Show HN: NightCafe Creator – Create art from a text prompt using VQGAN+CLIP

I hadn't seen either of these. Thanks!

Looks like they're both new apps, so they've done well to get everything up and running so quickly! I already had a lot of the groundwork laid for NightCafe Creator, so it was much easier for me to get this done. There's a lot involved, especially if you're going to charge for use (which is a must if you expect to have any sort of volume in the long run).

These are cool. I wish it was possible to move beyond Colab for generative type ML as the UX is horrible and there is no practical way to use them on mobile. Unfortunately it seems to be a problem of who has the hardware and who doesn't. Hopefully as time passes it will be easier to host these kinds of services, and not have to feel hopeless after the next AI Dungeon-type corporate implosion.

It doesn't support that yet, but it will soon.

I will build an interface for it rather than a prompt syntax. My target audience is a bit less technical than the average Google Colab user.

It's not, but I can see why the "Graffiti sunset" would make you think that. It does seem to be two different images combined.

I won't claim to have a good knowledge of the inner workings, but basically CLIP will give a score for how well the image matches your prompt, and that's used as a loss function for the GAN.

On the Colab notebooks you can specify multiple prompts with different weights, in which case I assume it has multiple loss functions that it's trying to optimise for.

I'm more of a web app guy than a deep tech guy. Some of what I wrote can probably be corrected by someone with a better knowledge of the ML.

At least in Google Collab I found longer prompts to work better.

E.g. instead of "graffiti sunset" you might get better results with "a sunset painted in the style of graffiti" or similar.

That's a good one!

Most of my regular users are artists who either use it for inspiration or use it to mix into their digital art. (NightCafe has been around for a while as a style transfer app).

It's rare that people buy prints. Most money comes from people buying credits.

That one turned out well!

Those are indeed robots. what about a more explicit cultural reference to point in a different direction? Gundam, Voltron, Jaeger/Kaiju.

You're right, adding modifier keywords like "impasto" or "cubist" have a big effect. There are also some powerful community-discovered keywords that have a huge impact on your results, like "Trending on Artstation" and "Unreal Engine".

My best tips for good results - use a phrase describing objects you'd commonly see in pictures and art, like "House on a hill" or "Futuristic city", add some modifiers, then start with the smallest resolution and runtime. Try a few variations of phrase and modifiers, and see what looks promising. Then pick the best one(s) and use the "Evolve" button to run them for longer and increase the resolution.

The Colab notebooks actually have a "target image" parameter. I haven't added it to NightCafe Creator yet, and haven't even experimented much with it on Colab, but it's definitely on my to-do list.

However, adding keywords like "watercolour painting", "van gogh painting" etc goes a long way to getting more precise results.

One big difference between style transfer and GAN art is that style transfer never changes the shape of things. E.g. you can't put in a woman's face and a cubist painting and get out a rearranged version of the face (as cubists do). It will have all the hallmarks of cubism, but it's still recognisable as the original photo.

With GAN art though, you can put that photo in as a start image, say "Cubist painting of a woman's face", and the GAN will actually rearrange the face like a cubist would.

> but I feel like they all have a "neural net" quality to them

it is getting significantly better though! The first AI art generators were just dreams now we're getting decent stuff as long as you stick to nature concepts.

Here's one I got for:

"a starry, dark night sky over vast plains of desert"

https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/70lx2Il45nK1rmcE1D...

it's definitely getting there!

Ran it a bit longer for you - https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/OAG7LUkRVNHunrsiGD...

I ran it a bit longer for you - https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/2MGvqi6ZBZ3mZSFB66...

Yes I do, it's a bit of a hangover from the original business model of buying prints. Stripe would potentially be better for credits.