14 ms·

DALL·E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts

235 points by dshipper 4y ago

basisword 4y ago
>> I think when Unsplash (the free photography website) was founded in 2013 it killed the old vibe by democratizing access to great photography, and thereby ruining its function as a costly status signal. Disagree with the premise. Great photography (the kind needed for a website anyway) was not costly. I got lots of images for apps and websites from iStockPhoto around that time and it was very inexpensive.
Randy34 4y ago
[dead]
sillysaurusx 4y ago
One thing I’ve been looking forward to for years: type out what kind of art asset you want for your videogame, then use it immediately. Can’t wait for it to be 3D. Replit has the 2D case, and it’s awesome. 13yo me was blocked primarily by lack of art. Unity sort of solved that, but it’s not effortless (or free). Don’t really care if it annihilates everything that makes art special. The more creators, the better the world. (Is there a single counterexample in all of history?)
- johtso 4y ago
  I'm now imagining being able to spawn 3d assets in VR games just by describing them, that would be wild.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Maybe we're not too far from a "real" Scribblenauts. Where you can write what you want to have, and AI model instantiates it with what it thinks is plausible behavior.
    - robbedpeter 4y ago
      This like this are now a matter of automation and tedious scripting - you could easily integrate dall-e into a platform/sprite game builder. You could probably make a killing doing something like a minecraft skin generator... You could do fantastic, on-device 8-bit pixel art generators with clip and so the 80s and 90s spritemaps , and a high level gpt-3/ gpt-neo dialog or adventure generator. If you use constraints wisely, AI-Dungeon and KoboldAI can produce fantastic adventures. I'm excited about AI- augmented have development coming in the near future. Transformers tech is going to diffuse into everything creative and will amplify the quality of games.
- hetspookjee 4y ago
  Not really an argument against but perhaps something to consider: more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest [1], the why is difficult but it might indicate that it becomes harder and harder to find true quality through the noise, but then again art generation does make it easy for someone like me to make something pretty even though it might not be a masterpiece. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-... Edit: added source for the statement of old vs new music
  - wingerlang 4y ago
    > more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest I doubt this, what do you base this on?
    - hetspookjee 4y ago
      I added the link to my comment but I took it from this article from the Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    > more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest Simple explanation? Sounds like your peer group is getting old.
    - garbagetime 4y ago
      Also, there's more and more old music. Although it gets complicated because it's getting easier and easier to make music.
    - Qworg 4y ago
      I recommend you read the article - unless Gen Z is abandoning streaming, the numbers are pretty shocking. While "new" is considered less than 18 months old, the shift is enormous.
- Eduard 4y ago
  > The more creators, the better the world. (Is there a single counterexample in all of history?) E.g. all those auto-generated Wikipedia/StackOverflow/Github content copycats swamping search engines and making the canonical, up-to-date sources harder to find
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Oh, good point. I keep winding up on those whenever I search for python examples. Hopefully stackoverflow outweighs the bad; it also hints that the solution might be to hook dalle3D to an upvote button and let crowdsourcing do its thing. Crowds would never upvote those spam sites to the top. But then again, fighting voting rings is hard too. Ah well, those are all problems for FutureCo. I wanna live in that world!
- TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
  I wonder if it can do a 2d mesh + UV map so we could just load it into blender.
- taigi100 4y ago
  Hey - what exactly do you mean by "Replit has the 2D case"?
  - FractalHQ 4y ago
    I was just about to ask the same thing…
- keiferski 4y ago
  We live in an age of abundance, yet our most prized art/architecture/aesthetic objects in general are from a less abundant time, when values like beauty or craftsmanship were more important than price or accessibility. Most of this AI-generated imagery will just be noise, as “artistic” as using Unsplash photos on your blog post.
- avaer 4y ago
  If you're interested in an open source job trying to do this in the browser using GPT-3 + Codex synthesis, we are hiring. (disclosure: I actually worked with the parent before but we haven't talked in forever :D)
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Ah yes, give everyone with no taste the means to create even more mediocrity. As if we aren't flooded with enough crap already!
  - alimov 4y ago
    Your comment feels good to read, to some extent. We are flooded with low quality content (art, music, books, articles), but we also have more high quality content than (probably) ever before. When you say “give everyone with no taste the means to create more mediocrity” I get the sense that you are overwhelmed with search results or feeds that are saturated with things you find unimpressive. Some of that comes with age (more experiences - that eventually overlap - can/will leave us wanting something new), but I think that’s more of a problem with curation than it is with an over abundance of mediocrity, or a lack of newness. I doubt everyone would hop onto the bandwagon and start creating mediocre <thing>. You have to already be interested in something to partake in its creation, and taste doesn’t magically exist without dabbling and experience and exposure to whatever the <thing> is. So maybe some of what you are seeing is more people exploring their interests and you happen to have similar interests that are maybe more developed or refined or opinionated.
