I think the primary reason people are wowed by this thread isn't attributable mainly to the subtle effect of the cherry-picking he did, but in fact to the overall quality of any image generated by DALL-E 2.
The rejections were most commonly
1. Kind of just slightly boring or literally drawing the thing rather than being cool and artistic
2. Cool but similar to the artistic style of bios near it in the thread, whereas I wanted to keep it diverse (surreal followed by literal, oil followed by sharp lines etc) so it's more fun to scroll through
Whereas a few years ago generative models (GANs etc) would often render like static noise sometimes or completely wrong things. I've only seen that problem once with DALL-E across hundreds or thousands of images now (it generated a fully white image)
The stuff on deviantart is pretty good too and neatly tagged and classified by art style.
Has anyone compiled a list of the styles and artists Dall-E "knows"? How niche does it get? Decorative Initial Caps? Florid Victorian Ornaments? Googie Architecture? SFF artists like Michael Whelan, Vincent Di Fate, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, or Jim Burns? Banksy? Sculptors like Bathsheba Grossman or Markus Pierson? Early animation artists like Ub Iwerks or E. C. Segar?
I was experimenting with one of the VQGAN+Clip notebooks a while ago, and it did pretty well with some styles, but not so much with "Heroic Realism" or "Soviet Propaganda Poster" or "Sheppard Fairey", and even worse when I was trying to get it to draw in that style an object that could be construed as implying a style itself like "retro robot" or "50s raygun" (eg. "A retro robot drawn in a heroic realism style" or "A cubist painting of a steampunk pistol"). Is that kind of dissonance a problem for Dall-E?
You're absolutely right, here he displays the full set for a given prompt. They all look fantastic!
Would you have names or links for some other projects you're aware of? Would love to check them out.
I don't think that is terribly surprising, nor a very cogent detraction from the model.
DALL-E 2 is different from what I've seen. The things it produces seem to actually make sense the majority of the time. The outputs are strikingly similar to what a competent human might output as opposed to one with a severe mental illness.
I'm sure part of this is an inherent advantage that DALL-E enjoys regarding context. Art is supposed to be artistic whereas text is expected to maintain long distance logical consistency of abstract concepts across a stream of output and also to communicate something concrete. So in a sense the bar for art is probably lower in many ways.
GPT-3 amazes me and occasionally disappoints me. But it's still something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. I suppose I'm still putting GPT-2 and Dall-E 2 in the same ball park because they are both so far beyond what I thought would be possible from what are essentially brute force methods.
Gather round, gather round, give me a text, any text at all and I will produce you an image of some kind. And you will call it "good" if it looks like anything at all.
Because all art is subjective and your mind will work overtime to connect it back to the text you provided.
Practical and epistemically relevant knowledge to anyone deciding how interesting these results, presented originally without mentioning they were cherry-picked, are. I’m doing a favor to provide it, as doing so isn’t exactly something that makes me look great, but is very much worth knowing for anyone following him.
Side note - there’s this SF club of effete intellectualistas who fashion themselves as modern day florentines during a de novo renaissance. They do a lot of back-patting. They have the exactly mentality of your reply - be kind, love is all you need, etc.
It’s sort of the exact opposite of the east coast mentality that willingly sacrifices looking good and “getting along” in favor of finding the truth despite some discomfort. Discomfort to this group is very taboo.
Of course, this don’t-rock-the-boat mentality is very much intentional as it gives said club the ability to instantly shun anyone who deigns to critique it, allowing them to continue building their following.
Your second critique: assumes the original presentation had to be accompanied by methodology and proof to be of value; derives an implicit attempt-to-distort from your perspective of the scene at hand; devolves into paternalism to end in unsubstantiated moralism.
I might even agree with the spirit underlying your words—given, say, the meaning-loss of the company’s name—this just isn’t the way to convey it.