Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Gimp is amazing and like Blender has replaced my use of proprietary tools in the area of 2D and 3D editing.

My wishlist for GIMP 4 is to see AI tooling integrated by default:

- Image generation that will do completions based on prompts on arbitrary areas. Something like this: https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/photoshop/generative-fill....

- AI super-resolution. There are a lot of options now that can dramatically improve sharpness, akin to Topaz Gigapixel: https://www.topazlabs.com/gigapixel

- Meta's segment anything integrated so that there is no need to painstakenly select objects. https://segment-anything.com (Does it support sub-pixel fuzzy selections?). It would also label everything in the model, which leads to...

- Built-in model context protocol (MCP) support to allow for automated control by agentic AI. (See what is possible with Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgKuLYUv00)

Of course it should only download the models the first time someone needs them.

There's a plugin system where you can have such things. Their registry has been down for years. I think over 10.

https://www.gimp.org/registry/

If you want to maintain a new one, i'm sure it'd be very appreciated.

Realistically the easiest pull would be to just take some existing repo system like npm/pypi/dockerhub and then fork the tools a bit and spin up an instance on some cheap cloud vps.

Enough of these things already exist, just take an existing one and modify it. The scripts really aren't that big

That is a good idea. Maybe someone who do a public call for a lead maintainer for that. Posting this as a sub-comment may not be the best way to get large visibility.

I'm surprised there's no framework or tool that makes creating these things easier.

I did some LLM chatting and couldn't find this so excuse me if it's well known and I'm out of the loop

The reason that Adobe can do AI gen "out of the box" is because you're paying for it (Firefly).

If GIMP were to implement it, they'd probably have to go the same route as Krita and either spin up or call out to a running instance of Automatic1111 or ComfyUI.

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

MCP would be cool, but it would be significantly harder than Blender which can represent the "world" as a formal set of expressions. MCP for GIMP would be dealing with layers of rasterized data which would mean integrating with YOLO/LLava/etc in order to make sense of it. It would be neat, but it'd be a daunting integration and potentially VERY VERY slow.

> If GIMP were to implement it, they'd probably have to go the same route as Krita

They definitely should run it locally. But there are many ways of running image generation model locally.

> The reason that Adobe can do AI gen "out of the box" is because you're paying for it

But you can say the same thing about any feature of GIMP. Your comment makes me wonder why we can use the pencil tool since we didn't pay for it.

You could get the same stable diffusion stuff for GIMP two years ago: https://github.com/ArtBIT/stable-gimpfusion

For your first point, I'd recommend using Krita (https://krita.org/) and its generative AI plugin: https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion / https://www.interstice.cloud/

do we really need to add AI to everything?

These 4 features are AI related but each of them have separate strong use cases. Looking at popular commercial tools like Adobe Photoshop and Topaz tools for inspiration is just logical -- it means there is clear demand for these features among users.

> it means there is clear demand for these features among users.

No, it just means executives want to add AI to things. So many of these "But with AI" are not lead by customers but by executives wanting to make sure their product isn't seen as behind the times.

Do you have anything to back up that blanket statement?

The knee-jerk dismissal of all AI features is as bad as the pointless addition of AI features. Some AI features are pointless, some AI features are useful. Segmenting, generative fill, object removal, AI scaling are all examples of really useful AI-assisted features.

Yeah, the anti-AI responses I got to this seem to come from people who don't actually need to use GIMP to do real world tasks, but they are sure vocal in their opinions as to the direction that tool should go. Hilarious.

That isn't always true, there's plenty of times where companies push features that users don't want. No Chrome users have been clamouring for more ads and more invasive tracking, for example.

I really hope open source/free software doesn’t get a bunch of AI nonsense added to it just to satisfy some KPI somewhere.

I'm a user of GIMP who wants those features, not a KPI driver...

Your stuff is interesting but I remember reading about GEGL and non destructive editing coming to Gimp back in... 2008?

So your stuff will probably happen after you retire.

Also, AI stuff needs to bake a bit more until it's worth adding as an extra maintenance burden, so maybe waiting 10+ years for it isn't such a bad idea.

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