    - tomc1985 4y ago
      Even before the democratization of art we were still flooded with crap. I've spent a lot of time curating through DJing and collecting digital music, and the goal has always been to find that 1% that is amazing in the sea of 99% crap. That sea of 99% crap is beginning to feel like 99.9% if I widen my search parameters to all the "modern" sources that are algorithmically "curated" for me. Call me a gatekeeper but art needs barriers and it needs to be hard. The process of overcoming those barriers contributes to an artists' skill, and conquering the difficult helps them to define their own style. The platform should not be favoring the unaccomplished and the accomplished with equal weight. And the problem isn't just my feed. It's everyone's feed. Peoples' tastes conform to the constraints of the world around them -- if you grow up in a household and culture that loves bluegrass music, for example, there's a strong chance you will like it too. After talking with lots of local brewers I believe that IPAs are super popular around here because they're the most economical kind of beer to make in the climate I live in. Which means there's tons of them on the shelves, which means lots of people will buy them for no particular reason other than because they are there and suddenly now that's the predominant local taste. If we surround people with crap (which is what we are doing), crap becomes the new standard and the new taste, dragging down society along with it. We are currently doing this with computers and look at all the mediocrity we've created in tech so that the smallminded can give their money to enterpreneurs with equal weighting as the nerds. Barriers keep quality high!
QuikAccount 4y ago
As an artist, Dall-E makes a pit in my stomach I can't quite explain.
- alar44 4y ago
  oh no new tools
- ackbar03 4y ago
  Are you worried about it replacing you? Can't you use it as a new tool somehow?
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Consider that Dall-E is using a corpus of older imagery to produce results. Technically it doesn't create original work, the originality comes from the description fed into it. This means the creative part of the process is still the human element.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    More importantly, if impressionist painting style had never been invented, DALL-E probably wouldn't be able to invent it. There's still lots of room for artists to invent new styles.
    - discreteevent 4y ago
      > There's still lots of room for artists to invent new styles. And immediately have that new style monetised by some VC backed startup with an AI that's constantly scanning for new styles.
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        In that case I think you'd have a fairly strong copyright case for "I put effort into coming up with this style, and AICo Inc stole it".
deleted 4y ago
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kingcharles 4y ago
I would argue against his theory of a vibe-shift in web design post-2015. I certainly remember during 2007-2013 that there were enormous amounts of sites using illustrations in a very similar way to how they are now. In fact, I would go as far as to say there are way more sites using full-bleed "hero" photographs now than there were then.
jollybean 4y ago
Shifts happen in design all the time, it's a stampede thing, one thing can start it, the rest follow suit, DalleE may or may not, and then in a few more years something else will happen. DallE is not hugely important, maybe AI in general might be for the next few years.
moconnor 4y ago
Good read, but I can’t shake the feeling that the author ascribes too much to exactly one “vibe shift” in website design and unsplash’s role in it. Web design trends change every few years, for the same signalling reasons that fashion does. It’s about standing out and leaving an impression more than the cost of technology, which is why fashions can repeat. I don’t think DALL-E will change that in the way author supposes, it will reduce the cost slightly but consumers can’t judge cost only novelty and there are plenty of ways to be creative with DALL-E.
- moconnor 4y ago
  To be more precise: the author’s theory predicts that new technology moves design away from the things it makes cheap directly as a status symbol. In this case, DALL-E makes websites move away from images it can create. I contend novelty is the prime mover and technology that opens new possibilities moves designs towards these. Only once the market is saturated with them is new novelty sought. In this case, DALL-E will let websites move towards new styles of e.g. smoothly animating / shifting logos and images, images that are slightly but smoothly different every time you visit the site, regularly styles logos ala Google Doodles, websites with automatic dark/light modes and images to match, websites that match the weather in your location etc. Only after whatever new style is found becomes widespread will it become passé. Testable predictions: let’s go!
angarg12 4y ago
Wow. This article spends a lot of real estate making an argument, but provides little proof to support it. The problem is I personally disagree with the premise. I don't think that so called "vibe shifts" happen based on the parameters described here. It's like when Apple shifted from skeuomorphism to flat/minimalist design. One could argue that minimalistic design is much easier and readily available. But it took Apple to make this creative shift for the masses to follow. Maybe DALL-E and others will make it easy to hire some in Fiverr to produce spades of high quality art for your startup. That works for the copycats. But the trend setters will keep moving according to the same rules.
- greiskul 4y ago
  > But it took Apple to make this creative shift for the masses to follow. Android was doing flat design 2 years before Apple did.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    Many people were doing flat design before Apple did. Scott Forstall famously loved skeuomorphic interfaces. When Apple Maps-gate got him fired, Jony Ive took over software UX design and commanded that everything be flat to match the hardware aesthetic. Apple’s switch to flat design was purely about internal politics and was disconnected from the external design world which had been using these idioms for quite some time.
