9 ms·

This blog post proves that Dall-E 2 will not make human taste and design ability obsolete. The final image he ended up with is a lot uglier and more complicated

by woah 4y ago

This blog post proves that Dall-E 2 will not make human taste and design ability obsolete. The final image he ended up with is a lot uglier and more complicated than most of the intermediate steps. I think generative art AIs will have a similar effect on design as compilers have on software development, and will not put artists out of a job.

yomkippur 4y ago
will likely improve massively given the generational leaps made in this area. The "good enough" threshold is very low for majority of enterprises.
bulbosaur123 4y ago
Disagree. Just allow one or two more iterations and it will supersede human abilities. Think ahead. Tech progress won't stop.
- city17 4y ago
  The tech will get better, but ultimately there still has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good', which strongly depends on someone's taste and skill in identifying what a good image looks like. There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
  - ramblerman 4y ago
    I agree with you, but what if what constitutes good taste is just a subset of things that we’ve seen and liked. If dale decides what we see, it might become what the next generation likes and considers “good taste”.
    - gffrd 4y ago
      This is an interesting conversation. Good taste is what we see and like … but also patterning after people we want to impress / be associated with, is it not? Taste is very complex: it's hierarchical, social, not fixed, not absolute, not rational, is specific to audience and has irregular overlaps across groups, much of it (all?) derived from human sensation and context-specific situations. The path to something being considered as good taste is generally not simple: much of it flows through lines of power/desire/moment whose branches are not easy to trace as they're being formed. Much of taste is the hidden "why" which most of us never see. It's realistic that Dall-E could understand what trends are on the rise, or in good taste … it's much harder to say if Dall-E could create something of originally good taste.
      - nyhc99 4y ago
        That just sounds like pattern recognition with extra variables. Subdividing people into groups and then analyzing them certainly doesn't sound like a task that a machine will struggle with. Why should the algorithm need to be able to see the hidden "why" when most of us creative types can't see it or define it either? It's just a function of having observed enough people of a certain type. You want to generate something that will impress the people I'm targeting? Just analyze the posts of all my followers on social media. Analyze the content that is "liked" by people in my demographic range and with close proximity to where I live. Analyze the works of creators who belong to my generation and who listen to the same music as me. Do that all nearly instantly and then offer me a selection of options picked from those various methods. I don't expect "good taste" will be hard to conjure up. I already can't tell that a lot of these octopus drawings weren't created by a talented human, and we're still early and unsophisticated in our data analytics.
  - monkeynotes 4y ago
    > has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good' Assuming the status quo, true. As we evolve our lives around emerging AI tech I think we will at first be the curators and creative directors of AI, but eventually a creative agency will defer to the AI as it knows more about our tastes, market, audience, and the ENTIRE HISTORY of art, design, marketing, tastes, trends, and so on. Eventually it won't make sense to have a stupid human rubber stamp what the all powerful AI suggests. Just as it does not make sense for Facebook to curate news feeds. Maybe one day product advertising will look different depending on who looks at it. Pepsi logo "just for you".
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Is anyone really happy with AI curated feeds? Besides the company's who make them?
      - paulcole 4y ago
        I am! TikTok is amazing and the ads I get on Facebook/IG are for things I often want to buy.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    There has to be x - y humans that needs X - Y hours instead of X humans needing X hours. And that is a real risk to the profession
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Only if you assume the world demand for raster images is fixed...
  - corysama 4y ago
    I still remember a HN article, might have been a Paul Graham article, from 15 years ago about “Why are all of Trump’s buildings so poorly designed when he can afford the best designers?” It came down the the fact the he personally has bad taste and therefore cannot pick good designers or approve good designs. That aside, a great use of these tools is to generate N spit-takes of wildly varying styles that you can present to the customer very quickly and very cheaply. Once you pin them down to a particular range of styles you can get down to the carving out the details by hand.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    What looks good is a more widely distributed skill. A lot of people can tell you what looks good quite well, very few people can make it.
- bsder 4y ago
  However, the input might stop. Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated. What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E. We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.
stocknoob 4y ago
If you can have humans sort the generated images into "good quality" and "bad quality", you can just keep iterating. Our subjective ratings is another score to optimize for.
- cloogshicer 4y ago
