The authors designed the VisiBlends system, which is used to do visual blends. This is a quite challenging task before because the generated object should contain the two input objects while these objects should be still distinguishable. However, the system leveraged both human strength and AI strength to achieve this goal. Humans need to find relative images, annotate images for shape and coverage, and evaluate the outputs generated by Automatic Blend Synthesis. Machines will apply matching algorithm according to human’s classification and blend the objects. Though the evaluation section mentioned that the workflow often fails, the system is flexible, and users can iterate and adapt easily. With the system, even novices can collaboratively complete the difficult visual blending tasks easily.
Reflections:
The system is interesting and useful since a user who knows nothing about visual blending can obtain a good blended design from a group of people who knows little about design, program, or visual blending. This can be a good example of human-AI interaction. Neither the inexperienced workers nor the AI itself cannot design such a kind of challenging task. However, with the system, they can collaborate to complete the tasks.
I like the experiment in which workers are divided into two groups. One group is exposed to a set of previous blended objects while the other one does not. I was surprised about the result that the group of workers who have experience with what the previous outputs look like performs worse than the other group. I think this is because their minds are limited by the successful outputs so they cannot have novel ideas of blending after brainstorming. The system works like it uses an exhaustive mechanism to get human ideas. If the human’s ideas are limited by some previous success, the result will lose some blending with novel ideas. If I am a worker who has some experience with image blending, I would consider whether I can blend the images or not instead of just thinking about whether the output would be interesting or not. However, the blending tasks are carried out by automatic mechanisms, so those guys who list all kinds of possibilities would probably obtain better ideas.
I think the system can be better used by experts instead of workers. If the workers have no experience with this system, it is hard for them to find proper images that can be used in the blending task later. They may spend a huge amount of time uploading images having no objects with proper shapes. Instead, experts can have an image of how the output would be looked at and provide only the proper images. Or a database of images should be provided to the users so that they can only make selections from the images which are good for blending.
Questions:
How can the system’s success rate be improved?
Does it worth to hire some professionals to involve in some of the stages of the system?
Can we design a system in which the user can upload pictures, annotate the images on himself, and the system generates the output according to his annotations? What is the advantage of hiring workers to do these tasks?
Hi Ziyao. Regarding your second question, “Does it worth to hire some professionals to involve in some of the stages of the system?”, I feel that this would depend on the use case. If the user is using VisiBlends to create visual blends that are meant to be published as advertisements or that are meant to be viewed by a wider audience, I feel that involving a professional at the final stage of production would definitely be valuable. On the other hand, if the users are just exploring the features of VisiBlends out of curiosity and interest, involving a professional may not be necessary.
For the first question, I think it is a good way to control the details of the image. At the same time, we should ensure the efficiency of brainstorming. Sometimes workers may not get positive results when discussing and communicating with others, so it is necessary to establish methods to improve the efficiency of their communication. And for the second question, I think it can be worth to introduce professionals to lead ordinary workers, it can let them to develop in a better and more professional direction, which is very beneficial for improving the satisfaction of the works.