6 ms·

DALL-E Chess in Jungle and Dunes

45 points by emadehsan 4y ago

gus_massa 4y ago
Did you use the same prompt for all the images? How much cherrypicking did you do? How many images did you generate to get this set?
- emadehsan 4y ago
  Most inputs were a combination from these: "Painting/Digital Art/3D Render] of [Animals/Foxes/Monkeys] playing Chess in [Jungle/Dune/Desert]" Some inputs were specific: "Capaybara vs Groundhog Chess match" or "Llama vs Panda/Red Panda in chess match" I almost used all the credits OpenAI gave me for DALL-E. This set consists of about 50-60% of all the images I generated.
- Plutoberth 4y ago
  Not OP, but I generated over 150 images using DALL-E 2. Results in the quality of the images in the gallery are very common. Usually, for prompts as simple as this most of the output images (there are 4) look as good or better.
fab1an 4y ago
Amazed we haven't seen more DALL-E / Midjourney on HN. Probably the most astonishing new tech I've used since booting up a computer in the 90s. Just generating images is barely doing the tools justice though - you can create entire mini movies with it, like SALT (a 70s sci-fi adventure happening on Twitter): https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 DALL-E's inpainting feature is incredibly powerful to generate very large scenes: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1545752145273802752 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1545752145273802752 Hard to believe that we're only beginning to scratch the surface here...
- desindol 4y ago
  Because it’s a novelty abused for attention with clickbait popculture references. It’s not ready for primetime.
  - fab1an 4y ago
    "photography is a novelty abused for attention, it's not ready for primetime and cannot replace a great painter"
    - desindol 4y ago
      and it was true until photography matured just like it is now with art generating AI. At least have a look at the early technology of your strawman argument. A better analogy would be the switch to digital photography it was really exciting because of the ease of use but years down the road nobody could use their early digital images for anything but stamps because of their atrocious quality.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      Photography is an instrument the results of which are strongly dependent from the ability of the artist and technologist adopting it. To the best of my understanding, DALL-E offers limited control and cannot be compared to a brush with paint, a photocamera, a virtual canvas for curves for illustration, a coding console. Why? Because the weight of the user, its "importance", its "impact", is limited with that tool. (A commissioner is not an artist. A photographer may be.) As HN member Moe wrote, «Bad analogies are like Vietnam».
  - sbergot 4y ago
    Some people are already using generated images to replace stock art in low budget zines.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  I made a post on trying to do absurd-but-controlled food photography with DALL-E 2 (https://minimaxir.com/2022/07/food-photography-ai/ https://minimaxir.com/2022/07/food-photography-ai/ ) which did get upvotes on HN but apparently did not make the front page (so may have been flagged?)
- eprparadox 4y ago
  here's one i did recently: https://vimeo.com/724055394 https://vimeo.com/724055394 a reading of dreamtigers by jorge luis borges images created using @openaidalle. sequencing and morphing in #python with credit to András Jankovics morphing library [github.com/jankovicsandras/autoimagemorph]. featuring borderlands granular synth (artist template: @kingbritt), other desert cities delay by audio.damage , #rymdigare reverb, mixed in #kymaticaaum. headphones recommended, awards eligible (text here: thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/02/dreamtigers/ )
- Marazan 4y ago
  Because if you spend more than 5 minutes with it you can determine numerous things about the "astonishing" images you have seen 1) the amount of human curation is huge. For every 1 good image shared there are dozen of utter crap not shared 2) Dalle fails in some very systemic ways that make it completely unsuitable for vast swathes of image generation (for instance the "N kittens problem" . Dalle is amazing at generating a picture of 1 kitten. Dalle is dreadful a generating a picture of 8 kittens and that is totally fundamental to how it works, not a bug that can be worked out with time.) Also basically anything that requires recognisable detail in the background, Dalle falls flat. 3) prompt parsing is simultaneously hit and miss as well as laughably primitive. This is the "without" problem. Ask for a picture without some feature and there is a good chance you will get that thing in the picture.
sklargh 4y ago
Does anyone know if there is a company or team focused on outputting CAD using a tool like DALL-E?
la64710 4y ago
Somehow I find the Dall-E and othe AI generated pictures revolting … is it the choice of colors or what I don’t know? It’s like looking at an art piece without a soul ..
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  Do you think you could pass a Pepsi challenge of random images from the internet vs Dalle?
- fab1an 4y ago
  DALL-E has that quality, yes - I did a project where I tried to recreate my own photographs with DALL-E, which shows both its potential and limitations right now: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1551663900776595461 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1551663900776595461 (obviously ignoring the potential to conjure things you cannot photograph...)
  - EwanG 4y ago
