I see the word “araffe” pop up a lot when it comes to AI image generation or AI generated image descriptions. What is the context, where does it come from?

  • lad@programming.dev
    3·
    9 months ago

    Maybe it’s a portmanteau of AI + giraffe, it seems like this was a problem well known among AI researchers:

    Machine responses are only as good as their data set. Take giraffes as another example. An AI trained on examples of questions people asked and answered about photos learned that nobody ever asked a question like “How many giraffes are there?” when the answer was zero. So if you ask that AI how many giraffes are in a photo, they always give a nonzero number, even if there are no giraffes at all.

    But I’m not a researcher and don’t know if it’s related or what does that mean now. I would be pleased to learn the answer as well

    • kakes@sh.itjust.works
      31·
      9 months ago

      Similarly, if you ask an image generator for a photo containing no giraffes, you’re likely to get a photo full of giraffes, because people aren’t properly labeling all the pictures with no giraffes in them.

      • lad@programming.dev
        1·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, saw an example of that with an elephant. Still it doesn’t explain why giraffes are the chosen ones (maybe ailefant sounds worse)

        • twice_twotimes@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          9 months ago

          I spent longer than I want to admit trying to make a pun with AI as “the elephant in the room” to talk to about to my students about which ways of using LLMs are unacceptable/acceptable/encouraged on the first day of class. I couldn’t do any better than AI-lephant. I even asked chat GPT for help. Very disappointing.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    9 months ago

    Good question. Remains completely ambiguous to me. I’ve tried googling, but despite a good amount of images turning up, not even Google seems to know the answer. I’d say it’s a placeholder name for mythical creature. Or a specific feature in something like a LoRa. But since results from all kinds of models turn up, that’s probably not it. And I also can’t back up the first idea with any facts…

    Edit: Found that: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/21/8757 (but the term has been used well before September 2023)

    huggingface.co/datasets/gkiwi/sd-prompt/ also uses the word a lot. And the word “arafed”! Maybe araffe is a mis(?)spelling of that?

    https://piratediffusion.com/what-does-arafed-mean-in-stable-diffusion-showprompt-and-the-describe-command/ (explanation, but offers no sources to back it up, could be made up)

    • sramder@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 months ago

      I do appreciate the flaming pope… but having lived in English speaking country my whole life I’m skeptical because I’ve never heard anyone talking about araffe.

      Also, none of my spell-checkers have ever heard of it…

      Not wanting to contribute nothing with this comment I punched “araffe” into my magic noise genie and it spat out 20 sad giraffes in a row.

      So my theory is generation loss: once long ago someone misspelled giraffe and Ai artists have copied each others prompts enough times that it’s now a thing…

      • VubDapple@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 months ago

        I also had never heard the word prior to the gen-ai craze. Perhaps it is a hallucination of the machine?

        • sramder@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          It’s eating my brain! It feels like a proper mystery but is probably fairly mundane.

          The page you found indicates some wider level of awareness… at the very least it’s an attempt at SEO, maybe just a harmless joke, a honeypot created by someone with the same unanswered question. I should probably go take someones medication ;-)

    • Devi@kbin.social
      0·
      9 months ago

      That’s interesting because Araf means slow in welsh and it seems to be using that as a root.