SCIENTISTS INVENT “NUCLEAR COCAINE” FOR COMPUTERS THAT GENERATES IMAGES SO FAST YOUR BRAIN MIGHT EXPLODE
In what can only be described as digital sorcery for the criminally impatient, researchers at MIT and NVIDIA have birthed an unholy hybrid AI abomination that cranks out fancy pictures faster than your grandmother forwards conspiracy theories on Facebook.
WHAT THE F@#K IS HART AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
The new system, called HART (Horny Algorithms Reproducing Titillation), combines two existing AI approaches in a way that scientists describe as “like having unprotected sex with two completely different species of technology and somehow not creating a monster.” Except they absolutely did create a monster—just an efficient one.
“We basically took the slow, quality approach and the fast, sh!tty approach and mashed them together like drunk college students making a pizza at 3am,” explains Dr. Obvious Metaphor, the project’s lead researcher. “If painting is your thing, imagine slapping paint on a canvas with a mop and then fixing the details with a tiny brush borrowed from a hamster.”
NINE TIMES FASTER, 100 PERCENT MORE PRETENTIOUS
Traditional diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E generate images through a painstaking process that’s about as efficient as teaching your grandparents how to use TikTok. Meanwhile, autoregressive models are faster but produce images that look like they were drawn by a toddler with a crayon clenched between their buttcheeks.
HART combines these approaches, letting it generate images nine times faster than current methods while using 31 percent less computation, which is absolutely meaningless to you unless you’re the kind of person who gets sexually aroused by GPU specifications.
EXPERTS PREDICT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE
“This technological breakthrough means we can now generate fake photos of unicorns pooping rainbows faster than ever before,” explained Professor Ima Genius, who wasn’t involved in the research but desperately wants to be quoted somewhere. “The applications are limitless, ranging from helping robots perform complex tasks to creating more realistic fake backgrounds for influencers pretending they’re in Bali.”
According to unreliable statistics we just made up, 87 percent of all AI-generated images are currently used to create fake LinkedIn profile pictures and dating app photos where people look 73 percent hotter than they actually are. HART will accelerate this process dramatically.
RESIDUAL TOKENS: THE FANCY BUZZWORD YOU’LL PRETEND TO UNDERSTAND
The researchers claim their success comes from something called “residual tokens,” which sounds like cryptocurrency for people who think regular cryptocurrency isn’t complicated enough.
“Our residual tokens learn high-frequency details, like edges of an object, or a person’s hair, eyes, or mouth,” says Haotian Tang, who apparently speaks fluent technobabble. What he means in human language is “our computer paints the big stuff fast then goes back and fixes the little bits it f@#ked up.”
LOCAL COMPUTING: NOW YOUR PHONE CAN LIE TO YOU WITHOUT CLOUD ASSISTANCE
Perhaps most terrifying of all, HART can run locally on your laptop or smartphone, meaning the ability to generate completely fictional realities is now available to anyone with opposable thumbs and a charged battery.
“We’ve essentially democratized the ability to create convincing visual lies,” beamed researcher Dr. Ethical Blindspot. “What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like humans have ever misused technology before!”
FUTURE APPLICATIONS: BECAUSE REALITY IS OVERRATED
In what scientists are calling “just the beginning of our plan to make reality completely optional,” researchers plan to integrate HART with language models, enabling you to have profound conversations with completely fictional entities who look disturbingly real.
At press time, 99.8 percent of the researchers’ family members still have no f@#king clue what any of these people actually do for a living, but smile politely when the topic comes up at Thanksgiving dinner.
Remember folks, in a world where seeing is no longer believing, the only thing you can trust is that some Silicon Valley startup will find a way to monetize your existential dread. Nuclear cocaine for computers is just the beginning.
