Thiings
thiings.co
thiings.co
"Free", but downloading the entire collection requires a payment.
And according to the terms:
> 4. Content
> You retain all rights to your content. By using our service, you grant us a license to host and display your content.
But then they advertise that anyone can download and use these pictures? Under what license?
That said, that's not my real reason to not use generative AI. My real reason to not use generative AI is that it still kinda sucks at fine details, and that annoys me greatly. These images have a great consistent style to them, but you can see that they're not really that clean. It's possible to tell at a glance, but really possible to see when you zoom in on them, especially depending on the icon. Whether this matters to you is up to taste; Personally, I'd rather have less detailed vector icons that are less technical but are very clean. If I really could do it, though, what I'd actually prefer is hand-crafted icons that are similar to these but with careful attention to detail and no weird artifacts when you pay too close of attention.
I can see that people largely don't care. Some people just have no taste and will jam ugly image generations with obvious, blatant artifacts into their blog posts; you do you. Others will use generative AI carefully in a way where you're not immediately sure if it's gen AI or not, but you probably suspect it; I kinda dislike this, but I can 100% understand it. Thiings is kind of in that group.
Very possible that some day soon genAI will be able to just produce perfect looking icons like this, no text errors, no weird artifacts, maybe even produce them in flawless looking vector SVGs or something. Maybe. For now though, it's tempting, but probably not for me.
I would happily use these as inspiration or reference, though. The broad strokes are good, it's the details that bug me to no end.
also, there's some genAI for SVG's too, so you could -modify- or tune-up these after a first AI gen if thats' your choice.
imho these are tools and will be useful to augment current workflows, a human will be always required to -edit/curate- because thats' what we do
I notice it suffers from the same London Bridge problem, do people never learn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_(Lake_Havasu_Cit...
At this point though, the two bridges should just swap names.
And there's so many weird specific design choices that a human artist would not make. Why is the subway tunnel curved on one side and squared on the other side? Why does the nature journal have two different bookmarks (one of which awkwardly covers the E in NATURE)? Why would a wall outlet have one plug with a ground prong and one without? Why does the Golden Gate Bridge look like an M.C. Escher piece? Why does the bingo ball look more like a pool ball?
Also a lot of items that are very clearly a specific brand, even though the description is generic. The "smart thermostat" is a Nest. The "soccer shoe" is made by Adidas. The "smart speaker" is an Amazon Echo Dot. The "wireless earbuds" are AirPods (and for some reason there's three of them).
And then there's the blatant AI goofs; the logo and text being distorted on the HP 11c calculator, the VCR having an EPICT button and a REE jack, the TARDIS reading "POLIC BOX", the egg timer reading "30 10 10 10 15", the playing cards having two aces of clubs (one of which is red).
I like this handmade/clay aesthetic, but it completely falls apart when it's obvious a human hasn't touched it. If I want handmade icons, I'll pay an artist for them; if I want AI slop, I can generate it myself.
And this decidedly is not a square not: https://www.thiings.co/things/square-knot
Though I don't know if that applies to the region that has the D: face sockets.
https://runware.ai/blog/creating-consistent-gaming-assets-wi...
Maybe helpful?
very manual yes, but gives a lot of control
[edit] the images seem to be made with a transformers model rather than diffusion (e.g. DallE3 vs MidJourney) which is mostly proprietary for now.
you can even use a vision model to generate the style guide for you
I wonder if the reason for that particular cultural norm is the need to manufacture consent for the mass murder (while the government couldn't give a shit either way about sex).
But touch drag inertia is a close second.
But why does it exist? Will it be around in 6 months? What is the backstory / creator of this project?
It's odd that they use their own license language, and doesn't use something explicit like CC-BY-NC. It appears to be a non-commercial, non-distribution license, but otherwise free for personal and commercial use...?
Appears that the site is funded through being able to purchase sponsorship spots for $10 / mo.
The concept minds me of the million dollar homepage, where you could pay a dollar per pixel of advertisement. Here, you're paying a dollar (that's a guess; i didn't check) to get a new object listed in the potentially infinite grid, which gives you a unique URL for that object, an emoji-like reference image, and a one-paragraph description for aliens, were they to land on earth and ask what that object was for.
Basically, looks like an art project that monetizes participation.
(more seriously, the timing on the playback does not seem to account for load time, audio may start a couple words in if not instantly loaded)
I can't consider this an art project when the creator has integrated:
- A lifetime membership fee for downloading all icons
- A sponsorship subscription option that lets subscribers integrate their own icon (ad) into the collection
- A credits system for generating new icons using AI
Nothing against creators getting paid, just saying that this is monetized to the gills and looks more like an indie hackers thing than an art project.
thanks!
I feel like this has been regenerated since this comment was posted - there's no scissors here now, but there _is_ an impossible thread skein (or whatever you call it for thread at least).