mg 4y ago
Before the vibe shift, all the cool websites looked like this: Here he shows the sites of Path, Medium, Circa, Squarespace and AirBnB After the vibe shift, websites suddenly started looking very different: Here he shows Intercom, Basecamp, LinkedIn, Lyft, Slack and Notion. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the same sites?
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  I just had a look. Circa and Path are now both defunct, but the remainder (SquareSpace and AirBnB) have kept their pre-vibes look. I must admit they look a bit bland because of it.
noduerme 4y ago
I've been doing web design long enough to have experienced the swing from illustration to photography, and then back to illustration. I don't really think it has to do with signaling wealth or status. Here's what I think: Most web designers are not designers. Most people on web design teams, in hierarchies of management, who style themselves "art directors" or who interface with the clients, are not designers. Most directives that come at people building websites come from marketing teams at companies, composed entirely of people who are not designers. Those people get to work in the morning with one goal: To impress their boss at the corporation by collecting tons of screenshots of other websites and marketing campaigns that have recently been popular, collating them and listing the features that these non-designers think, in their non-design opinion, made those things successful. What you end up with is a feedback loop where every marketing department follows every other one, and demands a copy of the latest trend, without any regard for the company's actual brand. Which designers are then obliged to do, even if we know it's stupid. The longest running brands I represent use a mix of illustration and photography, and that mix is specific to the way they choose to present themselves. In fact, understanding that particular mix for each business, creating style guides that delineate when one thing or the other should be used, and not messing with the mix if it's working is crucial to maintaining consistency and building brand recognition over time. TL;DR, most web designers have no design background, and companies hand too much control over online branding to people who are competent coders but should not be responsible for image. Also, the idea that Dall-E2 or any further iteration is going to replace either photography or illustration at the high end is counterintuitive. The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated.
- bspear 4y ago
  > high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. That actually is the argument the author makes. That companies compete to differentiate from what can be easily generated by anyone.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  > The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. But I think it'll actually be pretty hard to make something that is clearly not AI generated. Remember that to be effective, it needs to be clear to a regular person, not just an expert in AI imagery.
skilled 4y ago
The author does hit a chord. I am personally waiting when I can get my hands on this tech myself so I can use it to generate unique images for my blog posts. Designing them myself is a lot of work and you also have to consider copyright and all that.
- jfoster 4y ago
  Does OpenAI cede copyright to works created by Dall-E? I realize they may encounter some challenges in trying to claim copyright over the images, but will that stop them from trying?
  - webmaven 4y ago
    > Does OpenAI cede copyright to works created by Dall-E? Yes.
deleted 4y ago
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CryptoPunk 4y ago
Twitter Blue subscribers can let Twitter verify their ownership of an NFT profile picture, and then their profile picture comes to be distinguished by a hexagonal frame and a badge indicating which NFT collection it belongs to. If AI does truly make generation of design of all styles costless, NFTs could act as the "Costly Vibe Signals" the article refers to.
- raghavtoshniwal 4y ago
  I’ve been thinking about how NFTs are different from ordinary “costly” signals. NFTs directly come with a price attached. An attached dollar value is the problem. The difference between receiving an expensive ‘looking’ gift and and a gift with an expensive price tag attached. Maybe I’m wrong, but being subtle about the effort/cost is a big part of these signalling. NFT skips all of that.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
    That reminds me of an article I read recently about New York's high-end nightlife scene, where wealthy men engage in an indirect form of purchase of attention from young attractive women, but obfuscated so that it does not appear transactional. There could be something to that.
    - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
      Don't suppose you have a link or can recall what it was published in? Sounds like an interesting read
      - CryptoPunk 4y ago
        I did search for the article to provide a link in the comment, but I wasn't able to find it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tomatowurst 4y ago
This DALL-E 2 is absolutely the wildest thing I've seen by far. If we can get it to render 2D images, imagine 2d films, fully textured 3d mesh & environments is almost a certainty in the future. The implications of this is tremendous. We could be looking at crowd-directed AI generated consumable content. Imagine that you could watch infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6. Imagine that you could generate a production quality 3D animatable human mesh that can interact with the AI generated 3D environment. Pair this with ultrasound based non-invasive haptic feedback, taste, smell with some type of 3D holographic projector. The possibilities are literally endless. Holy moly!!!! We are on the cusp of a completely new way to generate and consume content. Copyright laws will have to be rewritten. Once this pandora box is open it can't be closed.
