9 ms·

We asked 100 humans to draw the DALL·E prompts

138 points by echen 4y ago

CarrieLab 4y ago
My intuition is that humans will continue to make art that takes advantage of technological advances, just like they always have. The modern process of producing music would basically be unrecognizable to anyone 40 years ago — it's completely intertwined with technology, and far more automated. Yet music is as important as ever, and amazing music is being made (will politely side-step the pitfall of debating whether music was better 40 years ago!) So I'm excited to see how visual artists incorporate tools like Dall-E into their artistic process.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > (will politely side-step the pitfall of debating whether music was better 40 years ago!) I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago. (We know about survivorship bias and that there was less of the design space search so much more novelty/amazing). I do think we've gotten a few more axes of exploration but also have in the mainline of music has gotten much more homogenous in some ways as well, which is kinda sad. Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier. Tastes evolve around what's being created. And tools evolve to match those tastes, which in turn really optimizes everything to a specific local maximum. And tools cause loss of skills and dependency upon the tooling.
  - CarrieLab 4y ago
    > I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago. Ha, fair point. I must not realize how old I am, because I was attempting to reference the music of the 1960s and 70s, not 1982, which I agree is not many people's idea of the golden year for music ("Come On Eileen" notwithstanding). > Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier. No doubt. Ableton, logic, and protools have drastically altered the norms of what modern music is "supposed" to sound like (ie tuned vocals, quantized drums etc). I do wonder what the next generation of music tech will bring.
    - dhosek 4y ago
      As someone whose high school years spanned 1982–6, I have a bit of a soft spot for that era.¹ I think, also, that in the early days at least, a lot of marginal bands who had videos ended up getting a bit more fame thanks to those videos than they would have pre-MTV. ⸻ 1. I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not.
      - CarrieLab 4y ago
        Oh I think your high school pop music theory is spot on. I grew up in the emo era, can actively laugh at the music/fashion now... and still love it more than anything :)
      - tkgally 4y ago
        > I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not. I would rank that theory with evolution, relativity, and the germ theory of disease as being as close to true as any theory is ever likely to get.
    - andybak 4y ago
      Completely non-ironically - 1981/1982 was an incredibly fertile period for music in the UK at least.
  - zone411 4y ago
    I believe the real AI music revolution is still ahead of us. Most existing tools don't really use modern deep neural nets and the ones that have just been released and do are quite good (e.g. Synthesizer V). The project I released yesterday uses all research advances (such as diffusion models) and more (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578YO4qa1NTkmMi4 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y...) and I think it's a large leap forward over what the existing melody generation software can do. I think that pretty soon we'll see many hit songs that have a large contribution from AI models. It's possible that the variety can increase as well and new styles can appear, as the "good" generated songs are fed back as training data.
  - rdedev 4y ago
    I don't think creative types will be satisfied with reaching a local maximum. They always try to find ways to stretch what's possible by looking for completely different ways to use said tools. Just the different genres of music points to this fact.
- narrator 4y ago
  Before recorded music, if one wanted to listen to music one had to pay skilled artisans for every song. Now music is more or less free and available in unlimited quantities. The same will probably happen for art, and maybe even animation thanks to DALL-E.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  How I see AI fitting in is being used as an effort multiplier. Imagine if a single person was able to produce an entire anime / cartoon tv series rather than the current situation of hundreds of people being involved. The single human could act as a creativity director ensuring consistent story and style while the AI does the heavy lifting of pumping out hundreds of thousands of frames. Currently we have youtubers putting out crude AI voice generated videos with basic visuals, and its still funny and entertaining because the story is good. But imagine if anyone with a good idea could start producing studio quality works to accompany their meme video.
  - Asooka 4y ago
    A good example are Joel Haver's videos on youtube. He explains his process here: https://youtu.be/tq_KOmXyVDo https://youtu.be/tq_KOmXyVDo . He produces animations by rotoscoping live footage, with only a few keyframes being done by hand and the rest by AI, using something similar to style transfer.
webmaven 4y ago
What I want to see next is Dall-E produced variations from all the "human" versions in this post. That would illuminate Dall-E's limitations in terms of mimicking original styles. P. S. Has anyone demonstrated actual style transfer with Dall-E? As in, provide an image by one artist and telling it to draw it as another artist would? Something along the lines of "Vincent Van Gogh's self portrait as drawn by Jack Kirby'.
- CarrieLab 4y ago
  Have you seen this post / these examples? It touches on some what of you are talking about in terms of style transfer. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r99tazGiLgzqFX7ka/playing-with-dall-e-2 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r99tazGiLgzqFX7ka/playing-wi...
  - webmaven 4y ago
