity, positivity, difficulty, and length across transmission chains, we uncover the existence of biases and attractors, and study their dependence on the initial text, the instructions, language model, and model size. For instance, we find that more open-ended instructions lead to stronger attraction effects compared to more constrained tasks. We also find that different text properties display different sensitivity to attraction effects, with toxicity leading to stronger attractors than length. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for multi-step transmission dynamics and represent a first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of LLM cultural dynamics.
There's a github repository, and a site where you can see (some of?) the communication chains.
david said,
May 9, 2025 @ 7:23 am
As a child in the 50s we used to play a game called “telephone”. We would sit in a row and the starter would whisper a few words in their neighbor’s ear, who whispers what they heard to the next neighbor, and so on along the row. The last child says it out loud and then the starter repeats what they said.
Mike Grubb said,
May 9, 2025 @ 9:09 am
Continuing on from david's post, an alternate name for the game in my region (late '70s into the '80s in south central Penna.) was "whisper down the lane." That different name may have been a function of families that didn't use telephones in the area. What david left implied was that chances were better that the output statement would be different from the starting statement than that the two would match. I'm not sure if it's an example of evolution or entropy, though.
Robot Therapist said,
May 9, 2025 @ 1:34 pm
"Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance"
Julian said,
May 9, 2025 @ 4:42 pm
In Australia in the 1960s this was "Chinese whispers"
I had never heard it called "telephone" until reading a reference to it in one of Steven Pinker's books quite recently.
Rick Rubenstein said,
May 9, 2025 @ 8:11 pm
LLMs and image generators/descriptors are very well suited to a more-recent variant, Telephone Pictionary, in which one person writes a notable phrase, the next person draws it, the next person writes down what the drawing seems to be of, and so on. I haven't tried this out with AIs yet, though I suspect others have.
Steve Morrison said,
May 9, 2025 @ 8:16 pm
I’ve seen the game called “Russian Scandal” in some old books.
Chas Belov said,
May 9, 2025 @ 10:04 pm
Western Pennsylvania, 60s, we called it telephone.
The answer was always wildly different, but there's no way to guarantee all players acted in good faith.
Michael Vnuk said,
May 10, 2025 @ 4:54 am
If you want an exact copy or replica, use a photocopier or copy the image file or do something similar. Why would you ask an AI? AIs seem to have great difficulty with things that humans think are absolute or should not be changed.
Mark Liberman said,
May 10, 2025 @ 5:23 am
@Michael Vnuk: "If you want an exact copy or replica, use a photocopier or copy the image file or do something similar."
This comment is… puzzling? The point of the telephone game has always been exactly the opposite of "exact copy" — it's that iterated human story-telling changes stories.
And everyone involved in the image evolution stuff knows how to copy a digital image. The point of the image-replication evolution, aside from amusement, is that it reveals something about the programs' image-creation methods.
Jerry Packard said,
May 10, 2025 @ 6:02 am
The ‘telephone’ game made for an excellent L2 class learning activity: I’d break the class into teams and keep score to see which team could get the most faithful final message.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 10, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
re: "Um use a photocopier?", analogue (among others) is "Um you can't count the r's in 'strawberry' or?"
However I don't see the analogue in this image reproduction case to "the answers 1, 2, 4, etc. r's in 'strawberry' are totally reasonable — indeed correct! — when you grock GenAI d e e p l y"… I'm sure it exists and look forward to it though.
Some suggest "a new wave of 'reasoning' systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often" (NYT) But haters Get RekT!! You can totally make great food via some pile of linear algebra absent any reference to what is edible/tasty/etc.; just stir the pile whenever you find turds in your soup geez!"
Jonathan Smith said,
May 10, 2025 @ 2:21 pm
oops, pile of linear algebra should link to the relevant XKCD, please google that baby
Michael Vnuk said,
May 11, 2025 @ 7:06 am
Mark Liberman finds my comment ‘puzzling’. One of the first tests of any new system or process or theory is whether it can do stuff where we already know the answer or prefered outcome, or we can easily and independently check the answer or outcome. If the system passes, then we might be on to something and we can more deeply assess whether the system can handle more complex things. From what I read, AI can’t do lots of simple things (count letters, draw fingers, copy images, find real references, etc). So, I still find it puzzling to ask AI to do things it can’t do, and it’s even more puzzling why we are trusting it with complex stuff that we can’t easily check or don’t check.
Mark suggests that asking AI to repeatedly replicate images is going to ‘reveal something about the programs’ image-creation methods’. Perhaps. In the meantime, why not keep AI away from the public until it can do what promoters say it can do?