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Show HN: Asciilator.com

asciilator.com

24 points4m1rk22 comments

I'm not sure I understand the appeal of sites that are literally a less-than-a-sentence prompt I could have typed myself.

But you didn't, and they did :)

It made me smile, I'm glad they built it.

Well, no, I have many times typed exactly that prompt, because making a hundred billion dollars worth of computer go "brr" to make ascii art is amusing! I just don't understand what the point is of a dedicated site.

Even the UI is created by AI :bushes:

Life is complete, I now have a beautiful 2D ascii elephant!

Random idea: now animate it.

Run the initial generate, keep that result, provide it back to another llm call: “user requested an elephant. you drew this. (object here) generate the next frame of an animation of this.”

Iterate the prompt 2-3 times for cool animated ascii art :)

I like that! Though it's not very smart or consistent at creating ascii art.

Object: pizza pie

       _      
     _|=|__________
    /              \
   /                \
  /__________________\
  |   ________   ___ |
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |      |  |   ||
  |  |______|  |___||
  |_________________|
     ( )      ( )
    (   )    (   )
      ( )    ( )

A flying house?? Very curious!

It was too excited ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tried with `goldfish`

           _.-=-._       
        .-`  '---`  '-.   
      /      .-"-.     \  
     |     /  _  \     |  
      \    \ (_) /    /   
       '-._ '-=-'_.-'     
            '---'

im not sure what this is

Looking at some of the popular suggestions, it can't help with some words, because they are too rude, however, "pen is" returns something rather long.

Haha it's so much fun to play around

please tell me what this is:

      w  c( .. )o    
       \__(  - )    
             /\       
           /(_|_)\   
          w  / |     
             | |

Not quite sure it's working properly. Just saw a shrek face labeled "pikachu", and a column with nothing else labeled "windmill".

Yeah, it sometimes doesn't feel like it. I tried different prompts but it's not that smart at generating ascii art.

Is it using a model to generate the ASCII art?

It’s quite clever.

It's gpt-4.1

Got it — it’s interesting how a text model can generate compelling visual representations that are essentially style-matching.

Matching styles using vision models is not that easy, especially if you want to capture the core subject of the prompt.

Lmao, its so random.

ASCII Art for "bambi":

         ,   ,
        /////|
       ///// |
      /////  |
     |~~~| | |
     |===| |/|
     | B |/| |
     | A / | |
     | M |  |
     | B |  |
     | I | /
     |===|/
     '---'
    /     \
   /       \
  /  .-""-. \
 (  /      \ )
  \/        \/
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
   |        |
  /          \
 /            \

/ \

I'm curious too. Should've make it explain why it generated what generated and as a note :D

Created using FastAPI and HTMX.

cool

       ___
     _/   \_
    /       \
   |         |
   |         |
   |         |
    \_______/
      /   \
     /     \
    /       \
   /         \
  /           \
  |   ___     |
  |  (___)    |
  |           |
   \         /
    \_______/

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