    I'd seen that post, and just skimmed it again to see if I missed something, but I don't see anything about style transfer unless you mean writing prompts like "thing as painted by artist". Which works when "thing" is a sufficiently well known work (as I suppose my "Van Gogh self portrait" example would be), but I meant something more along the lines of "[image] as painted by $ARTIST", or "[image] as drawn in $STYLE".
egypturnash 4y ago
I find myself wondering: were any of these hundred humans professional artists, was there money accompanying this request to draw these prompts, and if so how much?
- phh 4y ago
  It says "surgers" so I'm guessing it's just employees of the company that did it, so no professionnal artist. But my understanding could be wrong.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    The company kind of sounds like “Mechanical Turk for checking AI decisions” so I’m assuming “surgers” are people being paid those kinds of rates for small tasks. Which is definitely less than I charge for art.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cwillu 4y ago
Interesting that the human-drawn lab bears are nearly all clearly mad scientists out to conquer the world, while the AI bears are merely earnest… clowns I think?
- echen 4y ago
  Yeah, the human-drawn scientists all have an evil gleam or element of craziness to them... I missed that myself until you said it!
- elzbardico 4y ago
  The AI-driven bears look like 60's chemistry post-graduate students in California doing a batch of LSD.
- erikstarck 4y ago
  Clearly, the AI wants to hide its sinister nature to us.
- blackoil 4y ago
  Humans automatically assumed mad also means evil. While, seems AI took mad mildly.
- flobosg 4y ago
  The first thing I imagined after reading that prompt was Pinky and the Brain, probably because of the “1990s Saturday morning cartoon” part.
nautilus12 4y ago
Subjectively I find the human versions are almost always better even the poorly drawn ones, which isnt surprising, but even though DALLE is able to emulate elements of style it still seems to be lacking some gestalt or ability to connect on an emotional level. There's no accounting for taste it seems.
shannifin 4y ago
I find it fascinating and hilarious that DALL-E produces basketball-looking planets! (Or planet-looking basketballs?)
cercatrova 4y ago
It's relatively easy to tell which are AI made due to the weird artifacts they have that human drawings would not have. For example, the first image has a basketball where the lines don't line up correctly, a visual artifact that lets you immediately know it was an AI. Human artists would have made all the lines line up correctly.
- Illniyar 4y ago
  First image is glaringly AI - cat head is weird, there's no way a cat head can look like that, the tail has holes in it (if you don't look closely you might confuse them as stripes), basket net is cut up in the middle, astronaut's hands are basically broken. Fourth image it gets a bit confusing because the art is originally abstract, but the astronauts hands are again very easy to spot, the second biggest artifact are the cat heads, they are just close enough to be abstract but there's warping there that no human would do.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > cat head is weird, there's no way a cat head can look like that, the tail has holes in it (if you don't look closely you might confuse them as stripes) Neither of those is the biggest problem with the cat - it has two left front legs and no right front leg. I thought the biggest tell in the first four images was that the AI makes no attempt to draw correct lines on the basketballs.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  The thing that at first glance tipped me off to the AI images was one of the most common issues: several instances of whatever is the most important keyword. Playing basketball? Multiple balls! The planet is a ball!
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    > The planet is a ball! I actually like this dollop of creativity. Humans tend to ground their pictures in reality more than necessary for prompts that sit firmly in the realm of fantasy.
elzbardico 4y ago
Glad to know that the AI has humanity enough not to use Corporate Memphis style.
nirui 4y ago
> What about now? Well, that picture captioned "DALL·E or Dalí?" is almost certainly drawn by an AI, because most humans have learned that you don't draw weird shapes anywhere near ones crotch, it's just something a half-decent human won't do. Joke aside, the AI generated pictures are amazing. See those radishes? Most human-drawn radishes are happy. And those generated ones are happy too, even without explicit instruction to tell the AI to do so. I guess it really captured what humans collectively want.
- egeozcan 4y ago
  > I guess it really captured what humans collectively want Happy radishes? :) Anyway, I wonder if things like these cause a feedback cycle that just makes everything super boring. Humans sometimes get bored and do unusual things, what about the machines?
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > See those radishes? Most human-drawn radishes are happy. Most human drawn cats are evil. Most AI drawn cats are happy.
esjeon 4y ago
I think it's quite easy to distinguish b/w DALL-E and human. The biggest problem w/ current DALL-E is that it's really really bad at details, unless it's a stereotypical one. DALL-E delivers pretty good impression, but almost always fails to fill in the last mile. This is because DALL-E currently doesn't know what "perfection for human" is like.. Also, often times, DALL-E doesn't have a definitive style, meaning it composes images with different styles in one place. This is quite noticeable in the second image for "Teddy bears, mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists". The bubbles are obviously not in the same style. This hardly happens for humans because, welp, when someone draws a picture, one person draws with a limited set of tools in a single style. DALL-E itself is not subject to such limitations.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The obvious markers to me is mistakes / skill level. The AI is making mistakes no human would and it’s perfecting advanced techniques only experts pull off. For example the space ones have incredible style, texture and shading, but the basket ball lines are nonsensical. While the human ones are quite basic and artistically primitive but all of the easy things are flawless. And then the bears have an eye on their forehead and missing half their mouth mixed with extremely good textures everywhere else.
