Show HN: Wall-mounted diffusion mirror that turns reflections into paintings | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wall-mounted diffusion mirror that turns reflections into paintings

matthieulc.com

472 pointscataPhil123 comments

Nice! I peeked at the code and thought I’d share a few tips for improving the low frame rate:

Base64 encoding the JPEG bytes will increase payload size up to ~30% and burns CPU cycles on both client and server. This is unnecessary, as Websocket protocol can send binary payloads (doesn’t need to be text).

Consider removing lossy jpg compression as well, ie just send the raw RGB bytes over the network. Then on the server side you can simply call Image.frombuffer(…).

StreamDiffusion can achieve high frame rates because of extensive batching in the pipeline. You’re not benefiting from that here as the client is only sending one frame at a time and then waiting for a response. See this example for an idea of how to queue input frames and consume them in batches https://github.com/cumulo-autumn/StreamDiffusion/blob/main/e... .

Alternatively you could take a look at the SDXL Turbo and Lightning models. They are very fast at img2img but have limited resolution of 512² or 1024² pixels respectively. Which appears a bit lower than what you’re aiming for here, but they can be run locally in real time on a high end consumer grade GPU. For reference I have some code demonstrating this here https://github.com/GradientSurfer/Draw2Img/tree/main

yeah yeah yeah, do all these things, and afterwards, look at 2d interpolation methods that don't require AI for your inbetweens. There's some real fast kernel math that can lerp from one blob to another at 8 billion fps.

I think you’re getting downvoted because “yeah yeah yeah” is normally a sign that someone is sarcastically dismissing an idea, but the rest of your comment suggests you’re not at all - linerp is a great idea!

These are great ideas thank you!

It was a sincere triple yeah, born of excitement.

Makes sense, consider adding a `!` for clarity at the end next time ;)

Ok, but I wonder if it really needs to be real time like this? Wouldn't it make more sense to have some kind of button: somebody makes a pose, takes a picture, the picture is run through some kind of transformation and comes back as a painting that stays there until someone takes another picture? Wouldn't the illusion of art be better that way? (It would not be a "mirror" anymore though.)

I think it has to be either real time or a very low framerate, like once every 30 seconds. That way you have time to see each "painting"

IMO embrace low frame rate. Better energy use if its AI based on the first place (cheaper, environment... more cycles for fancier effecs) THEN pair that with e-ink display (also good energy use), I'd go for old school charcoal style but color e-ink is a thing. e-ink with some additional effects could resemble a physical paper moreso then a LCD/LED and so would be less obnoxious in the darkness of night... AND this also could be a low key security camera.

> Making art is hard. But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.

Not to sound like a luddite, but I do question the idea that the skill gap is merely an inconvenience. I suspect learning how to paint or make music changes something in yourself which teaches you some deeper life lessons.

I've heard the phrase (paraphrased): No great work of art was made by a genius, genius comes to you unexpectedly like a gust of wind. It seems that cultivating these opportunities is the most an artist can do, and removing the skill gap seems to be removing the cultivation, the thing that changes you, the essence.

There seems to be a few of these inherent deep workings that we as a people keep coming back to, without knowing what they are or how to discuss them (personally at least!). Not to rain on your parade OP, the project looks fun and super useful to a lot people! Just something I ponder on at times.

This goes opposite to the saying "Experts say it cannot be done; amateurs accomplish it every day.".

Sometimes it's good to have someone with fresh eyes looking and something and not be shaped by decades of prior history.

> "Experts say it cannot be done; amateurs accomplish it every day."

I love this because I seem to encounter situations like that every day. Who came up with this saying?

Recent example: This guy asked a very simple question about something that's commonly done in industry (wiring two power supplies in parallel and balancing the current between them): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/1g84zd7/usi...

Literally 95% of the replies in that thread are irrelevant bullshit from "experts" that have no idea how redundant server PSUs work. I replied to some under the same username. Meanwhile another guy successfully wired two 100W USB-C ports in parallel to power an entire PC. He had no idea that the resistance of his crappy wires kept the two smps control loops stable and divided the current evenly between the two ports ensuring that neither one trips OCP: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1g8pser/let_m...

