Show HN: Twogether AI – Multi-Person Photo Generation API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Twogether AI – Multi-Person Photo Generation API

twogether.ai

39 pointsyardenst40 comments

Hey everyone, at Magicflow (YC W23) we're helping our customers run AI image generation in production, enabling them to produce high-quality photos at scale.

We are launching a scalable API today that makes it possible to create multi-person portrait photos: which means the ability to create real-looking photos of any two persons interacting with each other in some way only by providing a prompt and the person's pose. Generating this kind of photo requires a deep understanding of the AI ecosystem, a knowledge gap many companies face. In order to make the photos look real with high consistency and for a low cost, chaining of many models is required, and an excellent understanding of how to tweak with the various params of each one.

We also handle the infrastructure required to generate the photos, which can be a challenge when dealt with alone, especially for companies with a small backend team (we can scale to thousands of requests per day and generate 100 photos in about 3 minutes). Our customers today use this technology for the following use cases: creating new photo albums from old-scanned albums, providing personalized content for user acquisition campaigns, enabling new kinds of experiences in physical venues, and creating humorous photos with celebrities.

There is a significant tradeoff between creating a robust abstraction layer on top of Stable Diffusion capabilities and providing customers with more control over various options. The API currently allows you to manipulate the following parameters: the pose of the couple (hugging, taking a selfie, etc.), their facial expressions, the style of the photo (realistic, cartoon, painting, etc.), as well as the location, theme, and outfits (e.g., ski vacation, on the beach)

We created a free demo app for you to view examples and try live: https://twogether.ai?source=hn (no user or payment needed). For full API access, contact me at yardenst@magicflow.ai. We can typically set you up within a day, but an onboarding session is required to ensure responsible API usage.

Open articleView on HN

It's neat technology, but...

I'm trying to think of uses for this that aren't creepy ("manipulate... the pose of the couple... their facial expressions..."), dishonest ("photos... with celebrities..."), or dystopian ("creating new photo albums from old scanned albums... providing personalized content for user acquisition campaigns") and failing. If someone comes along and makes a fake photo of themself with a celebrity, that's great, but it's also a one-off novelty. What kind of non-sleazy recurring use is going to prompt people to pay for this?

> Our customers today use this technology for the following use cases: creating new photo albums from old-scanned albums, providing personalized content for user acquisition campaigns, enabling new kinds of experiences in physical venues, and creating humorous photos with celebrities.

I'm genuinely curious what you see the use case being 5-10 years from now. Or in the short term, which use case do you think is most compelling from a business perspective? Or is this just an entry point to much different uses of AI+Images in the future?

Do you see this as a B2B play or a B2C play?

Lots of AI startups doing various things with AI models, but I always have trouble seeing the business model vision. (Or maybe that doesn't matter, yet)

As a young startup, this is something we are also trying to figure out. Currently, it's evident that this technology generates the most value in the B2C sector. However we also observe a robust B2B demand for other AI models (e-commerce)

As a funded corporation pursuing sales and not just a casual hobbyist doing a tech demo, I have to ask:

How did you get a license to use the image of these celebrities, let alone in commercialized deepfakes? Because that's kind of a hot topic right now and you're putting a giant target on your investors' assets if you didn't bother.

Great point, when using the API the photos used to train and generate photos are provided by the customer, and they must have the correct permissions to use them

That misses the point that was being asked which was about the celebrity photos and not the user photos.

By customer I mean our own customer (a business) and not the end user

Ah. I understand.

Though it’s obvious that the customer does not have these permissions in probably 95% of cases, maybe 100%. Because if both people agree, then you might as well just take a photo of them together. No need for AI then.

In Germany, a contract for such a service would be legally void.

(An example of this is the sale of radar detectors. Here, too, the companies claim that it’s the user’s responsibility not to use them for illegal purposes, i.e. speeding. But the courts don’t buy it. They say the companies know exactly what they selling, and they declare such contracts void. The fact that a user could, theoretically, use that detector in a way that would not be unlawful is irrelevant, since it’s empirically evident that the vast majority does not, and the very appeal of the product is precisely the unlawful behavior.)