- truemotive 4y ago
  > Imagine that you could watch infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6 This sounds like a special version of hell…
- londons_explore 4y ago
  ML models used in this way will struggle with scene to scene consistency... For example, when you generate someone riding a horse, and later want the same character to be at home drinking a coffee. It'll be hard to get the model to render the same face, mannerisms and style for the same person in both cases. I think that alone will take years to properly solve.
  - dougabug 4y ago
    Not so much. Check out E3GAN from Gordon Wetzstein’s lab at Stanford: https://matthew-a-chan.github.io/EG3D/ https://matthew-a-chan.github.io/EG3D/. In particular, note how they are able to apply a process called GAN Inversion to find a point in the 3D GAN’s representation space to generate a 3D model of a person’s face (one of the collaborators) from a single query image.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
zogomoox 4y ago
The best bit in the article is the Berkshire Hathaway website, a case of "the emperor wears no clothes and he knows it".
h0l0cube 4y ago
An alternative hypothesis: School Will Never End: On Infantilization in Digital Environments http://sigwait.tk/~alex/doc/bunz%2Cmercedes__school-will-never-end/ http://sigwait.tk/~alex/doc/bunz%2Cmercedes__school-will-nev...
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Thanks for that link!
johnqian 4y ago
This was a really great read. There's a few comments here saying something akin to "No, design trends are totally random, some hotshots decide they want to be different and then everyone else mindlessly follows". I got similar feedback when I wrote in an earlier HN comment my take on why flat design is popular now. I actually empathize with the sentiment because it reminds me of how I used to feel about wine tasters. To me, all wine tastes equivalently like poison. So when people express their complex, nuanced wine preferences, it's easy for me to feel like they're pulling something out of their butts, just saying what they think they're supposed to say. If my taste in everything was similar to my taste in wine, I would probably still believe this. But I've realized that when it comes to UI/UX design, I am one of the pretentious wine tasters. And I don't feel like I'm making stuff up or mindlessly following trends. The trends genuinely make sense to me; I think they'd happen in the same order in a parallel universe. Design is an optimization problem, and sometimes new technologies or patterns of human behavior change the optimal path for a wide spectrum of products, leading to trends, or what this author calls "vibe shifts". Of course there are mindless trend followers, just as there are people who parrot opinions on wine they didn't really form themselves. They may be the majority. But they don't disprove the existence of something real.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  I think this is easily disproven by looking at other areas of functional design besides computer UIs. Architecture is a good example - it's obvious there that while there are some things that are optimizations, a large part of the churn in architecture is style. You might claim the modern trend of having lots of large windows to emphasize natural light is an example of an optimization, but that is only "modern" because the materials and processes to affordably make big pieces of double pane glass are modern. Otherwise, the brutalist monstrosities of the last 30 years are completely a stylistic choice. Ironically flat icons and brutalist architecture share a lot in common.
  - johnqian 4y ago
    I think you defended my point for me with the glass panes example. Price is definitely a part of the optimization formula. In fact I think most trends in architecture are much easier to explain than in UI because they’re so clearly enabled by technology. I don’t know much about brutalism, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a dominant trend. I feel most expensive new buildings are pretty and efficient in ways that weren’t feasible before. But when there’s a mainstream, there are rebels. An interesting thought experiment is what buildings would look like if resources and labor were infinite—if we could essentially 3D print buildings. Whatever designs come out of that may be what we trend towards.
sgt101 4y ago
What is so interesting is that you get something really cool like Dall.E2 and instead of folks being engaged with it, and what it can actually do (which currently is moot as we/I can't play with it and have to accept the curated propaganda from OpenAI) what happens is that folks extrapolate it into a story teller, an animator, a game designer....
- Aicy 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it "curated propaganda". I've seen livestreams of people using it and taking requests of what to feed into it. Checkout @karenxcheng on insatagram.
_andrei_ 4y ago
GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are only a glimpse of an upcoming change with greater impact on humanity than the Internet.
joao 4y ago
This change was more due to the iOS 7 flat redesign, than to what the author proposes. A design trend, where it became fashionable to have a flat design supported by illustration/iconography, further away from skeumorphism, which photography was more close to.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Lost me after crap opening my gosh. It wasn't mysterious. It was Stripe. CSS frameworks around the time and mobile/responsive focus shifts. Throw in boom in developers new to space and JavaScript front-end undergoing a big change and that's what it was. Lots of looks based on influential designs like stripe, apple, etc and how they were being developed.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
I am skeptical of any art created without a significant amount of struggle. Maybe it is this strange fixation on hard work = quality mindset I have, but whatever it may be, I can't quite bring myself to use GitHub copilot and the rest of these tools.

