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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you look closely.

I mean, it’s an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate images at this level, but I don’t want them shown to me on a daily basis while I’m reading blogs.

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I sunk ~20 hours and $100 playing with DALL-E since last week and I've had a very different experience. Sure--my first dozen attempts with the engine gave bad results, but once I learned to "speak its language" it got easier to generate highly-polished images. The most realistic results come by appending things like "realistic photograph, 4k, in the style of a fashion magazine" to prompts. I suppose any style would work, as long as the body of source material in that style is (mostly) high-quality.

Here's a couple examples I produced with just a little trial and error. FWIW I have an engineering background and zero design experience.

"Frida Kahlo crossed with Julia Child, 4k realistic, expressive photo, hdr" https://labs.openai.com/s/hvFClrAMCXN6zwqJUJwsmYSB

"John Lennon crossed with Paul McCartney, 4k photograph" https://labs.openai.com/s/lb7qw07tdvRPZ9nmkrCmU0RA

Maybe they're not perfect, but I'm impressed as hell. Exploring what's possible by wording prompts differently feels very much like using a search engine for the first time. Give it a year. This technology is going places.

ERROR> https://openailabs-site.azureedge.net/public-assets/d/b3ac74...: Uncaught RangeError: Failed to construct 'ImageData': Out of memory at ImageData creation

I thought 2GB ought be enough for everybody.

Well, for 100 bucks you feel satisfied. That's what counts :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD.

I find the images to be incredible, but it's very unsettling when you focus on certain details like hands, feet, and eyes. The hands and feet that it draws are almost always mangled, and while it does a good job of drawing an individual eye, it doesn't seem to draw two eyes in a well coordinated manner, either one eye is bigger than the other, or there is something weirdly unsymmetrical about the eyes that makes the image look creepy.

I have a great example of this:

"Jesus takes a selfie" - https://imgur.com/a/togE2ko

I'm pretty sure this snap was three days after the resurrection.

Something that truly amazes me, is how well Dall-e handles lighting. The lighting and shadowing is really good, comparable to a path tracer, except it isn't really doing the super expensive light simulation that a path tracer does.

The shadows of the turkeys in OPs post is what impressed me the most so far...

Pretty much the definition of uncanny valley.

> The hands and feet that it draws are almost always mangled

I really, really REALLY don't like this fact and I won't be using or endorsing the technology until it's improved.

I also always hated the "deep dream" pictures of lovecraftian dog horrors

Just recently saw a three fingered spider-man created by DALL-E

I wonder if there’s a potential cottage industry of GANs that then fix up these details — one that knows exactly what a hand should look like and will fix up anything that looks like (or that you identify as) a hand

There are already ones to fix up faces, it'd be interesting to combine these things in a workflow. Dalle -> face detector -> user clicks -> stylegan3.

Online DALL-E generators often are deliberately prevented from producing good faces, because of the potential for abuse.

FYI, "ARC: FACE RESTORATION" is an AI that fixes distorted faces. It won't do miracles but it does a pretty good job when the face is just off a bit.

I suspect that overtime there will be many AIs that will target very specialized functions similar to ARC.

The article isn't loading for me, so I can't really comment on the images it contains, but I've found telling the ai to apply an impressionistic filter does wonders for removing the unsettling aspect. Obviously that limits you to a specific style of image, but I imagine there are other stylistic filters you might apply that achieve the same goal.

I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist cats" and similar queries.

I'm over 1000 credits into Dalle so far (I know, I know..) and you're on the money. You can go a lot further than impressionism, though. Specifying the names of famous illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting. The right combinations can yield some incredibly realistic looking things, even faces, and then for the rest of it, there's Photoshop, Gigapixel, and other tools to patch things up. (I've had more luck creating 'elements' with Dalle and then montaging them the old fashioned way.)

The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you still need to think like an art director and establish a way to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle alone can't do that.

Dall-E is very “first generation” in its design and interactivity with the users.

It’s just a matter of time until setting a “consistent art style” becomes a feature of these things.

Similarly, asking the AI to produce multiple views/poses of the same thing will likely become a common feature.

> Specifying the names of famous illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting.