I guess there's the armchair expert and the actual, real expert and these two are completely different beasts.

I wouldn't feel comfortable with this guy's usb-c setup but probably not for 'it's all going to burn down' reasons, more like 'the connection will get loose somewhere and I'll lose my work'.

He posted the photos as soon as he got it working; It's obviously not his permanent setup. My point is that he posted it on the same day that ~60 people claimed this was somehow a difficult task.

"Random person on reddit" doesn't qualify as experts.

Everyone in that thread pretended to be an expert despite being clueless. This is normal, but you'd only notice it if you're familiar. Also see Gell-Mann amnesia effect

> Who came up with this saying?

I was not aware of that specific formulation but there's a maxim by Mark Twain that says "They did not know it was impossible so they did it".

Amsyar hensem

who?

Since I actually work in this field:

Redundant switching power supplies are purpose built to be redundant. They usually have a current share circuit (to balance the load) and output diodes (to stop one supply from feeding the other one). Without that one supply will "over power" the other, fill it's output caps, and then the feedback of that supply will go "Hey the output caps are charged so why do I need to do anything!?". You end up with an erosion of power balance.

You are riding a pretty high horse, but the commenters in that thread are not wrong and if you think cheap 5V USB chargers are anything like redundant server PSU's. I don't think putting random USB chargers in parallel will cause a fire or anything, but it's just needlessly bad engineering that will be anything but robust.

A programming analogy to help people here: You can write a program that is tens of thousands of lines of if statements. It might probably work maybe for some inputs? But damn if it not bad engineering. No one would ride around on the high horse of "See the program worked! The "experts" were wrong!".

The linked post shows why all that is unnecessary. Paralleling PSUs is so easy that people get it working by accident.

> You end up with an erosion of power balance

Unlike you, the guy powering his PC with two USB-C ports quantified how imbalanced it is. 65W+75W in his photo.

>tens of thousands of lines of if statements

Terrible example because that takes more work than the correct solution. btw the correct solution in this case involves FETs, not diodes. Look up "ideal diode circuit"

? Have you ever read musician interviews: Its like a competition on how much clichee, naivete and reality denying drivel one can compress into 5 minutes.

Idealism is not a victimless crime, millions suffer every day because some artist threw a buggy,idealized world model over the fence and the idiocy stuck hypnotizing millions into permanently damaging themselves.

There something compelling inside musicians that comes out in their music. Everyone feels it but few can define it. There's a reason they did not choose conversation as their medium.

Are you talking about stage presence?

Musicians are not necessarily stage performers, there's lots of touching instrumental music where the musician doesn't even do much on stage.

Music itself is a language, something undefinable comes from that language that we can't modulate the same way through speech.

This is why the greatest art is only made by people who grow the plants to create their own paint from scratch...

I think he's on the right lines with "surfacing the inner world", but that's why I see this as more wallpaper than art. He's not doing a deep dive into his own psychology and hauling up pearls; none of these images have that property.

Does the totality of the project have that property? That would be less clear, but IMO, no. I see it as technically driven, not psychologically driven, although I can see how you could write an artist's statement that claims it was (it's about mirrors, after all, which are hugely symbolic).

To be clear I still like it, and if I'd done it I'd be proud of it. But it's more artifice than art.

(If I was him, I'd slow the frame rate down, not speed it up - work with the technical limitation, not against it. Have the system only display "good" images, and not update the display until another "good" image is generated. The code that decides if an image is "good" or not would be the most interesting part of the system, and could fairly be said to embody the artist's intent, and so cross (my own personal) threshold into capital-A Art.

I'd also experiment with buffering the image stream à la _Light of Other Days_ by Bob Shaw.

Oh, and as Halloween is nearly with us, the temptation to occasionally inpaint a figure standing behind the viewer would be massive.

Idle thought: to get some stability in the image, would it be possible to have an LLM generate random video filter code, instead of random images? "Write me a video filter that makes the input video look cubist". "...like an oil painting" "...with a Flash aesthetic". etc etc. Every time a filter gets generated that doesn't actively crash, swap to it. No idea if that's feasible or not.)

