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Comment by x187463 | Hacker News Reader

This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. I bet all of that disappears over the next few months.

On another note, and perhaps others are feeling similarly, but I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff, LLMs included. If, ten years ago, you told me I would have access to tools like this, I'm sure I would have responded with a never ending stream of ideas and excitement. But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day.

Maybe it's the unreliability on all fronts, I don't know. I ask a lot of programming questions and appreciate some of the autocomplete in vscode, but I know I'm not anywhere close to taking full advantage of what these systems can do.

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I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results, which is good enough for the presentations I hold, online pet projects (created a squirrel-themed online math-learning game for which I previously would have needed a designer to create squirrel highschool themed imagery) and memes. For many, many websites this is going to be good enough.

> For many, many websites this is going to be good enough.

It was largely a solved problem though. Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos. My current company's website is full of them.

For business use cases, those galleries were already so extensive before AI image generation, that what you wanted was almost always there. They seemingly looked at people's search queries, and added images to match previously failed queries. Even things you wouldn't think would have a photo like "man in business suit jump kicking a guy while screaming", have plenty of results.

Really? What stock service would have a selection of squirrels in a high school setting doing various math or other subject related things?

To think any/all combined stock services would be the end all is just unrealistic. Sure, someone one might have settled on something just because they got tired of scrolling (much like streaming video services), that does not mean they are happy with their selection. Just happy to be done.

Now, with generativeAI, they can have squirrels doing anything in any setting they can describe. If they don't like it, they can just tweak the description until they are happy. It's an obvious plus for them.

I never drank the kool-aid to be all gung-ho on this boom/fad, but I'm not going to be so obstinate that I refuse to accept some people find it quite useful. May someone make all the squirrel attending highschool generative art they want, but you can't tell me some stock place is good 'nuff for everything.

I searched Shutterstock for squirrels doing math. Here's a squirrel doing math: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/pensive-squirrel-d...

Yes, it's obvious that if your use case is obscure enough, or you need a ton of unique images, they won't work, which is why I said "largely a solved problem".

But image generation these days is simply image search anyway. Wether or not the image existed before is almost irrelevant.

I've never searched for an image from a stock vendor the way one would prompt a generative model. The stock vendor's metadata/keyword about its images were never that in-depth.

Also, you're implying that a generative system is so fast that it could create so many variations of your prompt to fill in the search results page in an acceptable time. That's a joke

AI is mediocre at a lot of things, but it makes a damn fine upgrade from stock photos. This is the art that’s going to get replaced by this tech, shitty low effort stuff. Images where you just need a picture of X because people are expecting a picture.

It’s the same with code. I don’t think software engineers will really be replaced, but small web dev agencies have a good reason to be nervous. Why would you pay someone to make a website for your restaurant when 3-5 prompts will get you there?

3-5 prompts doesn't get you a professional restaurant website.

The key word is professional. A good restaurant website begins with taking good photos of the premises and the food. AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.

There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.

HTML templates and themes have been around for a long time. AI can basically spit out those templates and themes, which is great. But there's still a lot to do before you get to www.fancy-dining.com.

Most restaurant websites don't have photos of the food. Certainly not professional ones. Pan around randomly on google maps then zoom in and find the nearest strip mall, then go down the line checking the websites of restaurants there. Most are generic crap and you'll be lucky if the menu online is even complete. If they have food photos it's probably smartphone pictures taken by the owner's kid.

I do this a lot, far more than I actually go to restaurants, because I like adding small business details to OSM. There are a few that have their shit together but the overwhelming majority do not.

You've evaluated a tiny sample of restaurant websites and extrapolated to make claims about the overwhelming majority - in the millions, across the globe.

"Most are generic crap" doesn't mean restaurants aim for that benchmark when they decide to get a website.

I'm not sure if you're refuting the point I was making, which I'll clarify. "Restaurant website" could be a stand-in for any basic small business website. The claim was that AI threatens small web dev agencies who make small business websites. I don't think it will, as millions of small businesses want something better than "generic crap" or cookie-cut AI copy paste; AND we've had site-building services, social media pages, and template-driven approaches for a long time.

> AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.

Neither will a web developer?

> There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.

Bolt.new can handle all these quite easily. Although I know several restaurants with very simple websites that have a few pics, a menu and their hours.

No, but you can do the photos and have the AI fix them or make suggestions about them.

> Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos.

And now these image-generating models are giving us the equivalent of stock photos without the pesky issue of attribution or royalties. What a wonderful time to be alive.

My problem with finding enjoyment in this is the same problem I have when using cheat codes in games: the doing part is the fun part, getting to the end or just permutations of the end gets really boring.

Trying to draw a squirrel when you have no artistic talents or experience is not the fun part.

I've produced my own music recordings in the past and I've hired musicians to play the instruments that I cannot. Having exasperated recording engineers watch my 5,000th take on a drum fill that I absolutely cannot play is not the fun part. Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.

> Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.

Is having the ai spit out idea after idea fun in the same way for you?

He's not talking about using AI to generate ideas, he's talking about using AI to turn ideas into reality.

>I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results

May I ask what you use? I'm not yet even a paid subscriber to any of the models, because my company offer a corporate internal subscription chatbot and code integration that works well enough for what I've been doing so far but has no image generation.

I have tried image generation on the free tier but run out of free use before I get anyway pleasing.

What do you pay for?

I was generating pictures to use for a little game I made with my six and ten year old kids. They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly, they were laughing and we had a ton of fun. The only thing that disappointed me was I got throttled. We’d need to pay for API image gen to get it even faster.

I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I also make a lot of shitpost memes to my friends to trash talk in the long running turn based war game we’ve all been playing, like “make a cartoony image of a dog man and a Greek giant beating up a devil” and the picture it gave was just hilarious and perfect, like an old timey Popeye cartoon.

Two years ago I was spending three hours using local models like Stable Diffusion to get exactly what I wanted. I had to inpaint and generate 100 variations which would have been insanely expensive if I wasn’t powering it with my own hardware.

Now I get something good in minutes, it’s crazy really.

> They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly

They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.

> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun

I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.

Thanks. Which service do you use please? I'm wanting to try a paid service, just want to know which ones people recommend.

I've used Midjourney and chatGPT. Midjourney is better for rapid iteration, cycling through options faster, and to a large extent getting "weirder". It's easier to tweak using parameters.

ChatGPT is far, far superior (especially now) when you want something more specific that you've already imagined. But it's slower, and unlike Midjourney you don't get four versions to choose to build and iterate on, you get a single image that takes longer to load.

    > four versions to choose to build and iterate on

How does this work? How do you ask a model to produce four different variations? Or do they have four different models run the same inference?

There's some noise in the process, so you won't get the same results if you ask the same model the same prompt 4 times. Most of the services that do this just ask the same model 4 times with a different random seed, as far as I can tell.

You don't ask to run four models, it's just that every single prompt you give it will return four models. You can then choose to have one of them iterated on, or upscaled.

If you're still not sure let me know and I'll show a screenshot.

Feels like you didn't answer the question. i know you weren't who was asked, but still.

The new ChatGPT image generation is insane. It's available on the free tier, just strongly rate limited.

If you use this technology, you're actively harming creative labor.

Whatever. I wrote and co-wrote ten albums and my total take was $3.

The market is saturated and the way it works means ten get rich for every million artists. I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.

Of course there's a lot of talent out there, "wasted", but I think that's always been the case. How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?

I actually decided I'd probably never write music again after 1-shot making a song about the south Korea coup attempt several months ago. I had the song done before the news really even hit the US. Why would I destroy my own hearing writing music anymore when I can prompt an AI to do it for me, with the same net result - no one cares.

here's the 3-shot remix, the triangle cracks me up so much that i had to upload it https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/coup-detat-symphony-remix

the "original" "1-shot" is on my soundcloud page as well. https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a...

it's in lojban. That's why you can't understand it. Yes. Lojban. Brings a tear to my eye every time i hear it. fkin AI

[0] more my style - hold music for our PBX https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music also all my stuff is CC licensed, mostly CC0 at this point.

