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I have been having a blast with DALL-E, spending about an hour a day trying out wild combinations and cracking my friends up. I cannot imagine getting bored of

I have been having a blast with DALL-E, spending about an hour a day trying out wild combinations and cracking my friends up. I cannot imagine getting bored of it; it's like getting bored with visual stimulus, or art in general. In fact, I've been glad to have a 50/day limit, because it helps me contain my hyperfocus instincts. The information about new pricing is, to me as someone just enjoying making crazy imagines, a huge drag. It means that to do the same 50/day I'd be spending $300/month. OpenAI: introduce a $20/month non-commercial plan for 50/day, and I'll be at the front of the line.

bfgoodrich 4y ago
nsxwolf 4y ago
I'm already bored of it. When you have everything, you have nothing.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I'm sure the novelty wears off. But I'm already coming up with several applications for it. On the personal side, I've been getting into game development, but the biggest roadblock is creating concept art. I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper. Using DALLE will be a massive benefit and will let me expedite that process. It's important to note that this is not replacing my entire creative process. But it solves the issue I have, where I'm lying in bed imagining a scene in my mind, but don't have the time or energy to sketch it out myself.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    I did notice it is very good at making small pixel art icons/sprites.
    - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
      Do you have any tips or some prompt examples?
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    I've been having a blast using it in my dungeons and dragons games. If you type in, say, "dnd village battlemap" it's really pretty usable. Not to mention the wild magic weapons and monsters it can come up with.
  - ausbah 4y ago
    >I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper. this is what I really like about DALLE-mini, it's ability to create pretty good basic outlines for a scene. it's low resolution enough that there's room for your own creativity while giving you a good template to spring off from. things like poses, composition of multiple people, etc.
    - zanderwohl 4y ago
      I've used AI to try out different composition/layout possibilities. Sometimes it comes up with an arrangement of objects I hadn't considered. Sometimes it uses colors in really interesting ways. Great jumping-off point for drafting.
    - danadannecy 4y ago
      I'm in exactly the same boat. I got tired of waiting around for openai to take me off their waitlist and used DALLE-mini (now craiyon) to generate large batches of concept art for a project I was working on. I picked the ones that, despite being low-res blobs, conveyed the right mood or had an interesting composition of elements. I then layered my favorite elements of those and painted over, adding details wherever I wanted, and came out with something much better than I would've been able to make alone.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    I’ve been using generative models as an art form in and of themselves since the mid/late 2010s. I like generating mundane things that bump right up along the edge of the uncanny valley and finding categories of images that challenge the model (e.g. for CLIP, phrases that have a clear meaning but are infrequently annotated). Generating itself can be art. I’m not going to win a Pulitzer here, it’s for the personal joy of it, but I will certainly never get tired of it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- peteforde 4y ago
  I don't know how to say this without sounding like a jerk, even if I bend over backwards to preface that this isn't my intent: this statement says more about your creativity and curiosity than a ceiling on how entertaining DALL-E can be to someone who could keep multiple instances busy, like grandma playing nine bingo cards at once. Knowing that it will only get better - animation cannot be far behind - makes me feel genuinely excited to be alive.
  - nwienert 4y ago
    Dall-e has novelty, but no intent, meaning, originality. Yes the author can be creative at generating prompts, but visually I haven’t seen it generate anything that feels artistically interesting. If you want pre-existing concepts in novel combinations then yes it works. It’s good at “in the style of” but there’s no “in a new style”. It has a house style too that tends to feel Reddit-like.