235 points by dshipper 4y ago

>> I think when Unsplash (the free photography website) was founded in 2013 it killed the old vibe by democratizing access to great photography, and thereby ruining its function as a costly status signal. Disagree with the premise. Great photography (the kind needed for a website anyway) was not costly. I got lots of images for apps and websites from iStockPhoto around that time and it was very inexpensive.

Randy34 4y ago

[dead]

sillysaurusx 4y ago

One thing I’ve been looking forward to for years: type out what kind of art asset you want for your videogame, then use it immediately. Can’t wait for it to be 3D. Replit has the 2D case, and it’s awesome. 13yo me was blocked primarily by lack of art. Unity sort of solved that, but it’s not effortless (or free). Don’t really care if it annihilates everything that makes art special. The more creators, the better the world. (Is there a single counterexample in all of history?)

johtso 4y ago
I'm now imagining being able to spawn 3d assets in VR games just by describing them, that would be wild.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Maybe we're not too far from a "real" Scribblenauts. Where you can write what you want to have, and AI model instantiates it with what it thinks is plausible behavior.
  - robbedpeter 4y ago
    This like this are now a matter of automation and tedious scripting - you could easily integrate dall-e into a platform/sprite game builder. You could probably make a killing doing something like a minecraft skin generator... You could do fantastic, on-device 8-bit pixel art generators with clip and so the 80s and 90s spritemaps , and a high level gpt-3/ gpt-neo dialog or adventure generator. If you use constraints wisely, AI-Dungeon and KoboldAI can produce fantastic adventures. I'm excited about AI- augmented have development coming in the near future. Transformers tech is going to diffuse into everything creative and will amplify the quality of games.
hetspookjee 4y ago
Not really an argument against but perhaps something to consider: more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest [1], the why is difficult but it might indicate that it becomes harder and harder to find true quality through the noise, but then again art generation does make it easy for someone like me to make something pretty even though it might not be a masterpiece. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-... Edit: added source for the statement of old vs new music
- wingerlang 4y ago
  > more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest I doubt this, what do you base this on?
  - hetspookjee 4y ago
    I added the link to my comment but I took it from this article from the Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  > more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest Simple explanation? Sounds like your peer group is getting old.
  - garbagetime 4y ago
    Also, there's more and more old music. Although it gets complicated because it's getting easier and easier to make music.
  - Qworg 4y ago
    I recommend you read the article - unless Gen Z is abandoning streaming, the numbers are pretty shocking. While "new" is considered less than 18 months old, the shift is enormous.
Eduard 4y ago
> The more creators, the better the world. (Is there a single counterexample in all of history?) E.g. all those auto-generated Wikipedia/StackOverflow/Github content copycats swamping search engines and making the canonical, up-to-date sources harder to find
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Oh, good point. I keep winding up on those whenever I search for python examples. Hopefully stackoverflow outweighs the bad; it also hints that the solution might be to hook dalle3D to an upvote button and let crowdsourcing do its thing. Crowds would never upvote those spam sites to the top. But then again, fighting voting rings is hard too. Ah well, those are all problems for FutureCo. I wanna live in that world!
TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
I wonder if it can do a 2d mesh + UV map so we could just load it into blender.
taigi100 4y ago
Hey - what exactly do you mean by "Replit has the 2D case"?
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  I was just about to ask the same thing…
keiferski 4y ago
We live in an age of abundance, yet our most prized art/architecture/aesthetic objects in general are from a less abundant time, when values like beauty or craftsmanship were more important than price or accessibility. Most of this AI-generated imagery will just be noise, as “artistic” as using Unsplash photos on your blog post.
avaer 4y ago
If you're interested in an open source job trying to do this in the browser using GPT-3 + Codex synthesis, we are hiring. (disclosure: I actually worked with the parent before but we haven't talked in forever :D)
tomc1985 4y ago
Ah yes, give everyone with no taste the means to create even more mediocrity. As if we aren't flooded with enough crap already!
- alimov 4y ago
  Your comment feels good to read, to some extent. We are flooded with low quality content (art, music, books, articles), but we also have more high quality content than (probably) ever before. When you say “give everyone with no taste the means to create more mediocrity” I get the sense that you are overwhelmed with search results or feeds that are saturated with things you find unimpressive. Some of that comes with age (more experiences - that eventually overlap - can/will leave us wanting something new), but I think that’s more of a problem with curation than it is with an over abundance of mediocrity, or a lack of newness. I doubt everyone would hop onto the bandwagon and start creating mediocre <thing>. You have to already be interested in something to partake in its creation, and taste doesn’t magically exist without dabbling and experience and exposure to whatever the <thing> is. So maybe some of what you are seeing is more people exploring their interests and you happen to have similar interests that are maybe more developed or refined or opinionated.
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Even before the democratization of art we were still flooded with crap. I've spent a lot of time curating through DJing and collecting digital music, and the goal has always been to find that 1% that is amazing in the sea of 99% crap. That sea of 99% crap is beginning to feel like 99.9% if I widen my search parameters to all the "modern" sources that are algorithmically "curated" for me. Call me a gatekeeper but art needs barriers and it needs to be hard. The process of overcoming those barriers contributes to an artists' skill, and conquering the difficult helps them to define their own style. The platform should not be favoring the unaccomplished and the accomplished with equal weight. And the problem isn't just my feed. It's everyone's feed. Peoples' tastes conform to the constraints of the world around them -- if you grow up in a household and culture that loves bluegrass music, for example, there's a strong chance you will like it too. After talking with lots of local brewers I believe that IPAs are super popular around here because they're the most economical kind of beer to make in the climate I live in. Which means there's tons of them on the shelves, which means lots of people will buy them for no particular reason other than because they are there and suddenly now that's the predominant local taste. If we surround people with crap (which is what we are doing), crap becomes the new standard and the new taste, dragging down society along with it. We are currently doing this with computers and look at all the mediocrity we've created in tech so that the smallminded can give their money to enterpreneurs with equal weighting as the nerds. Barriers keep quality high!