Are training sets prepared with systematic variations in individual axes, as an alternative/addition to tagging each of millions of training images on these axes?

I'm with you. I would hate to see these images all over the place -many are just unpleasant to see.

The cover image generated for the cosmopolitan cover is stunning at first but after seeing it a few times it begins to feel uncomfortable to look at. The uncanny valley is alive and well in many of these images.

The pictures are certainly deep down in the uncanny valley, but I think they would be great for nightmarish games. In fact, game developers (and especially game artists) might be the next profession on the line, to be automated by AI.

I don't understand your assertion. Neither game developers nor artists are in any danger of being automated by AI.

Until Copilot can make the game you want, you cannot replace developers. And until you think AI is ready to replace artists in general, you won't be able to automate game artists.

That's not to say a game with assets largely drawn by AI, and heavily assisted by Copilot, wouldn't be a cool artistic experiment!

assets seem quite possibly ai generatable in the near future. you won't be using AI for the important things yet, but a AA or AAA game has a ton of random assets where for random crap that doesn't matter, but that you need to make the world feel full. that seems like a perfect use of AI assets.

Depends on which kinds of assets. You don't even need AI; plenty of games feature procedurally generated levels, art and even enemies.

This hasn't put game developers out of a job.

> Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad?

Well they're bad at not looking like AI generated art. It's impressive, but I've yet to come across an example that doesn't look like AI generated art. A few seconds of surface level inspection and you can see the weird AI psychodelic circling effect (no idea what the technical name is - eye-ball-ification?)

There's a cyberpunk art Facebook group where some people have taken to sharing AI generated cyberpunk cityscapes, and I've been hard pressed to tell it apart from human art on occasion.

To be fair, I think this is because "cyberpunk cityscape" as an artform has become so cliché and generic, it's easy for an AI to copy it!

These are good enough for 99% of blogs out there.

Just like AI generated articles are good enough for 99% of content farms out there.

I agree. They're pretty in the same way as fractals are pretty, but still boring and bland.

I would not have any of the ones that I've seen this far on my wall, or as my blog icons.

The results tend to be residents in the uncanny valley. They are nice if you want something unsettling. They are very impressive, can be very aesthetically pleasing(especially with midjourney) but they look very alien.

Maybe part of the reason we are so impressed with those is because they break our perception of reality. It looks like the renaissance statues that are made from marble but looks like cloth.

Yeah, maybe it's okay for a tech company to be weirdly robotic, but I'd be happier without them random illustrations.

For maximum coherency, you have to make batches of 50 - 100 and pick the best one. Which can be time consuming and expensive.

This. The best things I've made have required that level of generation to get good results.

I truly wonder if there will a 'image picker job' in the future. A person who creates dall-e images for clients and picks the best for them.

Is that fundamentally different from an art director today who hands out assignments to freelancers and then picks out and puts together the best of their output?

It's not about being perfect, it's about having something that doesn't take time to produce. like the article says, searching google and stock image sites looking for a picture that very few people are going to ingest is a huge waste of time.

I would suggest scanning through the r/dalle2 sub-reddit, as the submissions there are rated. There are limitations in the way the current crop of AI generators work, but in the hands of someone who knows these and know what prompts to specify you get completely amazing results that you as a layman can't tell is AI generated (without an expert investigation maybe into pixel-level artifacts).

I had MUCH lower expectations about this article’s images, once I got it to load I was surprised, no, amazed!

They are good enough for most people and over time those details will get better until we have no need for illustrators.

Already I see website agencies and bloggers using DALL-E. What I do see is that it is easy to pick out DALL-E generated images, in that its too fantastic. Way over the top to a fault.

>Way over the top to a fault.

way over the type as a style

it's like the über-modern modern art. the next level of those goofy over-the-top meme images that make the rounds in socials

while you may not like it, you just know that this will be a thing on how to create AI-like images without AI. I used to refer to that as grade school ;P

You might be looking at the limited launched product. The fully powered product has amazing results

https://www.instagram.com/openaidalle/

> Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad?

Bad compared with what? They certainly convey a lot more information than a randomly generated gravatar.

I tried it a lot and I think it works ok for simple, mundane, trivial prompts, but when you start to ask for sophisticated stuff it gets weird.

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