  - barrkel 4y ago
    I think you're confusing art with technique. The human drawn ones were much more interesting to look at, as art, usually because of the emotion and hints of narrative conveyed by facial expressions. I also liked the giant cat. These days famous artists often don't execute the artwork themselves, they leave that to craftspeople. They have the idea, and the fame to imbue it with attention which connects it with the semantic fabric of the current art scene.
    - TremendousJudge 4y ago
      This has always happened. The famous renaissance artists would have their students do most of their work.
sriku 4y ago
I had an odd reaction reading the threads. People considering it worth posting that it is easy to tell which one is AI and which one is by a human .. are doing so because the Dall-e ones are damn good and not because te difference is too obvious, in which case nobody should bother.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  I think it's not just that they're good enough that it's worthwhile discussing how it fails. It's also that it's the same way it fails as has been the weak point of AI generated images for years. It's great and I love it, but the wow factor is fading and the easily recognizable problems remain.
darepublic 4y ago
the Dall-e pictures are good, interesting, and feel the most human from any ai produced content I've seen. I don't get the same sense when I read ai generated text, even the best examples, although those results may be impressive too. Perhaps something about the visual pieces more convincingly imparts the sense of another fellow mind
folli 4y ago
For me, the DALL-E generated imagery looks better than what an average human can draw, but there is still a gap to the skill of a true artist. However, commissioning artists is expensive, DALL-E less so. So there's definitely pressure on illustrators on upwork, fiverr etc.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I think the difficult part is actually controlling the output. For an artist on fiverr you can say, "can you give the bear a red cap". Or "can you make them smile a little more". While with an AI its largely you get what you get. Other than tweaking the prompts or randomly adjusting parameters hoping to get what you wanted.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    > "can you give the bear a red cap" That's exactly what DALL·E2 is already capable of. You can paint over a region of the image and tell it what you want in that area: https://youtu.be/qTgPSKKjfVg?t=77 https://youtu.be/qTgPSKKjfVg?t=77 You can even use this in-painting ability to enlarge images. For example you can feed it this: https://preview.redd.it/z7y2tbwjtny81.jpg?width=680&auto=webp&s=e3fa6a1760a58ee3d8275d3fd0bf8036dcd614df https://preview.redd.it/z7y2tbwjtny81.jpg?width=680&auto=web... And turn it into this: https://i.imgur.com/Zp4MWXX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Zp4MWXX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xsEydvk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xsEydvk.jpg Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/umk5vw/science_fiction_futuristic_dystopian_nun/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/umk5vw/science_fict... And also worth mentioning that each of those iteration only takes like 10sec, not days or weeks as with a real artist. The one thing DALL·E2 is however missing is being specific, you can tell it to draw SuperMario and it will come up with something that looks like somewhat like SuperMario, but it is taking a lot of creative freedom along the way. As far as I can tell, it isn't able to draw the same character in different situations. Every image is unique and there is so far no way to coax it into drawing a series of multiple images that are consistent with each other, as you would need to illustrate a short story for example. Best example I have seen so far is this, but even that remains very abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_laffNOoQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_laffNOoQw
rjh29 4y ago
The DALL-E ones are really impressive technically but I laughed at, and went 'aww' at a few photos and they were always the human ones. For now.
montanha 4y ago
It's pretty easy to find
montanha 4y ago
The easiest way to distinguish b/w DALL-E and Humans is looking to the freakish hands generated by the previous
userbinator 4y ago
Imagine a future where every homemade bedtime story can be turned into an IMAX-quality cartoon… Alternatively, imagine one where every website is flooded with mass-produced bland "art" like Corporate Memphis... we know what SEO spam looks like today, and I've been occasionally seeing what looks like AI-generated images show up in image searches. This feels like the latter --- good enough to look the part at a brief glance, but clearly "off" if you take a closer inspection (see comments about the lines on the basketballs.)
- lumost 4y ago
  I suspect the art is bland as it is plentiful, consistent, and cheap. This is still a large improvement over many modern spaces which include large blank slabs of concrete, white walls, and if its "fancy" faux-brick.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    I wouldn't call it an improvement. The less distracting the walls are, the better.
Philomath 4y ago
I really wanted to give this a try and guess, but unfortunately, there's the DALL-E watermark in the AI images, so I couldn't even try. It would have been cool to also add the watermark to the non DALL-E images and then do the disclosure of what is what. For those that don't know, the watermark is the bottom right rainbow squares.
grumbel 4y ago
The two reasonably good looking human versions of baseball-astronaut are copy&paste of clipart or at least used it for reference: https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/cat-astronaut https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/cat-astronaut https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/id/267579488 https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/id/267579488

