alt Hacker NewsI've seen many comments describing the "horse riding man" example as extremely bizarre (which it actually is), so I'd like to provide some background context here. The "horse riding man" is a Chinese internet meme originating from an entertainment awards ceremony, when the renowned host Tsai Kang-yong wore an elaborate outfit featuring a horse riding on his back[1]. At the time, he was embroiled in a rumor about his unpublicized homosexual partner, whose name sounded "Ma Qi Ren" which coincidentally translates to "horse riding man" in Mandarin. This incident spread widely across Chinese internet and turned into a meme. So they used "horse riding man" as an example isn't entirely nonsensical, though the image per se is undeniably bizarre and carries an unsettling vibe.
[1] The photo of the outfit: https://share.google/mHJbchlsTNJ771yBa
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This is fascinating!
From the article it seems the name is 马启仁, not 马骑人 so the guy's name sounds the same as 'horse riding man', but that's not a literal translation of his name.
There's also the "horse riding astronaut" challenge in image generation: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut-redu...
On the topic of modern Chinese culture, Is there the same hostility towards AI generated Imagery in China as there seems to be in America?
For example I think there would be a lot of businesses in the US that would be too afraid of backlash to use AI generated imagery for an itinerary like the one at https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate-overseas.aliyuncs.com/Qwe...
While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.
This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.
And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.
Super tone-deaf and inappropriate. Not realizing how it would read to the uninformed is a bad look. Myopic at best, openly hostile toward the west along racial lines at worst.
Very interesting! What's weird though is that the chinese do not even pretend: every single picture has asian-looking people generated.
But on the one picture that honestly looks like a man getting ass-raped by a horse, it's a white man.
I mean even in the west where you can hardly see an ad with a white couple anymore, they don't go that far (at least not yet).
White people are a minority on earth and anti-white racism sure seems to be alive and well (btw my family is of all the colors and we speak three languages at home, so don't even try me).
Why not ask for simply a man or even an Han man given the race of Tsai Kang-yong. Why a white man and why a man wearing medieval clothing. Gives your head a wobble.
Fun fact, the Serbian parliament building has two statues of horses riding men in front of it.
Which is really apt because in Serbian "konj", or horse, is a colloquial word for moron. So, horses riding people is a perfect representation of the reality of the Serbian government.
Another fun fact, the parliament building in HL2's City 17 was modelled from that building.
Interesting background! Prompts like this also test the latent space of the image generator - it’s usually the other way round, so if you see a man on top of a horse, you’ve got a less sophisticated embedding feeding the model. In this case, though, that’s quite an image to put out to the interwebs. I looked to see what gender the horse was.
EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out