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Comment by Charlieholtz | Hacker News Reader

Hi! Creator here! I just started hacking on this last night and wasn't expecting to see this on HN already :)

It works by taking your prompt and generating an emoji using https://replicate.com/fofr/sdxl-emoji. Next, I remove the background using https://replicate.com/cjwbw/rembg. Then, click to download and add to slack!

It's all open-source, code is here: https://github.com/cbh123/emoji

Let me know if you have any questions!

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I see that the perpetually-offended have already shown up.

My advice is to either simply ignore them, or point and laugh (your choice).

The one thing you can count on them is that they are never going to be satisfied. Most likely they're not even actually offended, not really. They just enjoy bullying other people.

That's such a coincidence. I was browsing Replicate last night for new models and played with the very same one and was impressed at the results (well, mostly). Kudos to you for turning it into something more accessible and the background removal idea. For everyone else, Replicate is well worth playing around with if you want to tinker with some models without much commitment.

Ahah, that's awesome. Thank you! Let me know if you have any questions about Replicate! Happy to help.

Awesome job! One criticism I have is these are emoji, they're more like bitmoji or memoji.

Super cool! I would add a checkbox to toggle whether you want background removal, or make that an optional second step. In about half the cases I tried, the background was an important part of my image and without it only weird artifacts remained.

great idea! working on this now

Just came off your Elixir talk photos on Twitter to find this on HN. Please share your ElixirConf talk recording. Producing a nice emoji/avatar for an AI agent seems like a cool idea.

Thanks so much :)

I'll share it as soon as I have access! I'll also post a transcript on my site (charlieholtz.com) soon.

Doesn't this cost money? Could you use a model from huggingface too. I'm trying to get into this kind of stuff, but I want to use free or local AI models to avoid bills.. lol

I guess even with hugging face you have to pay for the compute costs which could get pretty big pretty fast if something takes off.

Elixir... don't see that every day. I started reading through the code and was like "what the heck is an ex file?!!"

Never really seen Elixir before. Looks pretty nice.

Yes! I love Elixir :) Phoenix LiveView is really amazing. I feel so fast working in it. I got hooked after watching Chris McCord's 'Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes' demo, and things have improved a lot since then.

Elixir is a killer language and tool. It's considered esoteric these days but I think more and more folks are going to wake up to the inherent beauty of the Erlang BEAM and OTP applications pretty soon here.

Is Elixir really considered esoteric? There’s some pretty big businesses running on it.

It never took off as the Ruby killer. It hurts to say so because I agree with all the positive Elixir comments around here - IMO, people are missing out by not knowing of it.

The beauty of Ruby with the bulletproof-ness of Erlang.

Hi, neat idea. Appear to have hit an issue. https://i.imgur.com/XQGfBed.png Interesting, just not a clean Emoji.

Using :bob: (Thought it might give me "B.O.B.", "Bob Dylab", or "What about Bob")

Oh this is crazy, I didnt realize replicate had user models like that for chaining

Is there a good video or channel to follow thats all about replicate and similar services at this level of depth?

what did you use to recorder the demo in the GitHub readme? its very smooth on the transitions.

Really cool, I think this would be a nice service for Slack, etc to add custom emoji

I tried the prompt "electric bass" -- the generated image was OK (it was a three string bass, but whatever) but the background removal not only removed the background but most of the body of the bass because (I assume) the pickguard was the same color as the image background.

The word confused appears to cause a failure

I really like it. It does seem to be suffering a little from some biases that are probably coming from sdxl though.

What biases?

As others have pointed out it tends to associate some professions with specific races. And crime related emojis with black people. It's a Stable Diffusion issue.

It seems biased towards white people for most anything I input.

criminal - black man stealing - white murderer - white killer - white thief - white skin, black beard. arab? Indian? man murdering kittens - white

I just ran "a criminal" 8 times and got only white men.

It's not a stable diffusion issue, it's a culture issue.

"It's not a stable diffusion issue, it's a culture issue."

parroting and perpetuating the biases will ensure it will continue to be a culture issue.

The text to image models represent the data that is being fed to it. If you feed it 100 images and out of those 100 images 95 are of white men politicians and 5 are of politicians of color, that's what you are going to get back. These datasets are gathered automatically from various internet sources and represent the data that is available out in the wild. For stable diffusion to "fix" the bias in the data set would be simply impossible. That would require hiring an army of people whose sole purpose would be to "rebalance" the data set on some internal objective schema manually.

Id rather train it on real data and fix the root cause than to interject some version of utopia that won the minds of developers.

Remarkably complete, it even declined to make a dirty eggplant.

Wonderful, but the background removal breaks the image - the original final is great, then it destroys it trying to remove the background...

Try this prompt, and it gives a full image, then depending, it culls far too much when removing background, please make background removal optional?

"round brook as designed by comfort tiffany and alphonse mucha in green black and gold"

Yeah I’ve noticed that too. Adding a toggle soon!

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