> How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?

(Just a small comment out of context of the remaining discussion:)

Maybe not many? It could be that "cultural attention" is limited and there's not much space at the top anyways. In other words: It might be that there's always a few famous artists that get remembered and the rest is forgotten. Same as winning the world cup: There's always a team that wins and it says nothing about the quality in a universal way. At best it says something about quality relative to the competition.

(Not sure I'd fully get behind the argument i composed here. But I found it interesting.)

do you think that if the Beatles never existed, some other group would have absorbed their fame, like a power vacuum being filled? I've wondered this before.

Or maybe they just really were that good.

> I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.

It hasn't. Look up the collapse of the viability of music as a career. Jaron Lanier has written on this.

Can you elaborate how there's no possible way to use this technology without actively harming artists?

If a classroom of 14 year olds are making a game in their computer science class, and they use AI to make placeholder images... Was a real artist harmed?

The teacher certainly cant afford to pay artists to provide content for all the students games, and most students can't afford to hire an artist either.. they perhaps can't even legally do it, if the artist requires a contract... they are underage in most countries to sign a contract.

This technology gives the kids a lot more freedom than a pre-packaged asset library, and can encourage more engagement with the course content, leading to more people interested in creative-employing pursuits.

So, I think this technology can create a new generation of creative individuals, and statements about the blanket harm need to be qualified.

> This technology gives the kids a lot more freedom than a pre-packaged asset library, and can encourage more engagement with the course content, leading to more people interested in creative-employing pursuits.

This is your opinion. I don't see how these statements connect to each other.

You might have heard this: it's helpful to strive to be someone only a few years ahead of you. Similar to this, we give calculators to high-schoolers and not 3rd graders. Wolfram-Alpha is similarly at too high a level for most undergraduate students.

Following this, giving an image generator to kids will kill their creativity in the same way that a tall tree blocks upcoming sprouts from the sun. It will lead to less engagement, to dependence, to consumerism.

Scams beget more scams

Creative labor is not entitled to the work parent comment is describing. We employ labor because it is beneficial to us, not merely because it exists as an option. Creative labor’s responsibility is to adapt to a changing world and find roles where their labor is not simply produced / exceeded by a computer system.

Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.

Creative labor is going the way of manual labor.

No, I disagree. If anything, all of the (mostly rich) STEM people that I know spend a large portion of their disposable income on things and experiences that creative people make: Music, film, restaurants, art, books/magazines, etc. Image and video generation via LLMs will become one more tool for creative people to make new & cool stuff.

Only if there was ever any chance you would have hired some for that task.

I was never going to hire a professional artist to sketch shit up for me. I have replaced MS Paint, not harmed "creative labor".

All labor is bad.

Interesting philosophy, what is this predicated on? Do you mean that people should not have to work for a living, ie labor versus play?

Is that not self evident? When people engage in labor for the task itself (as opposed to a heavily abstracted version of not wanting to starve) we generally refer to that as a hobby.

So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.

It is not always evident especially when it comes to a site all about capital accumulation like HN, more due to its association with a venture capital firm.

Statistically, Jane Street probably employs at least a few communists.

What do you mean? For example, are vets or artists working to pay their bills laboring or practicing a hobby?

Aside from artists that make it big it seems like the majority of them are forced to make compromises in order to continue practicing their desired craft full time. Much of their behavior is dictated by "not starving" rather than their personal preferences.

And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".

Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?

Agreed. I am firmly on the side of Capital.

We aren't in the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism stage just yet, so labor is a necessary evil.

I'm not convinced LLMs are the road towards Minds, and I'm pretty sure the Culture would think we're a bit of a mess (I'm pretty sure they literally did in one of the final books), but who knows maybe I'm wrong!

I've never used a stock photo site before, so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand".

I've used stock photo sites occasionally but I use vector art and icon sites multiple times a week. Even today, I used an few different sites while designing some stuff on Canva.