138 points by echen 4y ago

My intuition is that humans will continue to make art that takes advantage of technological advances, just like they always have. The modern process of producing music would basically be unrecognizable to anyone 40 years ago — it's completely intertwined with technology, and far more automated. Yet music is as important as ever, and amazing music is being made (will politely side-step the pitfall of debating whether music was better 40 years ago!) So I'm excited to see how visual artists incorporate tools like Dall-E into their artistic process.

mlyle 4y ago
> (will politely side-step the pitfall of debating whether music was better 40 years ago!) I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago. (We know about survivorship bias and that there was less of the design space search so much more novelty/amazing). I do think we've gotten a few more axes of exploration but also have in the mainline of music has gotten much more homogenous in some ways as well, which is kinda sad. Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier. Tastes evolve around what's being created. And tools evolve to match those tastes, which in turn really optimizes everything to a specific local maximum. And tools cause loss of skills and dependency upon the tooling.
- CarrieLab 4y ago
  > I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago. Ha, fair point. I must not realize how old I am, because I was attempting to reference the music of the 1960s and 70s, not 1982, which I agree is not many people's idea of the golden year for music ("Come On Eileen" notwithstanding). > Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier. No doubt. Ableton, logic, and protools have drastically altered the norms of what modern music is "supposed" to sound like (ie tuned vocals, quantized drums etc). I do wonder what the next generation of music tech will bring.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    As someone whose high school years spanned 1982–6, I have a bit of a soft spot for that era.¹ I think, also, that in the early days at least, a lot of marginal bands who had videos ended up getting a bit more fame thanks to those videos than they would have pre-MTV. ⸻ 1. I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not.
    - CarrieLab 4y ago
      Oh I think your high school pop music theory is spot on. I grew up in the emo era, can actively laugh at the music/fashion now... and still love it more than anything :)
    - tkgally 4y ago
      > I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not. I would rank that theory with evolution, relativity, and the germ theory of disease as being as close to true as any theory is ever likely to get.
  - andybak 4y ago
    Completely non-ironically - 1981/1982 was an incredibly fertile period for music in the UK at least.
- zone411 4y ago
  I believe the real AI music revolution is still ahead of us. Most existing tools don't really use modern deep neural nets and the ones that have just been released and do are quite good (e.g. Synthesizer V). The project I released yesterday uses all research advances (such as diffusion models) and more (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578YO4qa1NTkmMi4 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y...) and I think it's a large leap forward over what the existing melody generation software can do. I think that pretty soon we'll see many hit songs that have a large contribution from AI models. It's possible that the variety can increase as well and new styles can appear, as the "good" generated songs are fed back as training data.
- rdedev 4y ago
  I don't think creative types will be satisfied with reaching a local maximum. They always try to find ways to stretch what's possible by looking for completely different ways to use said tools. Just the different genres of music points to this fact.
narrator 4y ago
Before recorded music, if one wanted to listen to music one had to pay skilled artisans for every song. Now music is more or less free and available in unlimited quantities. The same will probably happen for art, and maybe even animation thanks to DALL-E.
Gigachad 4y ago