QuikAccount 4y ago

As an artist, Dall-E makes a pit in my stomach I can't quite explain.

alar44 4y ago
oh no new tools
ackbar03 4y ago
Are you worried about it replacing you? Can't you use it as a new tool somehow?
kyriakos 4y ago
Consider that Dall-E is using a corpus of older imagery to produce results. Technically it doesn't create original work, the originality comes from the description fed into it. This means the creative part of the process is still the human element.
- runnerup 4y ago
  More importantly, if impressionist painting style had never been invented, DALL-E probably wouldn't be able to invent it. There's still lots of room for artists to invent new styles.
  - discreteevent 4y ago
    > There's still lots of room for artists to invent new styles. And immediately have that new style monetised by some VC backed startup with an AI that's constantly scanning for new styles.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      In that case I think you'd have a fairly strong copyright case for "I put effort into coming up with this style, and AICo Inc stole it".

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kingcharles 4y ago

I would argue against his theory of a vibe-shift in web design post-2015. I certainly remember during 2007-2013 that there were enormous amounts of sites using illustrations in a very similar way to how they are now. In fact, I would go as far as to say there are way more sites using full-bleed "hero" photographs now than there were then.

jollybean 4y ago

Shifts happen in design all the time, it's a stampede thing, one thing can start it, the rest follow suit, DalleE may or may not, and then in a few more years something else will happen. DallE is not hugely important, maybe AI in general might be for the next few years.

moconnor 4y ago

Good read, but I can’t shake the feeling that the author ascribes too much to exactly one “vibe shift” in website design and unsplash’s role in it. Web design trends change every few years, for the same signalling reasons that fashion does. It’s about standing out and leaving an impression more than the cost of technology, which is why fashions can repeat. I don’t think DALL-E will change that in the way author supposes, it will reduce the cost slightly but consumers can’t judge cost only novelty and there are plenty of ways to be creative with DALL-E.

moconnor 4y ago
To be more precise: the author’s theory predicts that new technology moves design away from the things it makes cheap directly as a status symbol. In this case, DALL-E makes websites move away from images it can create. I contend novelty is the prime mover and technology that opens new possibilities moves designs towards these. Only once the market is saturated with them is new novelty sought. In this case, DALL-E will let websites move towards new styles of e.g. smoothly animating / shifting logos and images, images that are slightly but smoothly different every time you visit the site, regularly styles logos ala Google Doodles, websites with automatic dark/light modes and images to match, websites that match the weather in your location etc. Only after whatever new style is found becomes widespread will it become passé. Testable predictions: let’s go!

angarg12 4y ago

Wow. This article spends a lot of real estate making an argument, but provides little proof to support it. The problem is I personally disagree with the premise. I don't think that so called "vibe shifts" happen based on the parameters described here. It's like when Apple shifted from skeuomorphism to flat/minimalist design. One could argue that minimalistic design is much easier and readily available. But it took Apple to make this creative shift for the masses to follow. Maybe DALL-E and others will make it easy to hire some in Fiverr to produce spades of high quality art for your startup. That works for the copycats. But the trend setters will keep moving according to the same rules.

greiskul 4y ago
> But it took Apple to make this creative shift for the masses to follow. Android was doing flat design 2 years before Apple did.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Many people were doing flat design before Apple did. Scott Forstall famously loved skeuomorphic interfaces. When Apple Maps-gate got him fired, Jony Ive took over software UX design and commanded that everything be flat to match the hardware aesthetic. Apple’s switch to flat design was purely about internal politics and was disconnected from the external design world which had been using these idioms for quite some time.