The reason I don't use AI is because it gives me far less reliable and impossible to specify results than just searching through the limited lists of human made art.

Today, for undisclosed reasons, I needed vector art of peanuts. I found imperfect but usable human made art within seconds from a search engine. I then spent around 15 - 25 minutes trying to get something closer to my vision using ChatGPT, and using the imperfect art I'd found as a style guide. I got lots of "huh that's cool what AI can do" but nothing useful. Nothing closer to my vision than what I started with.

By coincidence it's the first time I'vr tried making art with AI in about a year, but back then I bought a Midjourney account and spent a month making loads of art, then installed SD on my laptop and spent another couple of weeks playing around with that. So it's not like I'm lacking experience. What I've found so far is that AI art generators are great for generating articles like this one. And they do make some genuinely cool pictures, it blows my mind that computers can do this now.

It's just when I sit down with a real world task that has specific, concrete requirements... I find them useless.

Their main application appears to be taking blog posts and internal memos and making them three times longer and use ten times the bandwidth to convey no more information. So exactly the application AI is ‘good’ at.

If anything stock image websites are even worse at this then AI. With AI you come up with an image idea, then try to make the AI produce something close to it. With stock images you come up with an image idea, then hope some photographer had a similar idea and uploaded it to a stock website.

>so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand".

Other than stock photos, porn is the killer app for that, but most of the AI companies don't want to allow that.

How about remove blur from your photo, remove blocking items, denoise darks and fixing whiteouts. Granted it's not quite there yet for everything but it's pretty close.

I have the Gemini app on my phone and you can interact with it with voice only and I was like oh this is really cool I can use it while I'm driving instead of listening to music.

I can never think of anything to talk to an AI about. I run LM local, as well

Have it interview you (as-in a job interview) on your specialisation. Works your interviewer skills.

Ask it to teach you a language.

DnD works really well (the LLM being the game-master).

DnD does not work really well, I've tried that with LLMs before

That is a very interesting point about how little use of AI most of us making day to day, despite the potential utility that seems to be lurking. I think it just takes time for people and economies to adapt to new technology.

Even if technological progress on AI were to stop today, and the best models that exist in 2030 are the same models we have now, there would still be years of social and economic change as people and companies figure out how to make use of novel technology.

Unless I'm doing something simple like writing out some basic shell script or python program, it's often easier to just do something myself than take the time to explain what I want to an LLM. There's something to be said about taking the time to formulate your plan in clear steps ahead of time, but for many problems it just doesn't feel like it's worth the time to write it all out.

I find that if a problem doesn't require planning it's probably simple enough that the LLM can handle it with little input. if it does require planning, I might as well dump it into an LLM as another evaluator and then to drive the implementation.

Image generation is still very slow. If it generated many images instantly like Google’s image search, it would be a lot more fun to use, and we would learn to use it more effectively with practice.

Some of the image generation systems are very fast.

>Image generation is still very slow.

Only because the free ones slow things down.

> They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together.

Noticed tht.

Maybe it's my algorithm but YouTube is seemingly filled with these videos now.

They insist on feeding me AI generated videos about "HOA Karens" for some odd reason.

True, I do enjoy watching the LawTubers and sometimes they talk about HOAs but that is a far stretch from someone taking a reddit post and laundering it through the robots.

Youtube Studio is has build in AI thumbnail functionality. Google actively encourages use of AI to clickbait and to generate automatic AI replies to comments ala onlyfaps giving your viewers that feeling of interaction without reading their comments.

All my music cover images are AI generated. At the same time I refuse to listen to AI music. We're all going to sink alone on this one.

What's frustrating me is if I tell the Youtube algo 'don't recommend' to AI music video channels it stops giving me any music video channels. That's not what I want, I just don't want the AI. They need to seperate the two. But of course they need to not do that with AI cover images because otherwise it would harm me. :)

Probably is your algorithm as mine is pretty good in not showing me those low effort channels. Check out extensions like PocketTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow to manage your YouTube feeds better.

I was wondering yesterday how AI is coming along for tweening animation frames. I just did a quick search and apparently last year the state of the art was garbage:

https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-anima...

