Generative AI services like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E can deliver the unimaginable when it comes to stunning artifacts produced from simple text prompts. Sketching complex art imagery may be AI’s specialty, yet some of the simplest tasks are evidently what AI struggles with the most.
I don’t know much about image generators, but it’s not surprising to me at all that ChatGPT can’t fulfill the request to respond with nothing. Your prompt gets converted into tokens, tokens get processed by the model, it outputs a resulting set of tokens, and those get converted into text. Expecting the token-outputting-machine not to output any tokens is going to lead to disappointment.
This isn’t asking for nothing though. It’s asking for a very specific uniform thing. A better analogy to text generation would be asking for an uninterrupted string of nothing but repeated uppercase A’s.
That’s a really good way to break chatgpt BTW. Just ask it to repeat something over and over again it will create very interesting results.
It’s actually surprisingly difficult to ask for an absence of anything, since the training data doesn’t normally include what isn’t in the image.
I think they call it the Giraffe Problem or something like that. If you ask an AI for “an image containing no giraffes,” you’ll end up with a bunch of giraffes. It’s all about how the training data is tagged.
That works for humans too:
“DON’T THINK ABOUT GIRAFFES!”