  Doesn't the sample size for this have to be very large for it to make a difference? Genuine question.
  - stocknoob 4y ago
    Sure, but there are millions of people on the DALLE waitlist, who would happily rate the output for better performance / more credits. The famous ImageNet data set only has 1.2M images.
  - spyder 4y ago
    With semi-supervised learning a small amount of labeled data, can produce considerable improvement in accuracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning https://towardsdatascience.com/semi-supervised-learning-how-to-assign-labels-with-label-propagation-algorithm-9f1683f4d0eb https://towardsdatascience.com/semi-supervised-learning-how-...
    - cloogshicer 4y ago
      Thank you!
- cube2222 4y ago
  Moreover, the current Dalle UI already does that. When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection. With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
  - 4y ago
allenu 4y ago
I was thinking something similar. The editing process is still a human one, and I agree that the one chosen was weaker than a lot of the intermediate choices. It's a matter of taste, obviously, but to me the red ball with a nondescript sketched square around it feels unfinished. The yellow cartoony logos look more finished and professional to me.
- cube2222 4y ago
  Appreciate the feedback! I'll keep it mind, as I might still end up choosing a different one. The chosen one is closer to my original vision, but you do have a point that the yellow ones look more polished.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Strongly agree with others here that you skipped better options. Also, since time immemorial, databases are cylinders and data comes in cubes. For logo purposes, these are both strong, while the second adds “personality”: https://i.imgur.com/j6P4Oh4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/j6P4Oh4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kM23GZV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kM23GZV.jpg I really like the design breaking out of the strong circle, and your hard hat idea was great. That last one could have been your logo “as is”! Though you could consider replacing the green cubes with cylinders, or simply hand add rubix cube lines to these green cubes to make them data cubes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+cube&t=ha&va=j&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+cube&t=ha&va=j&ia=images&iax=... Thanks for sharing the process!
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    From what I see we are at the next stage of the logo generation :)
deebosong 4y ago
Not trying to be a luddite and/or vehemently defend the noble profession of nuanced graphic design, BUT... Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I. That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design. For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums. Just my 2 cents. I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
- bigfudge 4y ago
  I agree. But I think the key thing is that deciding what phase to feed the system was still the key task. Creative people are unlikely to be out of a job anytime soon, even if they end up using something like Dalle to make quick prototypes.
- cheschire 4y ago
  I think a tool like this might be good to help clients get through a few ideation phases on their own prior to showing up to the first discussion with branding / graphics / design professionals. At least it might get them closer to understanding the impossibility of their 7 perpendicular red lines requirement.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    It certainly reduces the # of designers necessary. Just because it doesn't obliterate all of the designers doesn't mean the profession isn't at risk. Today fewer data viz experts are hired despite the proliferation of data, since we now have Tableau, Looker, etc A more obtuse example, how many lift operators do you see today?
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    i am going to be extremely butthurt if clients start showing up and asking me to finish an ai's homework for them.
whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
DALL-E2 and similar are unbundlings: the best artists synergize 1) technical ability with 2) good taste. 1 is the ability to climb a hill and 2 informs the direction of "up", and both take years to develop well. What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.
mkaic 4y ago
Will DALL•E 2 make human taste obsolete? No, absolutely not. But DALL•E 3? 4? Other similar models in the next 5 years? Absolutely yes. This blog post proves that with current algorithms, human input is needed, but it proves nothing about future algorithms. In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.
- p1esk 4y ago
  Sounds familiar (Hinton’s predictions about radiology): https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ
monkeynotes 4y ago
Train Dall-E on more logos that you like. I can imagine a creative agency purchasing a Dall-E 2 instance and training it up on a model specific to the work and clients they have ongoing. If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.
croes 4y ago
It depends. Is the customer happy with the result? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are many professions where cheap products killed handmade quality.
Kiro 4y ago
Why are you framing it like your subjective taste is universal fact? I think the final image is the best.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
waynesonfire 4y ago
I agree, what a clunky process. Hard to express in written prose what you want, so much ambiguity. Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)

by woah 4y ago

yomkippur 4y ago

will likely improve massively given the generational leaps made in this area. The "good enough" threshold is very low for majority of enterprises.