Maybe this multimodal thing can fix that?

That blog post is a year old.

There has been a lot of progress since then: https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/

Very impressive. This is going to result in an explosion of content creation by pro studios, just as CG with cel-shading renderers did. I greatly prefer the hand-drawn + AI tweened look to the current low-budget CG 3D models look.

Yeah it will be much better than the low budget 3D models in anime, hopefully there will be a production ready product that works at a high enough resolution and studios will probably adopt it instead of using cheap labor.

Most of the professionals in this industry actively despise this technology.

That's true, but it will likely be newer studios with younger professionals who are going to be using it, much as Miyazaki doesn't like CGI either yet it's widely used now in anime. The young drive the advances while the older eschew them, that's generally how human progress has been.

I don't even think it will be newer studios and that's it, probably well known studios will adopt it after a production ready solution is presented and battle tested, I doubt many will complain about not making in between frames. Probably newer studios with a smaller budget will just test it first.

I doubt they will have a choice given the price difference.

This is arguably a good thing because if production cost drops it should mean either higher quality or more content.

The production of works that use AI will drop, while the cost to produce higher quality works - works that don't use AI - will remain the same. All we'll get is more AI slop.

Why presuppose that high quality works can't be produced with the help of (near future) AI tooling? Just because you can produce slop with AI doesn't mean that you have to.

Because there are lots of verysmarts here that think they know what's best for industries they have no training or experience in.

A restaurant near me has a framed monitor that displays some animated art with a scene of a cafe on a street corner. I looked closely and realized it was AI. Chairs were melted together, text was gibberish, trees were not branching properly etc.

If a local restaurant is using this stuff we're near an inflection point of adoption.

It's hard to let them ruin wild because unreliability.

I've built a simracing tool that's about 50% ai code now, and ai is mostly the boilerplate, accelerating prototyping and most of the data structure packing unpacking needed

It never managed to did a pit stop window prediction on its own, but could create a reasonable class to handle tire overheating messages

All in all what I can say from this experiment is that it enabled me to get started as I'm unfamiliar with pygame and the ux is entirely maintained by Ai.

Working on classes togheter sucks as the ai puts too many null checks and try catches making the code unreadable by humans, I pretty much prefer to make sure data is correctly initialized and updated than the huge nest of condition llm produce, so I ended up with clearly defined ai and human components.

It's not prefect yet but I can focus on more valuable thing. And it's a good step up from last year where I just used it to second check and enrich my technical writing and coverting notes into emails.

With vision and image generation I think we're closer to create a feedback loop where the Ai can rapidly self correct it's productions, but the ceiling remains to be seen to understand how far this will go.

I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.

The unreliability and inability to debug are why I think these tools are actually a liability for any serious work.

> I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff

I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.

I have absolutely no use for my photos being annotated by an AI.

I have had use for LLMs and previous era image gens. I haven't got around to trying the last iterations that this article is about yet.

That use I have had of it is very esoteric, an art mostly forgotten in the digital modernity, it's called "HAVING FUN", by myself, for curiosities, for sharing with friends.

That is by far the greatest usage area and severely underrated. AI for having fun, enjoyment that feels meaningful.

If you're a spam-producer or scam artist, or industrial digi-slop manufacturer or merchant of hype, or some other flavor of paid liar(journalist, influencer, spokesperson, diplomat or politician) then sure, AI will also earn you money. And the facade for this money making enterprises will look shinier for every year that passes but it will be all rotting organics and slops behind that veneer, as it have since many years before my birth.

I'm in the game for the fun part, and that part is noticably improving.

That feeling of not knowing what to do with it is an example of humans being stupid. We are all victims of being "Johnny" in this paper:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388

> But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day.

Well, that's because they suck, despite all the hype.

They have a use in a professional context, i.e., as replacement for older models and algorithms like BERT or TF/IDF.

But as assistants they're only good as a novelty gag.

Its because all those projects and ideas you had- where AI could do the fun work and you would be the middle manager- just became a job.

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