technology

It happens faster to images because of the way LLMs work. LLM's work on "tokens", a token for text is typically a character, fragment of a word, a word, a fragment of a sentence. With language it's much easier to encode meaning and be more precise because that's what language already does. The reason NLP is/was difficult is because language is not algorithmically consistent, it evolves, and rules are constantly broken. For example Kai Cenat is credited with more contributions to the English language than the vast majority of people because children decided to talk like him. Point being is that language does the heavy lifting in terms of encoding a string of characters into something meaningful.

With images, it's a whole different ball game. Image tokenizers often work in several different ways, there are two types of token hard and soft. Hard tokens for example could be the regions of the image, part could be the colors, the alpha channels.

Hard tokens are also the visual encoders of meaning so a chair, table, or car could be a hard tokens based on their bounding boxes. These tokenization techniques are based in a lot of other types of machine learning.

Note that these tokens often overlap in practice and consume regions of other tokens, however as "hard" tokens they are considered distinct entities, and this is where the trouble starts esp. for image generation (that's roughly why a lot of AI did and still does things like draw extra fingers).

The next type of tokens are soft tokens, and they're a bit harder to explain, but basically the idea is that soft tokens are encoded by detecting continual statistical distributions within images. It's a very abstract way of reading an image. Here's where the trouble compounds.

So now when we're writing an image, what do we write the image with? You guessed it. Tokens. The reason that those AI drift time lapses exist is because LLMs are statistical and not "functional". They don't have the mathematical concept of "identity". Otherwise they'd try to recreate the same image by copying the data in the exact tokens (or just copy the image itself) , instead they try to regenerate the image by generating new tokens with the same attributes that it read from the image.

To illustrate this lets say an image contains a blue car and the AI can only tokenize it as blue car. Asking an LLM to run an identity function on that image will result in a different car because the resolution of the token is only like 2 dimensions "blue" and "car" which roughly means it will output the average "blue" "car" from its training data. Now with human made things it's actually a lot easier. There's a finite variation of cars. However there's an infinite variation of things that can happen to a car. So an AI theoretically can run an identity function off of a particular make/model/year of a vehicle but if the paint is scratched or the paint job is unique it will start to introduce drift there's also other sources of drift like camera angle etc. With natural objects this becomes a whole different ball game because of the level of variation, this complexity compounds with scenes.

So identity functions on text are extremely easy in comparison for example:

This works because the tokens are simpler and there is less of a loss of "resolution" from the text to the tokenize form. E.g. word "Poopy" is token "poopy". But once you get into interpreting an image, and re-encoding those interpretations onto a new canvas it becomes much more difficult. e.g. image of "Dwayne the Rock Johnson" is most likely a series of tokens like "buff man", "bad actor", etc.

This is a rough explanation because there's a lot of voodoo, and I'm more of a Software Engineer than I am a statistics/data guy so I approach the alchemy a little bit from an alchemical standpoint.