Bench marking the Advances of AI Image Generation: 2024 – 2124

For decades, the challenge of AI “understanding” human speech was summarized by this humorous phrase: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

To set a benchmark for Project 2124, WLBOTT presents the current state of the art, and will revisit this topic every 25 years until 2124.

Calendar

Friday, May 3, 2024 9:00am US/Central
Monday, May 3, 2049 9:00am US/Central
Saturday, May 5, 2074 4:42pm US/Central (rescheduled due to conflict)
Wednesday, May 3, 2124 9:00am US/Central

To suck all the fun out of this, let’s see what Wikipedia has to say….

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana” is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis.

Analysis of the basic ambiguities

The point of the example is that the correct parsing of the second sentence, “fruit flies like a banana”, is not the one that the reader starts to build, by assuming that “fruit” is a noun (the subject), “flies” is the main verb, and “like” as a preposition. The reader only discovers that the parsing is incorrect when it gets to the “banana”. At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to reparse it, with “fruit flies” as the subject and “like” as the main verb.

The first sentence predisposes the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second. After reparsing the second, it becomes clear that the first sentence could be re-parsed in the same way.
Time Flies Like an Arrow
An Ode to Oettinger

Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms,
And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
And tax firm men like fat tax forms –
But time flies like an arrow.

When tax forms tax all firm men's souls,
While farm girls slim their boyfriends' flanks;
That's when the murd'rous thunder rolls –
And thins the fruit flies ranks.

Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then's the time to time the time flies –
Like the time flies like an arrow.

— Edison B. Schroeder (1966)
Wikipedia