    - hansword 4y ago
      I would say it helps to first think what you want to get out of it. If your task is "show me something that breaks through our hyperspeed media", then I guess some obscure museum is a better place than an ML model. If your task is "find the best variation on theme X" or "quick draft visualization", they are often very useful. I am sure there will be many further tasks to which current and future models will be well suited. They are not magic picture machines. At least not yet.
    - gsk22 4y ago
      Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts? Nothing new under the sun and all that. Either way, I feel like your view is an exhaustingly pessimistic take on AI-generated art. I mean, sure, most of what DALL-E generates is pretty mundane, but other times I have been surprised at how bizarre and unique certain images are. You seem to imply that because an AI is not human, its art is not imbued with meaning or originality -- but I find that an AI's non-human nature is precisely what _makes_ the art so original and meaningful.
- muzani 4y ago
  I was actually forcing myself to go through the whole 50/day because I knew it wouldn't be free forever, and I wanted to get better at it. I'm glad I did, but I wish I did more.
- ryanmercer 4y ago
  Same. I generated several thousand images and found it a chore, outside of the daily theme on the discord server, to try and even think of anything to query. It was also discouraging when sometimes you'd hit pure gold for 4-5 of the 6 images, then you'd be lucky to get 1 out of the 6 that was worth saving for several more queries. Now it's down to 4 images and... yeah... I'm not going to try and profit from the images, I don't need them for any business uses or anything, so to me it was a fun for a while and now just something I'll largely put out of mind.
dave_sullivan 4y ago
I think people don't realize how huge these models really are. When they're free, it's pretty cool. But charge an amount where there's actual profit in the product? Suddenly seems very expensive and not economically viable for a lot of use cases. We are still in the "you need a supercomputer" phase of these models for now. Something like DALLE mini is much more accessible but the results aren't good enough. Early early days.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  What are the resources at work here? What are the resources needed to train this model? If someone just gave you the model for free, what resources would you need to use it to generate new results?
  - binarymax 4y ago
    If I had to guess, based on other large models, it’s in the range of hundreds of GBs. It might even be in the TB range. To host that model for fast production SaaS inference requires many GPUs. An A100 has 80GB, so a dozen A100s just to keep it in memory, and more if that doesn’t meet the request demand. Training requires even more GPUs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used more than 100 and trained over 3 months.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      > Training requires even more GPUs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used more than 100 and trained over 3 months. Based on this blog post where they scale to 7,500 'nodes', they say: > A large machine learning job spans many nodes and runs most efficiently when it has access to all of the hardware resources on each node. So I wouldn't be surprised if they do have a total of 7500+ GPUs to balance workloads between. TO add, OpenAI has a long history of getting unlimited access to Google's clusters of GPUs (nowadays they pay for it, though). When they were training 'OpenAI Five' to play Dota 2 at the highest level, they were using 256 P100 GPUs on GCP[0] and they casually threw 256 GPUs at 'clip' for a short while in January of 2021[1]. As for how they do it, see these posts: https://openai.com/blog/techniques-for-training-large-neural-networks/ https://openai.com/blog/techniques-for-training-large-neural... https://openai.com/blog/triton/ https://openai.com/blog/triton/ 0: https://openai.com/blog/openai-five/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-five/ 1: https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/
andreyk 4y ago
Check out Artbreeder, it is likewise a ton of fun! Multimodal.art (https://multimodal.art/ https://multimodal.art/) is working on a free version of something like DALLE, though it's not that good as of yet.