    And I suspect this points out one of the more common future uses of the tool. Not replacing photographers per se, but certainly taking a large chunk out of the already shrinking Stock Image market. If instead of having to find a stock image that I can use as the base for my work (usually with at least SOME tweaking) I can just describe what I'm actually trying for as a final product... I'm not going to be getting rid of my Sony A7riv anytime soon, but this certainly would discourage me from trying to increase my library at Getty
quadcore 4y ago
I dont know how artists feel about DALL-E but as an amateur I feel bad. "This should be forbidden" bad. I guess the root of this feeling is the same as the one Copilot gives OSS programmers, it feels like theft and copyright enfringement. The pictures in this case uses techniques and colors scheme widely used by illustrator in the entertainment industries. Some of them are even above the average quality and that's scary too. Do we know if regulators are looking into Copilot and DALL-E? To which extent do we want computer doing what human do? I mean.. Art? Feels like bad taste to me.
- fooker 4y ago
  You can not regulate away tech advancements. Your competitors (researchers, companies, or countries - depending on granularity) certainly won't.
  - quadcore 4y ago
    Unless it kills the souls of their people.
- jstanley 4y ago
  All that will happen is humans start operating another abstraction layer up -- same thing as happened every previous time the machines have "taken our jobs". It's a good thing.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    Consider, however, that the output of these systems may not be copyrightable. So, when you move human involvement up to a higher layer of abstraction, it’s possible that the economics of the whole effort will be fundamentally transformed. Meaning, if these systems displace human artists, copyright itself may cease to be a motivator of economic activity—removing a significant incentive for the production of new art. Also, keep in mind that: (1) there are likely to be many fewer human custodians of systems like this who sustain themselves economically than there are artists who currently sustain themselves by producing new art; and (2) these systems are only as good as the artistic inputs that are fed to them, and is very unlikely that the contributing artists gave their consent or were compensated for their involvement in any way.
aaron695 4y ago
seestem 4y ago
Is DALL-E deterministic, like if I type the same phrase it will always generate the same images?
- bemmu 4y ago
  It starts with noise, so you get a different result every time.
  - seestem 4y ago
    That's very cool.
- corysama 4y ago
  I’m general, most Deep Learning processes these days are non-deterministic because 1) they only care about statistical correctness 2) there are some speed advantages in ignoring the existence of race condition bugs if you don’t care about being deterministic
  - seestem 4y ago
    Ah! That makes sense. Thank you for the info.
dimmuborgir 4y ago
Lots of weird artifacts which are very hard to fix. The argument that users can now generate professional grade art by bypassing artists entirely feels so strange. I have access to Dall-E. To generate images without artifacts, you have to do one of these: a) Do a lot of cherry-picking which can be expensive. b) Prompt should be about an abstract concept which can "tolerate" any number of artifacts. c) Prompt should be about a common/generic concept that you have already seen a lot of times on the internet. I think the biggest use case of Dall-E will be in removing creative block for artists.
- aetherson 4y ago
  I don't think that Dall-E as it currently exists is a big threat to professional artists. It's not super hard to imagine a noticeably improved version of Dall-E being a serious threat to professional artists, though. It's a question of how hard it will be to make some linear improvements to Dall-E. As a side note, I created an image in MidJourney from a prompt, which got a fairly pretty image that had some serious facial asymmetry problems, then uploaded the image to Dall-E and erased half the face, letting Dall-E fill it back in with a much more symmetrical look, and that kinda felt like the future. Using various AI models as tools for the things they do best.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  These feel like tools for creativity. Although the end result might not be masterful, it's super cool for quick iteration and exploration. Suddenly, people who don't have the skills to do that can start doing it and once you pick an output I totally see how you can improve on it manually.
heliophobicdude 4y ago
I believe the next evolution in generative images is stringing them together! If you can come up with the key frames with descriptions of the same style, a neat little program can interpolate them and produce a generative movie!
heliophobicdude 4y ago
Generating images seems almost a solved problem. What’s the next big problem to solve in this space?
status200 4y ago
During the beta, i must have done thousands of requests and was initially blown away, but now i can tell the "look" of a Dall-e generated image... it has these weird blurry spots that make it seem like a memory of a dream - the main schema is there but if you focus on any one point, the illusion is broken. Looking forward to the day that it is so polished that I cannot differentiate it from a human art piece.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > that I cannot differentiate I suggest that you aim for the day in which critics «cannot differentiate it from a human art piece». (We already have plenty of contexts in which the layman can be fooled. Think e.g. of "populism" in political discourse.)

