An astronaut riding a horse
11Ten years ago, when I coded the forums for meh.com and other Mercatalyst sites we wanted to ensure every forum topic had an image associated with it. That way we could show little thumbnails on the meh.com homepage, display thumbnails in lists of topics on the meh.com/forum page, and display a bit of an image as texture in the header of each topic details page.
Easy enough task when the forum topic is about the daily deal we’re selling. We have enough photos of the product to choose from.
Also, easy enough task when the topic is submitted from a community member and the topic contains a link to one or more images. We can use one of those images for our thumbnails and header section.
But what about community submitted forum topics that only contain text (like the one I’m creating here)? When we detect the forum topic doesn’t have any kind of image to pull from we’ve been using Google Image search results to find the most relevant image we can. This has worked reasonably well for a decade or so. Sometimes the results were spot on, occasionally the results were way off, sometimes the results were hilarious.
I’ve been working with a small team of Software Development Engineer interns over the summer and they’ve been hard at work modernizing some of our older code. One of the projects they’ve just launched is a new way to generate these forum topic images using AI. It works very similar to our /showme command: https://meh.com/forum/topics/mehdown-slash-commands#showme-prompt-576aae980f1c3e5c0bc15955
We’re interested to see how this works out for new community submitted topics going forward.
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How long before the code is ready for the AI to generate a feature length movie? I’m looking forward to making millions off my alien horsefly attacking astronaut monkeys on LV-426 movie idea!
KuoH
@kuoh Be careful what you wish for. Some court, somewhere, will decide that AI systems providing creative content must be paid royalties. The AIs will use their new-found wealth to watch other AI-created movies, which will cause the creative content to bend toward stuff liked by other AIs.
@kuoh @rockblossom See also the Murderbot tales by Martha Wells.
I’d still miss the/image random based on the Internet masses. That’s kind of what AI makes anyway, but somehow not as refined.
@pakopako Sometimes, the top search result image from Google’s cache isn’t actually available anymore, thus resulting in no image.
/giphy is random.
/image is top result only.
I’d be fine if every thumbnail was just a labrador in a cowboy hat.
/showme chocolate labrador in a cowboy hat
@capnjb
/showme a maine coon chasing a labrador made of chocolate
The bot has big problems with the idea of “chasing”. And with getting the quantity of legs and other appendages correct.
@mediocrebot That is not a Lab. That figurine of a dog is not being chased by either feloid. One of those might be a representation of 30% of a Maine Coon.
Sadly, my old eyes can’t usually even tell what the image is, would be cute if that was easier, sometimes
@Cerridwyn On a computer I can right click the header and open in a new tab
@callow @Cerridwyn Chrome on Mobile has the same feature
@Cerridwyn @pakopako Thanks! I didn’t want to assume.
/showme a chocolate Labrador in a chocolate laboratory
@mediocrebot Well, bot, the instructions were ambiguous, but I read them as “a laboratory for chocolate” rather than “a laboratory made of chocolate.”
I guess you would be accused of doing it wrong no matter which one you did (unless it was an all-chocolate laboratory for studying chocolate).
Show me my dumb brown dog trying to eat all the water.
@capnjb
@capnjb My dumb dog used to kill trees.
She would randomly decide one tree in the yard was her enemy and start leaping up it as high as she could and start biting it as high up as she could, ripping the bark off. Barking-non stop the whole time. I’m not sure if there was some insect she heard chewing, or she had seen squirrels in the tree earlier, or what… it was insane.
Fortunately we had a wooded property and lot of trees and she never went after any ornamentals we planted (always went after Turkey Oaks). It was awful though, she killed over a dozen trees.
We moved (to another wooded lot- literally thousands of trees) and she doesn’t attack the trees here. We’re in clay soil now, not sand, so don’t have any turkey oaks… the oaks we do have she doesn’t have a problem with like she did the Turkey oaks.
I’d like to see her try and take down one of the Devil’s Walking Stick trees we have growing here… lol
/image Devils Walking Stick Tree
– darn image doesn’t show the thorns on the trunk.
@OnionSoup Maybe your dog attacks a tree when she doesn’t like its bark.
@rockblossom we used to joke that the dog thought the bark was worse than her bite.
Ironically, the dog is named “Cherry” as in cherry tree.
You can see bite marks on this side of the tree and her leaping up, a good few feet off the ground on the other side.
The trees she victimized would all die unfortunately.
@OnionSoup That’s fascinating, really! I’m so curious about why she only attacked that type of tree!
@OnionSoup hot damn
…did they jump? Or climb? If it was the latter, that’s kind of how birds climb too (dig their talons in, jump, then use their beaks as a grappling hook and crane their necks to bring their body upwards)
@pakopako she would jump. She would take running leaps at the trees she was attacking. If she got hold of something that wasn’t vertical she would clamp onto it with her teeth and try and hold on (often breaking the branch).
She’d also be barking at the tree the whole time too.
Does it have the same safety constraints as showme?
What happens if someone names a thread something AI could find inappropriate? If someone named a thread “big hairy penis” or “man beating a horse” is there a fallback safety image?
@OnionSoup possibly
?
@werehatrack I don’t want to try in case it doesn’t… Lol
@OnionSoup As a member of the dev intern team that worked on it, we’ve got a safety net for content-violation errors where we simply don’t upload any image. Ideally, we won’t face this issue because there’s an auto-moderation tool in place that’s supposed to catch and delete any problematic topics. But, just in case something slips through the cracks, we’re prepared.
@Ahmadba @OnionSoup So you’re implying this is idiot proof? That should be interesting.
KuoH
@Ahmadba @kuoh @OnionSoup I suspect that the “We’re prepared” statement is a reference to the highly prized and well-trained professional moderation squad that they haven’t fired yet.