Show HN: Unwonted.io – in-browser, offline tool for generative art, mainly NFTs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Unwonted.io – in-browser, offline tool for generative art, mainly NFTs

unwonted.io

17 pointsipster_io30 comments

In my previous comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289339), I lamented how I missed the boat on BTC and ETH, and then somebody commented about NFT.

I want to like NFT, but I don't see how randomly generated stuff like this (no intention to dismiss author's work) can be valuable?

First tweet — Yes you can't reproduce being first, but it's only valuable because it's the first on Twitter. If it's the first post on SomeRandomSocMed.com, I don't care.

Original Disaster Girl meme — It's valuable because the meme is famous. If you create a new meme, I don't care. Unless it's famous.

So, unless the randomly generated content somehow becomes popular, I don't see how it's more valuable than the another unique content by the same algorithm.

Now, many artworks for sale as NFT are beautiful. I'm sure it took some time and effort to create. But, harsh as it may seem, it's no different than those cheap paintings being sold by the roadside.

Or am I missing something?

> So, unless the randomly generated content somehow becomes popular, I don't see how it's more valuable than the another unique content by the same algorithm.

NFTs benefit famous people, celebrities and the creators of early famous internet memes. They know it is a scam and they are doing it quickly before the demand collapses because they can.

The fool is the one that buys it off them for a high price and at the ATH of the crypto markets. It would take years and luck to find another fool to buy it off them for higher.

I’m clearly missing something.

I see NFTs a way to sign your digital work - which was previously impossible.

Or a way to speculate, aka create (art)work which can have arbitrarily any value, from O to infinite, depending on how powerful the person / network is who sets the price.

It's just a scam. There's not really any more depth to it than that.

What really made me change my mind on NFT's is collectibles. Not so much random pixel art, but actual collectibles (e.g. think stamps, baseball cards, basketball cards, pokemon, etc). The success of NBA Top Shots is a case in point. The blockchain allows for decentralized verifiability of a collectible's origin/authenticity (making fakes impossible), and even more importantly: seamlessly allows to create a marketplace around the collectibles without needing to rely on ebay and shady sellers. I definitely think this pixel art fad will pass or remain a niche, but the concept of collectibles has been around for a long time and will stay for a long time to come.

> (making fakes impossible)

The problem with this claim, and kind of NFTs in general, is that all the collectables in general are fake, and all the NFT really does is try to prop up scarcity, which is also fake in this scenario. There's nothing genuine about any of this.

Pokémon cards, back in the day, was at least some cool looking sheets of paper and a game to play. But you can buy a single $100 NFT and pay $200 in "gas fees". That's already exceeded what an average parent probably spent on Pokémon cards per year.

NFTs do not actually do any of that.

Call them pointers, or whatever you want. but to say they don't do any of that is not really true nor conducive to the discussion.

They don't, though. An NFT can't prove authenticity of a physical object.

This is an interesting thought: I buy an object and the NFT with it. Then I swap it and sell you a fake lookalike, and the NFT. Which one is the "original" object now? Who is the owner of the "valuable" object? Is it the person who holds the NFT, or the person who holds the original?

Most people would say it's the latter, but what makes an object valuable is not as clear-cut. Yes, a fake Picasso isn't as valuable as a real Picasso, but the NFT was (presumably) verifiably minted by the original artist, so maybe the NFT is the art, and the object is just something that comes with.

(It's not.)

Because the art market is nothing if not perfectly rational.

Not a claim anyone has made.

The great thing about three-word replies is that nobody can accuse you of making any claims.

I am experimenting with NFTs. I found it hard to manually come up with unique traits by combining layers. As a dev you can easily write such a tool but I know some people who have asked me to do that for them so I decided to create a tool.

Simply name your image files accordingly, drag entire folder(s), define how many NFTs you wanna generate, size etc and it will do that for you in browser. It's in browser / offline so your images are not uploaded anywhere. You can also disconnected with the network if you are concerned...

The only thing I track are page views to see if the tool is at all useful.

This tool also create a ERC721 (OpenSea specific) metadata template if you wanna create your own smart contract and host metadata... but if you are creating small set of images its best to lazy mint on markets like OpenSea.

Hope it's useful to someone, somewhere out there.

P.S. I also create my own collection, its not for sale yet but if you are interested its here https://unwonted.io/art

I think this tool could be really useful outside of NFTs as well, eg. to generate a bunch of similar but different avatars.

Exactly, I focussed on NFTs to get the point across. Avatar creation is a great example. Also, I will be adding few more tools to the site for generative art.

The point you are getting across by focusing on NFTs is that you are just taking part in a big scam, and that you are destroying the environment.

If you want to get a point across other than that, stay far, far away from NFTs.

There is something called lazy minting. You are not doing anything unless someone is interested in buying your artwork. You mint when its needed. You can do this as a developer or even OpenSea lets you do this.

Also, different blockchains work differently.

Destroying the environment is not really a valid point.

The big ones do. And all of them rely on trading against blockchains that do destroy the environment. If you do anything to support any of this industry, you end up supporting destroying the environment. You can not escape this.

This is going to be a super useful tool!

How many layers would someone need to upload for each trait type? Wouldn't the number of unique NFTs that can be generated be constrained by the number of trait types and number of trait values per type?

Thanks, the number of combinations can be very large, it really depends on what you are expecting. trait type is picked on random so there will be outputs which are similar and then there will be some which are extremely rare. I generated quite a few and then picked some which I liked the most to showcase on opensea.

You can also use rarity flag 'r' or 'u' to give some traits much less of a chance to appear.

"Generate something that has value because it's rare automatically!"

I don't think value means what you think it means

From ICOs to Tokens (ERC-20) to NFTs (ERC-721). I see another over-supply of 'randomly generated' art created by anyone, just like the tokens.

This reminds me of the tool to generate your own ERC20 token [0].

Won't be surprised to see them add NFTs. One scam after another.

[0] https://cointool.app/dashboard

Looks like we're well into the shitcoin phase for NFTs.

cool idea, maybe zip the files for the user so people do not have to deal with multiple download prompts

Yeah, I was going to do that!

Great tool. I will take a look.

Here is the thing; Being curious will always make you happy and more often then not it does pays off. Not necessarily in terms of money but you get something out of it.

Let people be excited about things.

I'm really excited about artificial scarcity and environmental destruction for digital beany babies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com