45 points by emadehsan 4y ago

Did you use the same prompt for all the images? How much cherrypicking did you do? How many images did you generate to get this set?

emadehsan 4y ago
Most inputs were a combination from these: "Painting/Digital Art/3D Render] of [Animals/Foxes/Monkeys] playing Chess in [Jungle/Dune/Desert]" Some inputs were specific: "Capaybara vs Groundhog Chess match" or "Llama vs Panda/Red Panda in chess match" I almost used all the credits OpenAI gave me for DALL-E. This set consists of about 50-60% of all the images I generated.
Plutoberth 4y ago
Not OP, but I generated over 150 images using DALL-E 2. Results in the quality of the images in the gallery are very common. Usually, for prompts as simple as this most of the output images (there are 4) look as good or better.

fab1an 4y ago

Amazed we haven't seen more DALL-E / Midjourney on HN. Probably the most astonishing new tech I've used since booting up a computer in the 90s. Just generating images is barely doing the tools justice though - you can create entire mini movies with it, like SALT (a 70s sci-fi adventure happening on Twitter): https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 DALL-E's inpainting feature is incredibly powerful to generate very large scenes: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1545752145273802752 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1545752145273802752 Hard to believe that we're only beginning to scratch the surface here...

desindol 4y ago
Because it’s a novelty abused for attention with clickbait popculture references. It’s not ready for primetime.
- fab1an 4y ago
  "photography is a novelty abused for attention, it's not ready for primetime and cannot replace a great painter"
  - desindol 4y ago
    and it was true until photography matured just like it is now with art generating AI. At least have a look at the early technology of your strawman argument. A better analogy would be the switch to digital photography it was really exciting because of the ease of use but years down the road nobody could use their early digital images for anything but stamps because of their atrocious quality.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Photography is an instrument the results of which are strongly dependent from the ability of the artist and technologist adopting it. To the best of my understanding, DALL-E offers limited control and cannot be compared to a brush with paint, a photocamera, a virtual canvas for curves for illustration, a coding console. Why? Because the weight of the user, its "importance", its "impact", is limited with that tool. (A commissioner is not an artist. A photographer may be.) As HN member Moe wrote, «Bad analogies are like Vietnam».
- sbergot 4y ago
  Some people are already using generated images to replace stock art in low budget zines.
minimaxir 4y ago
I made a post on trying to do absurd-but-controlled food photography with DALL-E 2 (https://minimaxir.com/2022/07/food-photography-ai/ https://minimaxir.com/2022/07/food-photography-ai/ ) which did get upvotes on HN but apparently did not make the front page (so may have been flagged?)
eprparadox 4y ago
here's one i did recently: https://vimeo.com/724055394 https://vimeo.com/724055394 a reading of dreamtigers by jorge luis borges images created using @openaidalle. sequencing and morphing in #python with credit to András Jankovics morphing library [github.com/jankovicsandras/autoimagemorph]. featuring borderlands granular synth (artist template: @kingbritt), other desert cities delay by audio.damage , #rymdigare reverb, mixed in #kymaticaaum. headphones recommended, awards eligible (text here: thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/09/02/dreamtigers/ )
Marazan 4y ago
Because if you spend more than 5 minutes with it you can determine numerous things about the "astonishing" images you have seen 1) the amount of human curation is huge. For every 1 good image shared there are dozen of utter crap not shared 2) Dalle fails in some very systemic ways that make it completely unsuitable for vast swathes of image generation (for instance the "N kittens problem" . Dalle is amazing at generating a picture of 1 kitten. Dalle is dreadful a generating a picture of 8 kittens and that is totally fundamental to how it works, not a bug that can be worked out with time.) Also basically anything that requires recognisable detail in the background, Dalle falls flat. 3) prompt parsing is simultaneously hit and miss as well as laughably primitive. This is the "without" problem. Ask for a picture without some feature and there is a good chance you will get that thing in the picture.

sklargh 4y ago

Does anyone know if there is a company or team focused on outputting CAD using a tool like DALL-E?

la64710 4y ago

Somehow I find the Dall-E and othe AI generated pictures revolting … is it the choice of colors or what I don’t know? It’s like looking at an art piece without a soul ..