Filligree 4y ago
MidJourney gives ~unlimited generation for $30/month, and is nearly as good. Unlike DALL-E it doesn't deliberately nerf face generation. I've been having a blast.
- muzani 4y ago
  Both seem equally bad with face generation, but Midjourney works really well with famous people (e.g. Trump).
- theAIartist 4y ago
  It's pretty good at faces now. https://labs.openai.com/s/BAdAExWMdtyyC5VJVxXF5wdd https://labs.openai.com/s/BAdAExWMdtyyC5VJVxXF5wdd
  - JulianaRestrepo 4y ago
    > Curbing misuse: To minimize the risk of DALL·E being misused to create deceptive content, we reject image uploads containing realistic faces and attempts to create the likeness of public figures, including celebrities and prominent political figures. We also used advanced techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of real individuals’ faces directly from the website
irrational 4y ago
Sounds kind of like scribblenauts. I would try the craziest things to see what it could come up with.
jnovek 4y ago
My heart sank when I saw the pricing model. I’ve been creating generative art since 2016 and I’ve been anxiously waiting for my invite. I wont be able to afford to generate the volume of images it takes to get good ones at this price point. I can afford $20/mo for something like this but I just can’t swing $200 to $300 it realistically takes to get interesting art out of these CLIP-centric models. Heck, the initial 50 images isn’t even enough to get the hang of how the model behaves.
- blueboo 4y ago
  If you’re technically inclined, I urge you to explore some newer Colabs being shared in this space. They offer vastly more configurable tools, work great for free on Google Colab, are straightforward to run on a local machine. Meanwhile we should prepare ourselves for a future where the best generative models cost a lot more as these companies slice and dice the (huge) burgeoning market here.
  - monkmartinez 4y ago
    Can you share a few, please? I am already out of credits on Midjourney and I don't even feel like I got the hang of it until I was almost out.
    - pjgalbraith 4y ago
      Here are a couple I've used recently: Majestic diffusion - https://github.com/multimodalart/majesty-diffusion https://github.com/multimodalart/majesty-diffusion Centipede diffusion - https://colab.research.google.com/github/Zalring/Centipede_Diffusion/blob/main/Centipede_Diffusion.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/Zalring/Centipede_D...
      - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
        These need to be Kaggle'd already, fuck Colab is dogshit if you don't pay
    - 4y ago
commandlinefan 4y ago
> trying out wild combinations and cracking my friends up Wait until the next edition comes out where it automatically learns the sorts of things that crack you up and starts generating them without any input from you.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Ai generated TikTok could be almost like wire jacking humans.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    How many years away is this? 5? 10? I seriously doubt it'll be longer than that, considering the recent advances of autoregressive models, and the overall trajectory of ML the last decade. It'll use hideous amounts of compute.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Imagine being able to subtly influence opinions too. If you get a large percentage hooked on TikTok you can change and undermine democracy. Starting to believe representative democracy and social media are incompatible.
pjgalbraith 4y ago
Yeah I've been having fun with it recreating bad Heavy Metal album art (https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1548597455138463744 https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1548597455138463744). It's good, but surprisingly difficult to direct it when you have a composition in mind. A few of these I burned through 20-30 prompts to get and I can't see myself forking up hundreds of dollars to roll the dice. My brother is a digital artist and while excited at first he found it to be not all that useful. Mainly because it falls apart with complex prompts, especially when you have a few people or objects in a scene, or specific details you need represented, or a specific composition. You can do a lot with in-painting but it requires burning a lot of credits.
the_doctah 4y ago
>In fact, I've been glad to have a 50/day limit, because it helps me contain my hyperfocus instincts. This belongs on /r/linkedinlunatics