How I see AI fitting in is being used as an effort multiplier. Imagine if a single person was able to produce an entire anime / cartoon tv series rather than the current situation of hundreds of people being involved. The single human could act as a creativity director ensuring consistent story and style while the AI does the heavy lifting of pumping out hundreds of thousands of frames. Currently we have youtubers putting out crude AI voice generated videos with basic visuals, and its still funny and entertaining because the story is good. But imagine if anyone with a good idea could start producing studio quality works to accompany their meme video.
- Asooka 4y ago
  A good example are Joel Haver's videos on youtube. He explains his process here: https://youtu.be/tq_KOmXyVDo https://youtu.be/tq_KOmXyVDo . He produces animations by rotoscoping live footage, with only a few keyframes being done by hand and the rest by AI, using something similar to style transfer.

webmaven 4y ago

What I want to see next is Dall-E produced variations from all the "human" versions in this post. That would illuminate Dall-E's limitations in terms of mimicking original styles. P. S. Has anyone demonstrated actual style transfer with Dall-E? As in, provide an image by one artist and telling it to draw it as another artist would? Something along the lines of "Vincent Van Gogh's self portrait as drawn by Jack Kirby'.

CarrieLab 4y ago
Have you seen this post / these examples? It touches on some what of you are talking about in terms of style transfer. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r99tazGiLgzqFX7ka/playing-with-dall-e-2 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r99tazGiLgzqFX7ka/playing-wi...
- webmaven 4y ago
  I'd seen that post, and just skimmed it again to see if I missed something, but I don't see anything about style transfer unless you mean writing prompts like "thing as painted by artist". Which works when "thing" is a sufficiently well known work (as I suppose my "Van Gogh self portrait" example would be), but I meant something more along the lines of "[image] as painted by $ARTIST", or "[image] as drawn in $STYLE".

egypturnash 4y ago

I find myself wondering: were any of these hundred humans professional artists, was there money accompanying this request to draw these prompts, and if so how much?

phh 4y ago
It says "surgers" so I'm guessing it's just employees of the company that did it, so no professionnal artist. But my understanding could be wrong.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  The company kind of sounds like “Mechanical Turk for checking AI decisions” so I’m assuming “surgers” are people being paid those kinds of rates for small tasks. Which is definitely less than I charge for art.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cwillu 4y ago

Interesting that the human-drawn lab bears are nearly all clearly mad scientists out to conquer the world, while the AI bears are merely earnest… clowns I think?

echen 4y ago
Yeah, the human-drawn scientists all have an evil gleam or element of craziness to them... I missed that myself until you said it!
elzbardico 4y ago
The AI-driven bears look like 60's chemistry post-graduate students in California doing a batch of LSD.
erikstarck 4y ago
Clearly, the AI wants to hide its sinister nature to us.
blackoil 4y ago
Humans automatically assumed mad also means evil. While, seems AI took mad mildly.
flobosg 4y ago
The first thing I imagined after reading that prompt was Pinky and the Brain, probably because of the “1990s Saturday morning cartoon” part.

nautilus12 4y ago

Subjectively I find the human versions are almost always better even the poorly drawn ones, which isnt surprising, but even though DALLE is able to emulate elements of style it still seems to be lacking some gestalt or ability to connect on an emotional level. There's no accounting for taste it seems.

shannifin 4y ago

I find it fascinating and hilarious that DALL-E produces basketball-looking planets! (Or planet-looking basketballs?)

cercatrova 4y ago

It's relatively easy to tell which are AI made due to the weird artifacts they have that human drawings would not have. For example, the first image has a basketball where the lines don't line up correctly, a visual artifact that lets you immediately know it was an AI. Human artists would have made all the lines line up correctly.