It's extremely sophisticated dynamic art.

Talk like "surfacing the inner whatever" can impress the masses, for a very short while, but good art requires more. All art has a language, standards that are learned though an artist's development as they learn the needed skills. The mona lisa isn't just a good picture of a person. It is full of details and meaning only understandable to people who have studied paintings. AI can generate a good or interesting picture but it cannot speak the language of painting. That requires actual graft to learn and appreciate. Injecting the paintbrush skills into someone's brain, or into an AI tool, isn't going to make them an artist.

> I suspect learning how to paint or make music changes something in yourself which teaches you some deeper life lessons.

I enthusiastically support this notion. A simpler, than painting, example would be writing. Sure everyone has a story to tell, and everyone can write, but to make it worth other people's time would take you days if not years of perfecting the craft, as you inevitably learn things about yourself and crystallize your perspectives on this world.

FYI, the link to the frame used to mount the display just blocks you:

https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/decoration-eclairage/dec...

For those curious, it's a MILO 21 x 29.7 cm black frame. These links work for me:

https://www.leroymerlin.pt/produtos/decoracao-e-tapetes/mold...

Also, the screen he uses (HMTECH Raspberry Pi Screen 10.1) is pretty hard to find. Do people have other good recommendations for screens with similar quality and specs?

Any idea why this uses infrared light and an infrared camera?

> Any idea why this uses infrared light and an infrared camera?

I'd guess it's to make it work in the dark as well.

That's correct. Plus it also adds a layer of interaction that's pretty fun, kind of like a wand.

Every time I've looked into building something like this, when I price it out, just using an old Android tablet in kiosk mode and making it a web app ends up being much cheaper.

The screen is available on Amazon? But it's a touch screen, which seems overkill; any screen would probably work? One can always build a custom frame around it.

Touch screen I think is cool because then you could interact with the art.

I did a little research and these Waveshare displays look really beautiful. For a particular size display, they have models in different resolutions (from lower to higher res). But they're only for rpis and windows, not like mac or ipad. The QLED ones are the best.

https://www.waveshare.com/product/ai/displays/10.1hp-capqled...

> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.

I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them. That’s why I find a banana on the wall art, popular music is still art.

(Might be school influence but I also tend to ask myself „why”)

This invention is definitely work of art, but its output - in my eyes - not. It’s like a cloud. It can make different shapes, and some are funny, some might remind me of my close ones, but it’s still averaged randomness.

However the idea to reflect reality to this digital randomness I find without doubt - art. And, well: while not visual or audible, there is software, hardware, code and design which are also art (and difficult to make so counterpoint to thesis in first paragraph ;)).

> I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them.

But this leaves the role of intention ambiguous. If I double-park a BMW across two handicap spaces because I'm angry and entitled, is that art? It certainly evokes emotion, and it's also produced by emotion.

If you present it as art, sure.

But the best part about art is that other people don't have to consider what you do as art.

I would find it hard to believe you are presenting it as art though, as you'll want your BMW back after you've bought whatever crap at the store.

I don't have to believe your AI generated slop is art because it doesn't actually convey any emotion.

This generation of the picture itself is art, similar to other "experience" art pieces. Its referred to as immersive art.

>If you present it as art, sure.

>But the best part about art is that other people don't have to consider what you do as art.

I often think of art in a way that is remarkably consistent with these statements.

My view was "Art is an invitation to consider" Sticking a banana to a wall becomes art when you do it to make people to engage or think about it.

Engagement is not compulsory, but I think the invitation might be. Sticking a banana to a wall to keep it away from ants is simple utility, not intended to be artistic expression.

>I don't have to believe your AI generated slop is art because it doesn't actually convey any emotion.

You don't have to engage, but choosing to denigrate is actively hostile engagement. There are plenty of people using AI for expression of ideas. There are also people doing a bunch of dumb things. Lowbrow art is still art in it's own way. Much of it may have very little to say, but I don't think there are very many people who have pretensions that low effort images are much more than a kind of doodling.