bfgoodrich 4y ago

nsxwolf 4y ago

I'm already bored of it. When you have everything, you have nothing.

danielvaughn 4y ago
I'm sure the novelty wears off. But I'm already coming up with several applications for it. On the personal side, I've been getting into game development, but the biggest roadblock is creating concept art. I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper. Using DALLE will be a massive benefit and will let me expedite that process. It's important to note that this is not replacing my entire creative process. But it solves the issue I have, where I'm lying in bed imagining a scene in my mind, but don't have the time or energy to sketch it out myself.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I did notice it is very good at making small pixel art icons/sprites.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    Do you have any tips or some prompt examples?
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  I've been having a blast using it in my dungeons and dragons games. If you type in, say, "dnd village battlemap" it's really pretty usable. Not to mention the wild magic weapons and monsters it can come up with.
- ausbah 4y ago
  >I'm an artist but it takes a huge amount of time to get the ideas on paper. this is what I really like about DALLE-mini, it's ability to create pretty good basic outlines for a scene. it's low resolution enough that there's room for your own creativity while giving you a good template to spring off from. things like poses, composition of multiple people, etc.
  - zanderwohl 4y ago
    I've used AI to try out different composition/layout possibilities. Sometimes it comes up with an arrangement of objects I hadn't considered. Sometimes it uses colors in really interesting ways. Great jumping-off point for drafting.
  - danadannecy 4y ago
    I'm in exactly the same boat. I got tired of waiting around for openai to take me off their waitlist and used DALLE-mini (now craiyon) to generate large batches of concept art for a project I was working on. I picked the ones that, despite being low-res blobs, conveyed the right mood or had an interesting composition of elements. I then layered my favorite elements of those and painted over, adding details wherever I wanted, and came out with something much better than I would've been able to make alone.
- jnovek 4y ago
  I’ve been using generative models as an art form in and of themselves since the mid/late 2010s. I like generating mundane things that bump right up along the edge of the uncanny valley and finding categories of images that challenge the model (e.g. for CLIP, phrases that have a clear meaning but are infrequently annotated). Generating itself can be art. I’m not going to win a Pulitzer here, it’s for the personal joy of it, but I will certainly never get tired of it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
peteforde 4y ago
I don't know how to say this without sounding like a jerk, even if I bend over backwards to preface that this isn't my intent: this statement says more about your creativity and curiosity than a ceiling on how entertaining DALL-E can be to someone who could keep multiple instances busy, like grandma playing nine bingo cards at once. Knowing that it will only get better - animation cannot be far behind - makes me feel genuinely excited to be alive.
- nwienert 4y ago
  Dall-e has novelty, but no intent, meaning, originality. Yes the author can be creative at generating prompts, but visually I haven’t seen it generate anything that feels artistically interesting. If you want pre-existing concepts in novel combinations then yes it works. It’s good at “in the style of” but there’s no “in a new style”. It has a house style too that tends to feel Reddit-like.
  - hansword 4y ago
    I would say it helps to first think what you want to get out of it. If your task is "show me something that breaks through our hyperspeed media", then I guess some obscure museum is a better place than an ML model. If your task is "find the best variation on theme X" or "quick draft visualization", they are often very useful. I am sure there will be many further tasks to which current and future models will be well suited. They are not magic picture machines. At least not yet.
  - gsk22 4y ago
    Isn't every "new style" just a novel combination of pre-existing concepts? Nothing new under the sun and all that. Either way, I feel like your view is an exhaustingly pessimistic take on AI-generated art. I mean, sure, most of what DALL-E generates is pretty mundane, but other times I have been surprised at how bizarre and unique certain images are. You seem to imply that because an AI is not human, its art is not imbued with meaning or originality -- but I find that an AI's non-human nature is precisely what _makes_ the art so original and meaningful.
muzani 4y ago
I was actually forcing myself to go through the whole 50/day because I knew it wouldn't be free forever, and I wanted to get better at it. I'm glad I did, but I wish I did more.
ryanmercer 4y ago
Same. I generated several thousand images and found it a chore, outside of the daily theme on the discord server, to try and even think of anything to query. It was also discouraging when sometimes you'd hit pure gold for 4-5 of the 6 images, then you'd be lucky to get 1 out of the 6 that was worth saving for several more queries. Now it's down to 4 images and... yeah... I'm not going to try and profit from the images, I don't need them for any business uses or anything, so to me it was a fun for a while and now just something I'll largely put out of mind.

dave_sullivan 4y ago

I think people don't realize how huge these models really are. When they're free, it's pretty cool. But charge an amount where there's actual profit in the product? Suddenly seems very expensive and not economically viable for a lot of use cases. We are still in the "you need a supercomputer" phase of these models for now. Something like DALLE mini is much more accessible but the results aren't good enough. Early early days.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago
What are the resources at work here? What are the resources needed to train this model? If someone just gave you the model for free, what resources would you need to use it to generate new results?
- binarymax 4y ago
  If I had to guess, based on other large models, it’s in the range of hundreds of GBs. It might even be in the TB range. To host that model for fast production SaaS inference requires many GPUs. An A100 has 80GB, so a dozen A100s just to keep it in memory, and more if that doesn’t meet the request demand. Training requires even more GPUs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used more than 100 and trained over 3 months.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > Training requires even more GPUs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used more than 100 and trained over 3 months. Based on this blog post where they scale to 7,500 'nodes', they say: > A large machine learning job spans many nodes and runs most efficiently when it has access to all of the hardware resources on each node. So I wouldn't be surprised if they do have a total of 7500+ GPUs to balance workloads between. TO add, OpenAI has a long history of getting unlimited access to Google's clusters of GPUs (nowadays they pay for it, though). When they were training 'OpenAI Five' to play Dota 2 at the highest level, they were using 256 P100 GPUs on GCP[0] and they casually threw 256 GPUs at 'clip' for a short while in January of 2021[1]. As for how they do it, see these posts: https://openai.com/blog/techniques-for-training-large-neural-networks/ https://openai.com/blog/techniques-for-training-large-neural... https://openai.com/blog/triton/ https://openai.com/blog/triton/ 0: https://openai.com/blog/openai-five/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-five/ 1: https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/

andreyk 4y ago

Check out Artbreeder, it is likewise a ton of fun! Multimodal.art (https://multimodal.art/ https://multimodal.art/) is working on a free version of something like DALLE, though it's not that good as of yet.