bulbosaur123 4y ago

Disagree. Just allow one or two more iterations and it will supersede human abilities. Think ahead. Tech progress won't stop.

city17 4y ago
The tech will get better, but ultimately there still has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good', which strongly depends on someone's taste and skill in identifying what a good image looks like. There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
- ramblerman 4y ago
  I agree with you, but what if what constitutes good taste is just a subset of things that we’ve seen and liked. If dale decides what we see, it might become what the next generation likes and considers “good taste”.
  - gffrd 4y ago
    This is an interesting conversation. Good taste is what we see and like … but also patterning after people we want to impress / be associated with, is it not? Taste is very complex: it's hierarchical, social, not fixed, not absolute, not rational, is specific to audience and has irregular overlaps across groups, much of it (all?) derived from human sensation and context-specific situations. The path to something being considered as good taste is generally not simple: much of it flows through lines of power/desire/moment whose branches are not easy to trace as they're being formed. Much of taste is the hidden "why" which most of us never see. It's realistic that Dall-E could understand what trends are on the rise, or in good taste … it's much harder to say if Dall-E could create something of originally good taste.
    - nyhc99 4y ago
      That just sounds like pattern recognition with extra variables. Subdividing people into groups and then analyzing them certainly doesn't sound like a task that a machine will struggle with. Why should the algorithm need to be able to see the hidden "why" when most of us creative types can't see it or define it either? It's just a function of having observed enough people of a certain type. You want to generate something that will impress the people I'm targeting? Just analyze the posts of all my followers on social media. Analyze the content that is "liked" by people in my demographic range and with close proximity to where I live. Analyze the works of creators who belong to my generation and who listen to the same music as me. Do that all nearly instantly and then offer me a selection of options picked from those various methods. I don't expect "good taste" will be hard to conjure up. I already can't tell that a lot of these octopus drawings weren't created by a talented human, and we're still early and unsophisticated in our data analytics.
- monkeynotes 4y ago
  > has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good' Assuming the status quo, true. As we evolve our lives around emerging AI tech I think we will at first be the curators and creative directors of AI, but eventually a creative agency will defer to the AI as it knows more about our tastes, market, audience, and the ENTIRE HISTORY of art, design, marketing, tastes, trends, and so on. Eventually it won't make sense to have a stupid human rubber stamp what the all powerful AI suggests. Just as it does not make sense for Facebook to curate news feeds. Maybe one day product advertising will look different depending on who looks at it. Pepsi logo "just for you".
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Is anyone really happy with AI curated feeds? Besides the company's who make them?
    - paulcole 4y ago
      I am! TikTok is amazing and the ads I get on Facebook/IG are for things I often want to buy.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  There has to be x - y humans that needs X - Y hours instead of X humans needing X hours. And that is a real risk to the profession
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Only if you assume the world demand for raster images is fixed...
- corysama 4y ago
  I still remember a HN article, might have been a Paul Graham article, from 15 years ago about “Why are all of Trump’s buildings so poorly designed when he can afford the best designers?” It came down the the fact the he personally has bad taste and therefore cannot pick good designers or approve good designs. That aside, a great use of these tools is to generate N spit-takes of wildly varying styles that you can present to the customer very quickly and very cheaply. Once you pin them down to a particular range of styles you can get down to the carving out the details by hand.
- bergenty 4y ago
  What looks good is a more widely distributed skill. A lot of people can tell you what looks good quite well, very few people can make it.
bsder 4y ago
However, the input might stop. Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated. What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E. We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.

stocknoob 4y ago

If you can have humans sort the generated images into "good quality" and "bad quality", you can just keep iterating. Our subjective ratings is another score to optimize for.