> You don't have to engage, but choosing to denigrate is actively hostile engagement.

Apologies, that was not my intent, more to make people think because some people seemed to be confused about what is the art here.

Sticking a webcam through a filter to produce a pretty output isn't necessarily original, but that doesn't stop it being interactive art. Some folks here seem to think the image is art, whereas I see the whole as the art. A single static image that had been captured and run through the filter then presented doesn't really have very much to say. The installation can be interpreted in many ways and grows to be more than the sum of its parts.

Is it generating images?

Could it be co-adopted by people with vision or interpretation issues such as prosopagnosia?

Low effort/low brow art is still art.

Clicking on "create me an image" and having Bing generate a picture doesn't give the world anything as it enters zero effort, which ultimately reduces the creators investment, and therefore the viewers investment, into the piece.

If I had to drag myself across a desert in order to press that Bing button, would it be art then? (I think, in that example, the act of pressing the button might be the art - a performance).

Which aligns with this piece in the story.

Sticking a webcam shot through an AI filter is a pretty low bar. What makes it art that anyone other than the creator would care about is the real-time rendering. Thats the art that people are interested in discussing.

People do all sorts of walks as art. Whether thats Drag or a parade where the art is to make the walk interesting, or walking through the desert, laying on a bed of nails where the "walk" (or laying down) isn't necessarily interesting but the passion is.

Pressing the Bing button is unlikely to evoke any passion except from Bing product management.

shl0ms exploded a lambo to pieces and sold those as NFT's

crypto-art is art too

a car can be art

ceci n'est pas une pipe

it’s true (i was there)

invite me on next installation

An interesting viewpoint for sure.

I would dissect it though since it’s not pure anger - frustration maybe, a complex one and caused by additional input. E.g. anxiety (you took what could be mine) or internal discord (after observing act of injustice).

I’d argue that it’s an act of random (again, like a cloud) and wouldn’t treat it as art.

But, if you’d park it sideways in front of the mall entrance, blocking it considerably, I’d consider it art (in my imagination I can see the headlines about artist making a statement against the overconsumption).

Yet art is art, so everyone has their own definition. I’d prefer “positive” emotions, so awe, nostalgia, etc., but I don’t see reason why anger should be excluded.

<<proceeds to print “THIS IS AN ART INSTALLATION” message to put behind the windshield>>

Art is something that grabs you and is also unique in the way it presents the subject. Also, there has to be skill involved, otherwise the whole thing goes up in smoke if it feels cheap or superficial.

A banana on the wall is not art, because it involves an everyday object in an everyday setting.

You might feel it's art, but if that's the case, then you haven't exposed yourself to true art enough to have a pool of experience or only seen so far superficial examples.

> I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them.

Is that not what was meant by "surfacing the inner world?"

I think this would be cooler if the camera was somewhere different than the frame. Looking at an artistic mirror seems a little boring. Maybe make a 2nd one, and put it in someone else's house, and then feed the camera from one into the other. So you can look at the 'reflection' of someone else and have these little moments where you're both looking at the picture at the same time. Heck, make many so you never know who you're looking at. It'll be the Omegle of picture frames.

that's a good idea but something completely different than OP wanted to accomplish.

i remember that this has been done already as an art installation in public places so people could see - and interact - with others from around the world.

edit: like this here - https://www.inavateonthenet.net/news/article/vc-art-installa...

> an art installation in public places so people could see - and interact - with others from around the world

Sure, and it wasn't long before this happened:

> It took less than a week for people eager to share their ‘assets’ with the world to shut down the visual portals set up between the cities of Dublin and New York on 8 May. Although the project was aimed at bringing people together and connecting cultures, a few visitors to the locations have decided to take the invitation of getting to know others to a whole other level.

https://traveltomorrow.com/new-york-dublin-portals-shut-down...

(One wonders why flashing is such a big problem that the whole installation needs to be shut down; but it seemed quite obvious from the start that people would try to do this...)

We're getting quite good at nudie filters. Can we not just black out the goods or the whole screen if they're detected?

That's pretty cool!

