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?
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
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.
Yeah, saw an example of that with an elephant. Still it doesn’t explain why giraffes are the chosen ones (maybe
ailefantsounds worse)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.
I’ve asked LLaVA and it says: “There are no giraffes in the image you provided. It is a California driver’s license with various pieces of information printed on it, including the licensee’s photo, personal details, and vehicle registration information.”
So at least that seems to have a concept of giraffe and “no”/“zero”.
The article linked is from 2019, it’s ages old in terms of AI improvement, so this may not apply today
That’s interesting because Araf means slow in welsh and it seems to be using that as a root.
I took great delight in saying that when we would go through Wales.
Haha, I lived in Wales for quite a few years and I think it’s the law that if you drive over it then you have to.
Found
arafedin the Welsh-English dictionary online but thought it was unrelated because of onef. Turns out, it was very relatedI 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…
I also had never heard the word prior to the gen-ai craze. Perhaps it is a hallucination of the machine?
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 ;-)
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)
This is a longshot and may be wrong, but as I didn’t find the other replies here (nor on Reddit, where a similar question was asked) satisfying, I did some digging and found this paper that relates to something called CARAFE, which seems as though it may fit as it relates to image processing and improving image resolution.
Although arrafe or arafe have dropped the c, perhaps it still relates to this? That seems to make more sense at least in terms of image generation, and maybe in descriptions it’s meant to indicate that this was used, like to improve the quality or something. For anyone interested, the paper linked to isn’t paywalled, so you can check it out and see if this makes sense in context.
From my limited knowledge of this subject, I think it does, but 🤷♀️