mg 4y ago

Before the vibe shift, all the cool websites looked like this: Here he shows the sites of Path, Medium, Circa, Squarespace and AirBnB After the vibe shift, websites suddenly started looking very different: Here he shows Intercom, Basecamp, LinkedIn, Lyft, Slack and Notion. Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the same sites?

h0l0cube 4y ago
I just had a look. Circa and Path are now both defunct, but the remainder (SquareSpace and AirBnB) have kept their pre-vibes look. I must admit they look a bit bland because of it.

noduerme 4y ago

I've been doing web design long enough to have experienced the swing from illustration to photography, and then back to illustration. I don't really think it has to do with signaling wealth or status. Here's what I think: Most web designers are not designers. Most people on web design teams, in hierarchies of management, who style themselves "art directors" or who interface with the clients, are not designers. Most directives that come at people building websites come from marketing teams at companies, composed entirely of people who are not designers. Those people get to work in the morning with one goal: To impress their boss at the corporation by collecting tons of screenshots of other websites and marketing campaigns that have recently been popular, collating them and listing the features that these non-designers think, in their non-design opinion, made those things successful. What you end up with is a feedback loop where every marketing department follows every other one, and demands a copy of the latest trend, without any regard for the company's actual brand. Which designers are then obliged to do, even if we know it's stupid. The longest running brands I represent use a mix of illustration and photography, and that mix is specific to the way they choose to present themselves. In fact, understanding that particular mix for each business, creating style guides that delineate when one thing or the other should be used, and not messing with the mix if it's working is crucial to maintaining consistency and building brand recognition over time. TL;DR, most web designers have no design background, and companies hand too much control over online branding to people who are competent coders but should not be responsible for image. Also, the idea that Dall-E2 or any further iteration is going to replace either photography or illustration at the high end is counterintuitive. The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated.

bspear 4y ago
> high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. That actually is the argument the author makes. That companies compete to differentiate from what can be easily generated by anyone.
londons_explore 4y ago
> The high end is going to just go further to show it's not AI-generated. But I think it'll actually be pretty hard to make something that is clearly not AI generated. Remember that to be effective, it needs to be clear to a regular person, not just an expert in AI imagery.

skilled 4y ago

The author does hit a chord. I am personally waiting when I can get my hands on this tech myself so I can use it to generate unique images for my blog posts. Designing them myself is a lot of work and you also have to consider copyright and all that.

jfoster 4y ago
Does OpenAI cede copyright to works created by Dall-E? I realize they may encounter some challenges in trying to claim copyright over the images, but will that stop them from trying?
- webmaven 4y ago
  > Does OpenAI cede copyright to works created by Dall-E? Yes.

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CryptoPunk 4y ago

Twitter Blue subscribers can let Twitter verify their ownership of an NFT profile picture, and then their profile picture comes to be distinguished by a hexagonal frame and a badge indicating which NFT collection it belongs to. If AI does truly make generation of design of all styles costless, NFTs could act as the "Costly Vibe Signals" the article refers to.

raghavtoshniwal 4y ago
I’ve been thinking about how NFTs are different from ordinary “costly” signals. NFTs directly come with a price attached. An attached dollar value is the problem. The difference between receiving an expensive ‘looking’ gift and and a gift with an expensive price tag attached. Maybe I’m wrong, but being subtle about the effort/cost is a big part of these signalling. NFT skips all of that.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  That reminds me of an article I read recently about New York's high-end nightlife scene, where wealthy men engage in an indirect form of purchase of attention from young attractive women, but obfuscated so that it does not appear transactional. There could be something to that.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    Don't suppose you have a link or can recall what it was published in? Sounds like an interesting read
    - CryptoPunk 4y ago
      I did search for the article to provide a link in the comment, but I wasn't able to find it.
- deleted 4y ago
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tomatowurst 4y ago

This DALL-E 2 is absolutely the wildest thing I've seen by far. If we can get it to render 2D images, imagine 2d films, fully textured 3d mesh & environments is almost a certainty in the future. The implications of this is tremendous. We could be looking at crowd-directed AI generated consumable content. Imagine that you could watch infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6. Imagine that you could generate a production quality 3D animatable human mesh that can interact with the AI generated 3D environment. Pair this with ultrasound based non-invasive haptic feedback, taste, smell with some type of 3D holographic projector. The possibilities are literally endless. Holy moly!!!! We are on the cusp of a completely new way to generate and consume content. Copyright laws will have to be rewritten. Once this pandora box is open it can't be closed.