You should get a couple of old-work low voltage brackets and brush wall plates (https://www.homedepot.com/p/Carlon-1-Gang-Non-Metallic-Low-V..., https://www.homedepot.com/p/Commercial-Electric-1-Gang-Brush...), and route the power cable through the wall. It would look much nicer.

Really neat idea, I'd also love to have on my bookshelf.

> The main issue with the current setup is the low frame rate.

I'd call it a feature rather a limitation, it's not bad that I have second to process the image for a bit.

I would even increase the update frequency to 5 - 15 minutes and let it capture and generate a new image whenever it detects something changing / moving.

Have you considered a high frame rate morph effect between images? That would increase the effective frame rate and probably would look pretty cool.

Even a simple crossfade.

That’s the technique I used on a piece that does inpainting across an image at a rate of about 1 image every 8 seconds - I ‘melt’ the results in for the duration until the next patch is ready: https://hardwork.party/aws-epoch-optimizer/

I actually think the high frame rate will look worse unless the styling changes less in between frames. Otherwise, it's going to look erratic and there will be a ton of "popping" if each frame changes as much as the frames in the current video. Or maybe op wants it to be a chaotic feeling.

Many years ago I did a couple of hundred variations on the mona lisa in photoshop, and stacked them as a gif. As the eyes remained unchanged in each frame, they gave a fixed point you could focus on while the rest of the face strobed chaotically. It was a nice effect.

> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?

I really like this direction. I understand why some object to the genai approaches, but in practice sometimes I get an idea of something cool and don't have the skills to create it myself. I'm not going to invest months/years to create each of those ideas and they're not important enough to spend hundreds of dollars that a skilled artist would request. Now there's a way people can try generating the thing and may end up enjoying it - and that's great. (At least for personal use, it gets a bit complicated for commercial purposes)

But unfortunately they did not.

Not everyone could build what is presented here, and inadvertently they have validated that it requires skill to produce a machine that distorts your reality. The pictures being produced isn't the art.

This is assuming an unimplemented idea has value. I think the value we attribute to an idea is actually the dissemination of the idea to others. Often a sufficiently radical idea is difficult for others to grasp and therefore an example must be created by the originator of the idea.

So when someone says "That's a great idea" what they mean is "That's great work".

Time will tell if others see an idea backed by AI work as valuable. Can they even tell? Who knows.

> The main issue with the current setup is the low frame rate.

I think lowering the framerate to something between 0.3 to 1 fps might even be better!

Let’s hook it up to a sentiment and toxicity model, and then if you’re being too negative online, it will start to deform you into a monster, we could have a real Picture of Dorian Gray!

I chuckled, but that is actually an interesting ( and very doable ) fun project idea.

This is actually such a cool idea.

Prize for the most power-hungry mirror.

I also notice that the paintings are not stable over small changes in the inputs.

To me, that’s the charm.

How about changing the style every time the viewer blinks?

Is there any way to freeze some of the images?

I thought some of them would be awesome to keep (e.g. pfp or lockscreen photo).

I think the low framerate adds a unique ambience, at least to me, watching the recorded videos. It gives time to appreciate the art style and generated features. It also feels like a time lapse of gradual changes. I could imagine it being annoying to look at in real time though.

I would love to see you add a networking layer so that I could connect my frame to a random one somewhere in the universe. Then I could see another person through this style transfer. They could see me. It would be like an art chat roulette.

It would be cool to intercept the input from a webcam, transform it like this, and then present it to the OS as another virtual camera so you could select it in Teams or Zoom or whatever.

You can do this with OBS.

I don't have anything to say about the artistic value, but as a part-time tool collector with dreams of being a handy person, this passage was the most interesting:

I used a puncher to cut a hole in the frame’s cardboard for the camera (drills didn’t work).

I would love some more detail, or just people's interpretations ... in what manner can a drill fail to "work" on cardboard? There can be issues with tearing, perhaps, that I think punching works around nicely.

It's too soft and layered, the drill tends to chew it up. I've had some luck putting duct tape over both sides and drilling through that, but for very clean holes you'd still probably have to clean the edges with a craft knife.