cloogshicer 4y ago
Doesn't the sample size for this have to be very large for it to make a difference? Genuine question.
- stocknoob 4y ago
  Sure, but there are millions of people on the DALLE waitlist, who would happily rate the output for better performance / more credits. The famous ImageNet data set only has 1.2M images.
- spyder 4y ago
  With semi-supervised learning a small amount of labeled data, can produce considerable improvement in accuracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning https://towardsdatascience.com/semi-supervised-learning-how-to-assign-labels-with-label-propagation-algorithm-9f1683f4d0eb https://towardsdatascience.com/semi-supervised-learning-how-...
  - cloogshicer 4y ago
    Thank you!
cube2222 4y ago
Moreover, the current Dalle UI already does that. When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection. With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
- 4y ago

allenu 4y ago

I was thinking something similar. The editing process is still a human one, and I agree that the one chosen was weaker than a lot of the intermediate choices. It's a matter of taste, obviously, but to me the red ball with a nondescript sketched square around it feels unfinished. The yellow cartoony logos look more finished and professional to me.

cube2222 4y ago
Appreciate the feedback! I'll keep it mind, as I might still end up choosing a different one. The chosen one is closer to my original vision, but you do have a point that the yellow ones look more polished.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Strongly agree with others here that you skipped better options. Also, since time immemorial, databases are cylinders and data comes in cubes. For logo purposes, these are both strong, while the second adds “personality”: https://i.imgur.com/j6P4Oh4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/j6P4Oh4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kM23GZV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kM23GZV.jpg I really like the design breaking out of the strong circle, and your hard hat idea was great. That last one could have been your logo “as is”! Though you could consider replacing the green cubes with cylinders, or simply hand add rubix cube lines to these green cubes to make them data cubes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+cube&t=ha&va=j&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+cube&t=ha&va=j&ia=images&iax=... Thanks for sharing the process!
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  From what I see we are at the next stage of the logo generation :)

deebosong 4y ago

Not trying to be a luddite and/or vehemently defend the noble profession of nuanced graphic design, BUT... Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I. That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design. For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums. Just my 2 cents. I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.

bigfudge 4y ago
I agree. But I think the key thing is that deciding what phase to feed the system was still the key task. Creative people are unlikely to be out of a job anytime soon, even if they end up using something like Dalle to make quick prototypes.
cheschire 4y ago
I think a tool like this might be good to help clients get through a few ideation phases on their own prior to showing up to the first discussion with branding / graphics / design professionals. At least it might get them closer to understanding the impossibility of their 7 perpendicular red lines requirement.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  It certainly reduces the # of designers necessary. Just because it doesn't obliterate all of the designers doesn't mean the profession isn't at risk. Today fewer data viz experts are hired despite the proliferation of data, since we now have Tableau, Looker, etc A more obtuse example, how many lift operators do you see today?
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  i am going to be extremely butthurt if clients start showing up and asking me to finish an ai's homework for them.

whatgoodisaroad 4y ago

DALL-E2 and similar are unbundlings: the best artists synergize 1) technical ability with 2) good taste. 1 is the ability to climb a hill and 2 informs the direction of "up", and both take years to develop well. What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.

mkaic 4y ago

Will DALL•E 2 make human taste obsolete? No, absolutely not. But DALL•E 3? 4? Other similar models in the next 5 years? Absolutely yes. This blog post proves that with current algorithms, human input is needed, but it proves nothing about future algorithms. In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.

p1esk 4y ago
Sounds familiar (Hinton’s predictions about radiology): https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ

monkeynotes 4y ago

Train Dall-E on more logos that you like. I can imagine a creative agency purchasing a Dall-E 2 instance and training it up on a model specific to the work and clients they have ongoing. If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.

croes 4y ago

It depends. Is the customer happy with the result? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are many professions where cheap products killed handmade quality.

Kiro 4y ago

Why are you framing it like your subjective taste is universal fact? I think the final image is the best.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

waynesonfire 4y ago

I agree, what a clunky process. Hard to express in written prose what you want, so much ambiguity. Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)