Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

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I pay for both MJ and DALL-E (though OpenAI mostly gets my money for GPT) and don't find them to produce significantly better images than popular checkpoints on CivitAI. What I do find is that they are significantly easier to work with. (Actually, my experience with hundreds of DALL-E generations is that it's actually quite poor in quality. I'm in several IRC channels where it's the image generator of choice for some IRC bots, and I'm never particularly impressed with the visual quality.)

For MJ in particular, knowing that they at least used to use Stable Diffusion under the hood, it would not surprise me if the majority of the secret sauce is actually a middle layer that processes the prompt and converts it to one that is better for working with SD. Prompting SD to get output at the MJ quality level takes significantly more tokens, lots of refinement, heavy tweaking of negative prompting, etc. Also a stack of embeddings and LoRAs, though I would place those more in the category of finetuning like you had mentioned.

If you try diffusionGPT with regional prompting added and a GAN corrector you can get a good idea of what is possible https://diffusiongpt.github.io

That looks very impressive unless the demo is cherrypicked, would be great if this could be implemented into a frontend like Fooocus https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus

What do you use it for? I haven't found a great use for it myself (outside of generating assets for landing pages / apps, where it's really really good). But I have seen endless subreddits / instagram pages dedicated to various forms of AI content, so it seems lots of people are using it for fun?

Nothing professional. I run a variety of tabletop RPGs for friends, so I mostly use it for making visual aids there. I've also got a large format printer that I was no longer using for it's original purpose, so I bought a few front-loading art frames that I generate art for and rotate through periodically.

I've also used it to generate art for deskmats I got printed at https://specterlabs.co/

For commercial stuff I still pay human artists.

Whose frames do you use? Do you like them? I print my photos to frame and hang, and wouldn't at all mind being able to rotate them more conveniently and inexpensively than dedicating a frame to each allows.

https://www.spotlightdisplays.com/

I like them quite a bit, and you can get basically any size cut to fit your needs even if they don't directly offer it on the site.

Perfectly suited to go alongside the style of frame I already have lots of, and very reasonably priced off the shelf for the 13x19 my printer tops out at. Thanks so much! It'll be easier to fill that one blank wall now.

I use comfyUI/SD and MJ and I have never seen anything on the level of what I get out of MJ. Nothing at CivitAI is impressive to me next to what I get from MJ.

Of course, art is so subjective none of this has any real meaning. MJ routinely blows my mind though and it is very rare something from SD does. The secret MJ sauce is obviously all the human feedback that has gone into the model at this point.

I think AI video will be a different story though. I think that is when comfyUI/SD will destroy MJ because MJ is simply not going to be able to have an economic model with the amount of compute needed.

What IRC Channels do you frequent?

Largely some old channels from the 90s/00s that really only exist as vestiges of their former selves - not really related to their original purpose, just rooms for hanging out with friends made there back when they had a point besides being a group chat.

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