My guess is he tried with a wood drill bit, which will tear cardboard and make a big mess. For cardboard, or plastic, you need a metal drill bit.

That's right, sorry for not explaining further in the post! The cardboard was so thin than neither wood nor metal drill bits made a clean enough cut.

I've had success by putting the material between two pieces of wood and drilling through it all. Ideally you clamp it, but you can also just kind of push down on it.

This really does change the interaction with art. As a future expansion it might be neat to recognize images on camera that would make for interesting art (i.e. detection of people/animals or recognition of certain styles of composition) as well as being able to choose amongst different styles.

It seems sort of akin to some modern art that incorporated TV screens and video to make dynamic installations, like Nam June Paik.

reminds me of the classic 80's "Take on Me" music video

The interesting thing to me about this, and most other demos, is what people are simulating as examples of art. In this case, it's a very specific Picasso time period. Others tend to center on fantasy or well-known science fiction painters. This makes sense if your only exposure to art is the internet. Maybe a few Wikipedia sessions and a Google search for "modern art". The actual art world is in a huge transition right now and the idea of this Western dominance of art history is being completely re-evaluated. I haven't seen many demos of these tools, or AI art in general, that makes use of any actual modern art from the past 20-30 years. I definitely don't see examples from non-European art history (except Ukiyo-e or anime). That says a lot about what most of you expect from tools like this. It's not just technical, it's culturally normative. Think of it, (without looking it up) can any of you name any living artists that have been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in the past 30 years? I see so many strong opinions here about what art is or isn't, but wonder if anybody actually goes to museums or galleries to see what is considered modern art.

I'd love to know the cost of all the materials used in the project and how much time it took you to assemble everything (I didn't see it in the article unless I missed it)

This would definitely be a very cool installation piece for a house or commercial property for people to gather around and talk about!

Sounds cool! I would like pictures with people in the room doing weird things energetically like stand on their chair. Dancing. Confetti booze strange outfits. Bordering the offensive then deleted after 30 minutes.

> Art is ... mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.

I like the phrasing of the first part. But what art is "about" is very subjective.

For me, part of what I look for in art is intentionality - the notion that the artist has crafted each element toward a purpose, consciously or not. The less an artist contributes to the final piece, the less meaning I assign to it.

In this case: I would say that the individual pictures being displayed are not "art" - they have no meaning. But I think the device in whole is a piece of art. That is a creation that surfaces the creator's inner world, because they designed the device, wrote the code, crafted the prompts to achieve pieces that reflected their notion of beauty.

I love this framing (pun unintended) of "art".

Besides what you articulated as the "intention", I often think of the "story" behind the art -- whether an idea in the creator's head was expressed via the piece (or not) makes me go "yes, this is Art" (or not).

By that token, when I see automated projects like this, I think of the "installation" as art, but the pixels or arrangements generated by the piece itself is less art-like IMO.

Yes. I think we attribute the cost of the human sacrifice into the value of the art. It's a like owning 1/80th of a human soul and hanging it on the wall.

>But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world

Oh good lord.

What’s wrong with that? If art is expression shouldn’t everyone have the right to artistic expression? Even people who express themselves with nerdy projects and code and hardware instead of paint and canvas? What do you think art is?

how much does this end up costing to run?

Super cool! I've had similar ideas when I first saw StreamDiffusion. The possibilities are endless

On the low framerate: why get a pi5 when a Jetson Nano could be had for about the same price?

What do you want a high frame rate for when looking at art? What is the frame rate of the Mona Lisa?

What's the frame rate of a zoetrope, a 1920's silent film, Charlie Chaplin's greatest works, Eraserhead?

Not all art is still.

So, why the snark?

It's pretty neat, but I'd never have a webcam steaming everything in view to someone else's server on the internet. It'd be cool if the server ran on my own hardware, and ideally in the frame itself. The privacy policy at runpod.io wouldn't even display in my browsers. (their ToS loaded without an issue).

I wonder if you could do something like this with hardware acceleration (like google coral)

Unfortunately no, they only have a TensorFlow target and none of the hobbyist / released big model image stuff works with it

> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.