f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Do you think you could pass a Pepsi challenge of random images from the internet vs Dalle?
fab1an 4y ago
DALL-E has that quality, yes - I did a project where I tried to recreate my own photographs with DALL-E, which shows both its potential and limitations right now: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1551663900776595461 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1551663900776595461 (obviously ignoring the potential to conjure things you cannot photograph...)
- EwanG 4y ago
  And I suspect this points out one of the more common future uses of the tool. Not replacing photographers per se, but certainly taking a large chunk out of the already shrinking Stock Image market. If instead of having to find a stock image that I can use as the base for my work (usually with at least SOME tweaking) I can just describe what I'm actually trying for as a final product... I'm not going to be getting rid of my Sony A7riv anytime soon, but this certainly would discourage me from trying to increase my library at Getty

quadcore 4y ago

I dont know how artists feel about DALL-E but as an amateur I feel bad. "This should be forbidden" bad. I guess the root of this feeling is the same as the one Copilot gives OSS programmers, it feels like theft and copyright enfringement. The pictures in this case uses techniques and colors scheme widely used by illustrator in the entertainment industries. Some of them are even above the average quality and that's scary too. Do we know if regulators are looking into Copilot and DALL-E? To which extent do we want computer doing what human do? I mean.. Art? Feels like bad taste to me.

fooker 4y ago
You can not regulate away tech advancements. Your competitors (researchers, companies, or countries - depending on granularity) certainly won't.
- quadcore 4y ago
  Unless it kills the souls of their people.
jstanley 4y ago
All that will happen is humans start operating another abstraction layer up -- same thing as happened every previous time the machines have "taken our jobs". It's a good thing.
- legutierr 4y ago
  Consider, however, that the output of these systems may not be copyrightable. So, when you move human involvement up to a higher layer of abstraction, it’s possible that the economics of the whole effort will be fundamentally transformed. Meaning, if these systems displace human artists, copyright itself may cease to be a motivator of economic activity—removing a significant incentive for the production of new art. Also, keep in mind that: (1) there are likely to be many fewer human custodians of systems like this who sustain themselves economically than there are artists who currently sustain themselves by producing new art; and (2) these systems are only as good as the artistic inputs that are fed to them, and is very unlikely that the contributing artists gave their consent or were compensated for their involvement in any way.

aaron695 4y ago

seestem 4y ago

Is DALL-E deterministic, like if I type the same phrase it will always generate the same images?

bemmu 4y ago
It starts with noise, so you get a different result every time.
- seestem 4y ago
  That's very cool.
corysama 4y ago
I’m general, most Deep Learning processes these days are non-deterministic because 1) they only care about statistical correctness 2) there are some speed advantages in ignoring the existence of race condition bugs if you don’t care about being deterministic
- seestem 4y ago
  Ah! That makes sense. Thank you for the info.

dimmuborgir 4y ago

Lots of weird artifacts which are very hard to fix. The argument that users can now generate professional grade art by bypassing artists entirely feels so strange. I have access to Dall-E. To generate images without artifacts, you have to do one of these: a) Do a lot of cherry-picking which can be expensive. b) Prompt should be about an abstract concept which can "tolerate" any number of artifacts. c) Prompt should be about a common/generic concept that you have already seen a lot of times on the internet. I think the biggest use case of Dall-E will be in removing creative block for artists.

aetherson 4y ago
I don't think that Dall-E as it currently exists is a big threat to professional artists. It's not super hard to imagine a noticeably improved version of Dall-E being a serious threat to professional artists, though. It's a question of how hard it will be to make some linear improvements to Dall-E. As a side note, I created an image in MidJourney from a prompt, which got a fairly pretty image that had some serious facial asymmetry problems, then uploaded the image to Dall-E and erased half the face, letting Dall-E fill it back in with a much more symmetrical look, and that kinda felt like the future. Using various AI models as tools for the things they do best.
mrtksn 4y ago
These feel like tools for creativity. Although the end result might not be masterful, it's super cool for quick iteration and exploration. Suddenly, people who don't have the skills to do that can start doing it and once you pick an output I totally see how you can improve on it manually.

heliophobicdude 4y ago

I believe the next evolution in generative images is stringing them together! If you can come up with the key frames with descriptions of the same style, a neat little program can interpolate them and produce a generative movie!

heliophobicdude 4y ago

Generating images seems almost a solved problem. What’s the next big problem to solve in this space?

status200 4y ago

During the beta, i must have done thousands of requests and was initially blown away, but now i can tell the "look" of a Dall-e generated image... it has these weird blurry spots that make it seem like a memory of a dream - the main schema is there but if you focus on any one point, the illusion is broken. Looking forward to the day that it is so polished that I cannot differentiate it from a human art piece.

mdp2021 4y ago
> that I cannot differentiate I suggest that you aim for the day in which critics «cannot differentiate it from a human art piece». (We already have plenty of contexts in which the layman can be fooled. Think e.g. of "populism" in political discourse.)