>Though it’s obvious that the customer does not have these permissions in probably 95% of cases, maybe 100%. Because if both people agree, then you might as well just take a photo of them together. No need for AI then.

That's not true if they cannot meet in person.

The legal aspects here are very interesting but I think they miss the point. This tech can be used to create photos with celebrities, but not only.

Am I correct to read that as "we didn't"?

If you make a tool that makes copyright infringement easy, and you demonstrate infringing use in order to market it, you're really asking for trouble.

If you care about your startup and its survival, I strongly suggest you focus your marketing on legitimate B2B use cases and avoid showing off how great it is at making deepfakes. It's one thing to turn a blind eye to misuse of your technology and a whole different thing to explicitly promote misuse as a product feature.

Seriously, Gandhi had given permission to generate the photos on the website :). On one hand, openAI trains its data on copyrighted material. Now YC has funded this startup. A significant number of readers have rightly pointed out Copyright issues and the founders are saying it is up to customers and all those answers have been rightfully downvoted. I don't know what else to say here. How could this point be overlooked? If I had permission from the celebrity I would have taken a photo too. Then what is the need for this.

> and creating humorous photos with celebrities.

how are you handling licensing (use of celebrity or any other person's image) and copyright (original image is not from user, so is likely copyrighted by someone else)?

Is this not a case of being allowed for personal use and/or satire vs publishing the rendered works and then stepping on copyright?

This is something our customers need to deal with

Depending on jurisdiction, you may find that this isn't exactly the case.

This is a strange answer when having celebrities on your home page and a demo of famous people.

We demo with people without copyrights and have strict terms of use

Sounds like an ideal tool for misinformation and smear jobs.

"Look, here's person X with Jeffrey Epstein", etc.

For this reason we’re currently screening all new customers and monitoring the usage

so I had this thought - we should flood the zone with fakes. All out. Systems like Clearview and pimeyes, and intelligence agencies would have a lot more noise to deal with as fake detection is expensive per photo and by definition, always lagging behind the cutting edge fake generator.

I would also be surprised if governments aren't also sewing distrust with their enemies by generating fakes of government officials in past random photos of graduating classes of military academies of foreign governments, just to sew chaos. And why stop there - are you a middle-management cartel member with low prospects for advancement? Find a higher ranking cartel member you want to get rid of, start generating their face in older real photos of FBI graduating classes. Who knows, a position might open.

It's a new world.

> so I had this thought - we should flood the zone with fakes.

This seems to me like the worst possible thing to do. We already have a serious problem being able to determine what's true and what's not. A response like this would make the problem so much worse that it could pose an actual societal threat.

That's my point, we might regain an ounce of privacy in public.

Oops, my bad. I got Poe'd.

I'm not sure where you live but you want intelligence agencies to be less effective? There are numerous complaints to make against intelligence agencies but I don't know if I want them to be worse. I just want them to operate within the law and be morally sound.

will you enhance this site to allow uploading 2 persons photos to make a picture together ? thanks

It is not something we allow now for various reasons in the demo website, but please contact me at yardenst@magicflow.ai and we will make what you need.

Using the API it's possible to choose any 2 persons.

This is simply region prompting isn't it? Person A in left 50%, Person B in right 50%?

We do use regional prompting but not only

Reskin of gradio + controlnet and some prebaked Lora

IDK what you’re planning on charging for this, but it’s nothing that can’t be done for free on any device in a notebook already

why not make this a consumer app like can of soup? Bet it would blow up and make a mess out of BeReal feed

Now we are focusing on serving other businesses, if you have a good consumer app idea please let's talk over email we would love to collaborate.

Sigh. This is just the sort of thing that people are afraid that AI will be used for. The fear is not entirely unjustified.

Here comes Rule 34...

Dude, this is crazy.

Stable Diffusion's eco system is pretty wild!

Any website that hijacks my browsers back button is a hard pass.

Sorry, we try to move fast, we’ll fix it in our next release

Soon Samsung would be like able to show moon and Saturn twogether in their photos

This is so fun. I'd love to integrate this into a holiday card app :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com