Jackson Pollock begs to differ.

Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.

> Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.

Precisely. There is no skill in artistry, it’s rather just a developed sense of style, that doesn’t come from a medium or method, it comes from growing to know oneself.

I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.

> I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.

Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.

> Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.

And spend more time (and intentional effort) in making art! It's like people want a shortcut to end result, when "real" artists know that the process of self-discovery is the reason and means through which they make the art in the first place.

The map is not the territory. The purpose of the journey is the journey itself; the destination is simply a guiding star. A whole lot of aspirational mapmakers think if they only had "this one weird trick," they'd be gods.

Um, no, I want illustrations for my stories. That’s the end, and the means can be whatever. I don’t care to search for self-discovery in that.

That’s a reasonable expectation and desirable outcome in and of itself. Not everything needs to be intended to be art for it to be perceived as such.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

Do you share your stories publicly? I’m curious what kind of stories you would write.

It would be cool to have an HN writing group!

I do, but it’s obscure fanfiction. Admittedly with heavy computer science and AI inspirations, so maybe you’d find it interesting regardless?

It’s over here: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/shards-of-a-br...

I read the prologue and it seems neat! I'm not familiar with the fanfiction scene really, or the works yours is based on. How did the voting work?

I like the pictures, and I can see how using AI would help a lot with that, especially in the context of existing characters, as matching styles and designs is something that AI is likely well-suited to do.

I read a bit about Shugo Chara to see what it's about, and it seems like an interesting series. The way you presented your story reminded me of Steins;Gate a bit with the reality manipulation.

Should I be familiar with the source material in order to appreciate your work better?

Thanks for sharing your work. Are you working on any other pieces?

Any anime recommendations, while you're here?

The voting is pretty much as shown. People vote on what the protagonist (usually Amu) tries to do, I decide what actually happens. It's a kind of communal roleplaying game; a quest, in SV parlance.

I've worked on other stories, but this is the only one right now. As to source material, knowing it would be beneficial, but it's all new to the protagonists and the only one I'd say is a must-have is Shugo Chara. Though not even that; several players did not know anything about Amu in advance. You'll be a little lost, but the wiki entry will suffice for giving you the basic idea. The story's set post-canon, with some divergences, so it starts off by trying to describe the current situation.

And anime... Magilumiere is great. Give it a try.

> The voting is pretty much as shown. People vote on what the protagonist (usually Amu) tries to do, I decide what actually happens. It's a kind of communal roleplaying game; a quest, in SV parlance.

That's pretty cool! At first when I saw the boon/bane thing, I thought you were writing one of those RPG style choose your own adventure gamebooks I remember reading in the 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook

I wasn't disappointed, I just got my hopes up a bit. Once I figured out a bit more about the quest and how it worked, I didn't even look at the comments or votes, just went right to the reader mode.

Have you played any visual novel games or interactive fiction? I think you would be good at making one!

As for that anime, it seems neat from what I've read. I see that it's on Amazon Prime and also seems to have some fansubs maybe? How should I experience it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magilumiere_Co._Ltd.

https://anidb.net/anime/18292

As for myself, I just started watching the new 3D/CGI Gundam anime on Netflix, and it's pretty well done. I think they're using Unreal Engine to animate it, and the production values on it are really quite high, though I know 3D/CGI anime are controversial in the anime fandom, to say the least. I'm a Gundam fan though, and I like what they've done with the opportunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundam:_Requiem_for_Vengeance

https://anidb.net/anime/18096

> Um, no, I want illustrations for my stories. That’s the end, and the means can be whatever. I don’t care to search for self-discovery in that.

Maybe writing a story is your art… Part of self-discovery is in finding out how you desire to express yourself. There’s a reason many books have a an author and an illustrator.

No question about that, but I always get slightly annoyed about people who insist artwork has to be internally fulfilling or whatever.

Great if that’s how it works for you, but for me it’s a means to an end.