Illniyar 4y ago
First image is glaringly AI - cat head is weird, there's no way a cat head can look like that, the tail has holes in it (if you don't look closely you might confuse them as stripes), basket net is cut up in the middle, astronaut's hands are basically broken. Fourth image it gets a bit confusing because the art is originally abstract, but the astronauts hands are again very easy to spot, the second biggest artifact are the cat heads, they are just close enough to be abstract but there's warping there that no human would do.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > cat head is weird, there's no way a cat head can look like that, the tail has holes in it (if you don't look closely you might confuse them as stripes) Neither of those is the biggest problem with the cat - it has two left front legs and no right front leg. I thought the biggest tell in the first four images was that the AI makes no attempt to draw correct lines on the basketballs.
Agentlien 4y ago
The thing that at first glance tipped me off to the AI images was one of the most common issues: several instances of whatever is the most important keyword. Playing basketball? Multiple balls! The planet is a ball!
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  > The planet is a ball! I actually like this dollop of creativity. Humans tend to ground their pictures in reality more than necessary for prompts that sit firmly in the realm of fantasy.

elzbardico 4y ago

Glad to know that the AI has humanity enough not to use Corporate Memphis style.

nirui 4y ago

> What about now? Well, that picture captioned "DALL·E or Dalí?" is almost certainly drawn by an AI, because most humans have learned that you don't draw weird shapes anywhere near ones crotch, it's just something a half-decent human won't do. Joke aside, the AI generated pictures are amazing. See those radishes? Most human-drawn radishes are happy. And those generated ones are happy too, even without explicit instruction to tell the AI to do so. I guess it really captured what humans collectively want.

egeozcan 4y ago
> I guess it really captured what humans collectively want Happy radishes? :) Anyway, I wonder if things like these cause a feedback cycle that just makes everything super boring. Humans sometimes get bored and do unusual things, what about the machines?
Aeolun 4y ago
> See those radishes? Most human-drawn radishes are happy. Most human drawn cats are evil. Most AI drawn cats are happy.

esjeon 4y ago

I think it's quite easy to distinguish b/w DALL-E and human. The biggest problem w/ current DALL-E is that it's really really bad at details, unless it's a stereotypical one. DALL-E delivers pretty good impression, but almost always fails to fill in the last mile. This is because DALL-E currently doesn't know what "perfection for human" is like.. Also, often times, DALL-E doesn't have a definitive style, meaning it composes images with different styles in one place. This is quite noticeable in the second image for "Teddy bears, mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists". The bubbles are obviously not in the same style. This hardly happens for humans because, welp, when someone draws a picture, one person draws with a limited set of tools in a single style. DALL-E itself is not subject to such limitations.

Gigachad 4y ago
The obvious markers to me is mistakes / skill level. The AI is making mistakes no human would and it’s perfecting advanced techniques only experts pull off. For example the space ones have incredible style, texture and shading, but the basket ball lines are nonsensical. While the human ones are quite basic and artistically primitive but all of the easy things are flawless. And then the bears have an eye on their forehead and missing half their mouth mixed with extremely good textures everywhere else.
- barrkel 4y ago
  I think you're confusing art with technique. The human drawn ones were much more interesting to look at, as art, usually because of the emotion and hints of narrative conveyed by facial expressions. I also liked the giant cat. These days famous artists often don't execute the artwork themselves, they leave that to craftspeople. They have the idea, and the fame to imbue it with attention which connects it with the semantic fabric of the current art scene.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    This has always happened. The famous renaissance artists would have their students do most of their work.

sriku 4y ago

I had an odd reaction reading the threads. People considering it worth posting that it is easy to tell which one is AI and which one is by a human .. are doing so because the Dall-e ones are damn good and not because te difference is too obvious, in which case nobody should bother.