Filligree 4y ago

MidJourney gives ~unlimited generation for $30/month, and is nearly as good. Unlike DALL-E it doesn't deliberately nerf face generation. I've been having a blast.

muzani 4y ago
Both seem equally bad with face generation, but Midjourney works really well with famous people (e.g. Trump).
theAIartist 4y ago
It's pretty good at faces now. https://labs.openai.com/s/BAdAExWMdtyyC5VJVxXF5wdd https://labs.openai.com/s/BAdAExWMdtyyC5VJVxXF5wdd
- JulianaRestrepo 4y ago
  > Curbing misuse: To minimize the risk of DALL·E being misused to create deceptive content, we reject image uploads containing realistic faces and attempts to create the likeness of public figures, including celebrities and prominent political figures. We also used advanced techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of real individuals’ faces directly from the website

irrational 4y ago

Sounds kind of like scribblenauts. I would try the craziest things to see what it could come up with.

jnovek 4y ago

My heart sank when I saw the pricing model. I’ve been creating generative art since 2016 and I’ve been anxiously waiting for my invite. I wont be able to afford to generate the volume of images it takes to get good ones at this price point. I can afford $20/mo for something like this but I just can’t swing $200 to $300 it realistically takes to get interesting art out of these CLIP-centric models. Heck, the initial 50 images isn’t even enough to get the hang of how the model behaves.

blueboo 4y ago
If you’re technically inclined, I urge you to explore some newer Colabs being shared in this space. They offer vastly more configurable tools, work great for free on Google Colab, are straightforward to run on a local machine. Meanwhile we should prepare ourselves for a future where the best generative models cost a lot more as these companies slice and dice the (huge) burgeoning market here.
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  Can you share a few, please? I am already out of credits on Midjourney and I don't even feel like I got the hang of it until I was almost out.
  - pjgalbraith 4y ago
    Here are a couple I've used recently: Majestic diffusion - https://github.com/multimodalart/majesty-diffusion https://github.com/multimodalart/majesty-diffusion Centipede diffusion - https://colab.research.google.com/github/Zalring/Centipede_Diffusion/blob/main/Centipede_Diffusion.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/Zalring/Centipede_D...
    - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
      These need to be Kaggle'd already, fuck Colab is dogshit if you don't pay
  - 4y ago

commandlinefan 4y ago

> trying out wild combinations and cracking my friends up Wait until the next edition comes out where it automatically learns the sorts of things that crack you up and starts generating them without any input from you.

jamiek88 4y ago
Ai generated TikTok could be almost like wire jacking humans.
- geysersam 4y ago
  How many years away is this? 5? 10? I seriously doubt it'll be longer than that, considering the recent advances of autoregressive models, and the overall trajectory of ML the last decade. It'll use hideous amounts of compute.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Imagine being able to subtly influence opinions too. If you get a large percentage hooked on TikTok you can change and undermine democracy. Starting to believe representative democracy and social media are incompatible.

pjgalbraith 4y ago

Yeah I've been having fun with it recreating bad Heavy Metal album art (https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1548597455138463744 https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1548597455138463744). It's good, but surprisingly difficult to direct it when you have a composition in mind. A few of these I burned through 20-30 prompts to get and I can't see myself forking up hundreds of dollars to roll the dice. My brother is a digital artist and while excited at first he found it to be not all that useful. Mainly because it falls apart with complex prompts, especially when you have a few people or objects in a scene, or specific details you need represented, or a specific composition. You can do a lot with in-painting but it requires burning a lot of credits.

the_doctah 4y ago

>In fact, I've been glad to have a 50/day limit, because it helps me contain my hyperfocus instincts. This belongs on /r/linkedinlunatics