Just watched "F for Fake" (Orson Welles, 1973), a documentary of sorts about the great art forger Elmyr de Hory who was able to imitate the style of many of his contemporaries to perfection (Modigliani, Matisse, etc.), fooling the painters themselves!

At one point in the movie his biographer says

> I think Elmyr's problem for years and the reason why he could not succeed as a painter in his own right was that the type of life he led prohibited him from having a personal vision.

Elmyr had great skill, greater than anyone alive perhaps, but he had nothing to say.

> Elmyr had great skill, greater than anyone alive perhaps, but he had nothing to say.

I would argue that he spoke volumes and had a vision so vast that he was able to take perspective from any other’s view. What a rich life Elmyr must have led.

This is great and all, but just to address the 'art' issue. It's the creation of the 'mirror' that's artistic (to whatever extent running a copy of stable diffusion is a creative act), not looking in the mirror. The enormous number of affordances of 'AI art' will be like this - passively consumptive, creative only in the sense that chatting about a movie or playing a video game can be creative.

All of us can already 'surface the inner world' (which I think is actually a pretty great definition of art, or part of one at least) - it's not skill based, it's practice based. Just start drawing, or writing or progaming with Processing or futzing with Ableton or what have you. Skill builds over time, expression needs no automation.

This is very cool and I applaud you OP.

This is great.

> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?

I don’t think the poor lad knows what Art is.

Put another way, we have hundreds of years of recorded philosophical texts and diatribes on what constitutes Art, and what art-making is. Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes. We have people who are deemed artists, not necessarily painters but people who are wired a certain way and are industrious with their abilities. Math geniuses attend certain schools and the other pupils may pick up a thing or two from them, but that doesn’t mean the other pupils are geniuses also. So too, do artists walk among us and may do what we do and we may imitate what they do. But that doesn’t put us on equal footing whatsoever.

Art doesn’t select for skill. This is a red herring and a misunderstanding. Art doesn’t select for anything, because if it did it wouldn’t be Art. This is an old somewhat trite topic that, historically, boiled down to no more than a pithy phrase: “Art cannot be taught.” as expounded by many teachers of incredible talent in their own right who have attempted to distill it into teachable material and realized their talent is not transferable as easily as they had hoped.

Most of what you read on this subject is nonsense sold to you by grifters who want your money. Now and today more than ever. I’m all for, say, “Art and Fear” and “The Art Spirit” and even a bit of “War of Art” to name some household items on the subject. These are all great recent texts. But let’s take these for what they are: self-help literature, and nothing more. The further back in literature you go the less of this patting-on-the-back attitude you get, and more serious the subject matter is treated (example: read the lectures on Art by the presidents of the Royal Academy, they are numerous, Archive has them all. One president basically tells students to choose a different profession, discussed as an aside topic in a book on portraiture from that time.)

Elsewhere in the comments people saying how art is simply good taste seem to be oblivious to the creations of artists that led them to make such a blundering conclusion. Your taste wouldn’t exist had an artist not created a thing to begin with.

We’ve used image generators for decades now. It gets the job done. The person using it may be an artist or just someone who wants a dynamic, changing generated image on the wall.

<< Archive has them all.

Thank you. I added those to my reading list. I don't think I ever delved into the topic.

<< Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes.

And yet, here we have someone not burdened by the serious business of art and gives his personal perspective on it. I am not saying a lot of everything is not mostly crap, because it mostly is, but I found this child-like honesty oddly endearing.

<< Art doesn’t select for skill.

Artist without a skill is just a dreamer, who can't put his vision into place. Barrier of entry has been lowered now, but I am relatively certain that was not always the case.

Some optimization suggestions:

- cache the prompting somehow, unless you are doing dynamic stuff with the prompts, the language embeddings generated should be static (this depends on the architecture of the model that you are using, it's only possible with certain setups where the language processing is a separate part in the pipeline)

- consider fine-tuning an img to img model with your current outputs instead of using a language-coupled model. My intuition is that this is currently significantly over-engineered on the ML side.

- Play around with local hardware acceleration instead of sending everything to the cloud, you also probably don't need particularly high resolution for the images either.

Love it thanks, will look into it!

Micasso

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