truemotive 4y ago
> Imagine that you could watch infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6 This sounds like a special version of hell…
londons_explore 4y ago
ML models used in this way will struggle with scene to scene consistency... For example, when you generate someone riding a horse, and later want the same character to be at home drinking a coffee. It'll be hard to get the model to render the same face, mannerisms and style for the same person in both cases. I think that alone will take years to properly solve.
- dougabug 4y ago
  Not so much. Check out E3GAN from Gordon Wetzstein’s lab at Stanford: https://matthew-a-chan.github.io/EG3D/ https://matthew-a-chan.github.io/EG3D/. In particular, note how they are able to apply a process called GAN Inversion to find a point in the 3D GAN’s representation space to generate a 3D model of a person’s face (one of the collaborators) from a single query image.
  - londons_explore 4y ago

zogomoox 4y ago

The best bit in the article is the Berkshire Hathaway website, a case of "the emperor wears no clothes and he knows it".

h0l0cube 4y ago

An alternative hypothesis: School Will Never End: On Infantilization in Digital Environments http://sigwait.tk/~alex/doc/bunz%2Cmercedes__school-will-never-end/ http://sigwait.tk/~alex/doc/bunz%2Cmercedes__school-will-nev...

wrycoder 4y ago
Thanks for that link!

johnqian 4y ago

This was a really great read. There's a few comments here saying something akin to "No, design trends are totally random, some hotshots decide they want to be different and then everyone else mindlessly follows". I got similar feedback when I wrote in an earlier HN comment my take on why flat design is popular now. I actually empathize with the sentiment because it reminds me of how I used to feel about wine tasters. To me, all wine tastes equivalently like poison. So when people express their complex, nuanced wine preferences, it's easy for me to feel like they're pulling something out of their butts, just saying what they think they're supposed to say. If my taste in everything was similar to my taste in wine, I would probably still believe this. But I've realized that when it comes to UI/UX design, I am one of the pretentious wine tasters. And I don't feel like I'm making stuff up or mindlessly following trends. The trends genuinely make sense to me; I think they'd happen in the same order in a parallel universe. Design is an optimization problem, and sometimes new technologies or patterns of human behavior change the optimal path for a wide spectrum of products, leading to trends, or what this author calls "vibe shifts". Of course there are mindless trend followers, just as there are people who parrot opinions on wine they didn't really form themselves. They may be the majority. But they don't disprove the existence of something real.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
I think this is easily disproven by looking at other areas of functional design besides computer UIs. Architecture is a good example - it's obvious there that while there are some things that are optimizations, a large part of the churn in architecture is style. You might claim the modern trend of having lots of large windows to emphasize natural light is an example of an optimization, but that is only "modern" because the materials and processes to affordably make big pieces of double pane glass are modern. Otherwise, the brutalist monstrosities of the last 30 years are completely a stylistic choice. Ironically flat icons and brutalist architecture share a lot in common.
- johnqian 4y ago
  I think you defended my point for me with the glass panes example. Price is definitely a part of the optimization formula. In fact I think most trends in architecture are much easier to explain than in UI because they’re so clearly enabled by technology. I don’t know much about brutalism, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a dominant trend. I feel most expensive new buildings are pretty and efficient in ways that weren’t feasible before. But when there’s a mainstream, there are rebels. An interesting thought experiment is what buildings would look like if resources and labor were infinite—if we could essentially 3D print buildings. Whatever designs come out of that may be what we trend towards.

sgt101 4y ago

What is so interesting is that you get something really cool like Dall.E2 and instead of folks being engaged with it, and what it can actually do (which currently is moot as we/I can't play with it and have to accept the curated propaganda from OpenAI) what happens is that folks extrapolate it into a story teller, an animator, a game designer....

Aicy 4y ago
I wouldn't call it "curated propaganda". I've seen livestreams of people using it and taking requests of what to feed into it. Checkout @karenxcheng on insatagram.

_andrei_ 4y ago

GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are only a glimpse of an upcoming change with greater impact on humanity than the Internet.

joao 4y ago

This change was more due to the iOS 7 flat redesign, than to what the author proposes. A design trend, where it became fashionable to have a flat design supported by illustration/iconography, further away from skeumorphism, which photography was more close to.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Lost me after crap opening my gosh. It wasn't mysterious. It was Stripe. CSS frameworks around the time and mobile/responsive focus shifts. Throw in boom in developers new to space and JavaScript front-end undergoing a big change and that's what it was. Lots of looks based on influential designs like stripe, apple, etc and how they were being developed.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

I am skeptical of any art created without a significant amount of struggle. Maybe it is this strange fixation on hard work = quality mindset I have, but whatever it may be, I can't quite bring myself to use GitHub copilot and the rest of these tools.