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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

How useful actually is this? It generates SVGs of pelicans on bicycles, sure, and some of them are (almost) spatially correct. But, none of them look good.

AI image generation suffers from this more generally. You can generate pictures of pelicans, sure. Newer models clearly generate images with more pelican-ness than before. But all of it is still uglier than sin. Drawing things accurately is one thing, making results that someone might actually want to use (without embarrassing themselves) is something else.

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Just today I asked Claude Fable to take an SVG map and add a circle with a 150 mile radius around a specific city, cutting off the circle at the edge of certain boundaries. It came back a minute later with more or less exactly what I wanted, saving me maybe 5 to 10 minutes of photoshop time. It’s almost certainly not perfect, but I didn’t need it to be perfect, just a legible representation for a group of 20ish people.

OTOH I had Fable laying out a 3d broadcast room, and as part of the assets it sourced, it grabbed a camera. Makes sense. There were a lot of problems with the scene - backwards facing props and clipping everywhere. But the true coup de grace was a mansized, more like a giant sized, 35mm camera pointing at everything. I was seriously confused for a minute until I realized what had happened.

I used Claude to plan some landscaping, and it gave me SVG diagrams of flower beds showing where to place plants and their approximate mature size. It was pretty useful.

Even if the models don't break through any particular "uglier than sin" barrier, with a bit more work, presumably the SVGs could become importable into an editor that would let a human apply taste and discretion. Seems to me like a heck of a head-start.

As for conventional diffusion-model stuff, I happen to think there are some pieces of AI art that still look really good even knowing they're AI.

AI can generate a fairly satisfactory SVG for a favicon now (programmer art quality at least).

Great for charts, illustrations etc, can do much more with SVG than pretty pictures. Good spatial understanding in an SVG can be really nice for model to have

I used it to generate some icons for my app recently, I found it a pleasantly useful feature already in its current state. Before this I would’ve had to close the code editor, open something like Illustrator, use something like a tablet (or struggle with the mouse and keyboard), and export the result. For something like a generic icon for a button, or a simple geometric figure, this always felt too tedious. On the other hand, my apps looked visually impressive before the AI and people valued my artistic ability more. So there’s that… Not every software engineer also had an eye for design. With AI generation, they can bridge that gap.

Vibecoding a SVG based metroidvania as we speak! This is gonna be lit!

Would it be useful if the models were actually good at it?

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