Agentlien 4y ago
I think it's not just that they're good enough that it's worthwhile discussing how it fails. It's also that it's the same way it fails as has been the weak point of AI generated images for years. It's great and I love it, but the wow factor is fading and the easily recognizable problems remain.

darepublic 4y ago

the Dall-e pictures are good, interesting, and feel the most human from any ai produced content I've seen. I don't get the same sense when I read ai generated text, even the best examples, although those results may be impressive too. Perhaps something about the visual pieces more convincingly imparts the sense of another fellow mind

folli 4y ago

For me, the DALL-E generated imagery looks better than what an average human can draw, but there is still a gap to the skill of a true artist. However, commissioning artists is expensive, DALL-E less so. So there's definitely pressure on illustrators on upwork, fiverr etc.

Gigachad 4y ago
I think the difficult part is actually controlling the output. For an artist on fiverr you can say, "can you give the bear a red cap". Or "can you make them smile a little more". While with an AI its largely you get what you get. Other than tweaking the prompts or randomly adjusting parameters hoping to get what you wanted.
- grumbel 4y ago
  > "can you give the bear a red cap" That's exactly what DALL·E2 is already capable of. You can paint over a region of the image and tell it what you want in that area: https://youtu.be/qTgPSKKjfVg?t=77 https://youtu.be/qTgPSKKjfVg?t=77 You can even use this in-painting ability to enlarge images. For example you can feed it this: https://preview.redd.it/z7y2tbwjtny81.jpg?width=680&auto=webp&s=e3fa6a1760a58ee3d8275d3fd0bf8036dcd614df https://preview.redd.it/z7y2tbwjtny81.jpg?width=680&auto=web... And turn it into this: https://i.imgur.com/Zp4MWXX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Zp4MWXX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xsEydvk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xsEydvk.jpg Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/umk5vw/science_fiction_futuristic_dystopian_nun/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/umk5vw/science_fict... And also worth mentioning that each of those iteration only takes like 10sec, not days or weeks as with a real artist. The one thing DALL·E2 is however missing is being specific, you can tell it to draw SuperMario and it will come up with something that looks like somewhat like SuperMario, but it is taking a lot of creative freedom along the way. As far as I can tell, it isn't able to draw the same character in different situations. Every image is unique and there is so far no way to coax it into drawing a series of multiple images that are consistent with each other, as you would need to illustrate a short story for example. Best example I have seen so far is this, but even that remains very abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_laffNOoQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_laffNOoQw

rjh29 4y ago

The DALL-E ones are really impressive technically but I laughed at, and went 'aww' at a few photos and they were always the human ones. For now.

montanha 4y ago

It's pretty easy to find

montanha 4y ago

The easiest way to distinguish b/w DALL-E and Humans is looking to the freakish hands generated by the previous

userbinator 4y ago

Imagine a future where every homemade bedtime story can be turned into an IMAX-quality cartoon… Alternatively, imagine one where every website is flooded with mass-produced bland "art" like Corporate Memphis... we know what SEO spam looks like today, and I've been occasionally seeing what looks like AI-generated images show up in image searches. This feels like the latter --- good enough to look the part at a brief glance, but clearly "off" if you take a closer inspection (see comments about the lines on the basketballs.)

lumost 4y ago
I suspect the art is bland as it is plentiful, consistent, and cheap. This is still a large improvement over many modern spaces which include large blank slabs of concrete, white walls, and if its "fancy" faux-brick.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it an improvement. The less distracting the walls are, the better.

Philomath 4y ago

I really wanted to give this a try and guess, but unfortunately, there's the DALL-E watermark in the AI images, so I couldn't even try. It would have been cool to also add the watermark to the non DALL-E images and then do the disclosure of what is what. For those that don't know, the watermark is the bottom right rainbow squares.

grumbel 4y ago

The two reasonably good looking human versions of baseball-astronaut are copy&paste of clipart or at least used it for reference: https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/cat-astronaut https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/cat-astronaut https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/id/267579488 https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/id/267579488