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I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2
- croes 4y agoI find it quite ironic that a AI company like OpenAI seems to use word lists to prevent inappropriate content creation.
- frozencell 4y agoPrivate word lists right.
- Halan 4y agoSuggestion for the next blog entry: How my blog post going viral on Hacker News pushed me to finally use a CDN
- l00sed 4y agoI wrote that one, but haven't gotten enough traffic again to see if it works... https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/hug-of-death https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/hug-of-death
- motoboi 4y agoHow I generated static html for my static site and it got served and cached.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amsterdorn 4y agothis. I couldn't even load the page.
- superchroma 4y agoWhen asked about what jobs the robots would come for first, I would have had to say that digital artist was pretty low on my ranking before now.
- Dylan16807 4y agoMaybe, but this is replacing fifty cents of stock photo, not digital artists.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonas21 4y agoWho do you think created that 50-cent stock art?
- Dylan16807 4y agoProbably not a digital artist. Is there a big fraction of that on stock photo sites?
- stemlord 4y agoThere is a semantic issue going on here, "digital art" I thought meant fine art, not illustration for blog posts
- ravenstine 4y agoIt's coming for us, too. It won't be long before most software engineer positions are eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code. Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to an extent. This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet. All we need is a significant market correction and the next generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs. The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD. Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of common problems in building software. AI can do it better because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable code because those things will no longer matter.
- sbf501 4y agoYou should've invested in CloudFront first because your site isn't loading.
- dsmmcken 4y agoI know. I wasn't actually expecting to hit front-page. Trying to reinforce it best I can.
- brundolf 4y agoFwiw, in my experience you don't actually need a CDN just to survive HN. It may be enough to just make sure you're not hitting a DB on every request; ideally you'd be caching the HTML output wholesale (via static site generator or otherwise) For reference: with cached HTML, my single Node.js process running on Heroku's cheapest tier has weathered the front page multiple times without breaking a sweat
- knicholes 4y agoRight, like something like Varnish.
- brundolf 4y agoHadn't heard of Varnish, but yeah, it looks like a good solution the OP could probably layer over their current setup without too much trouble
- wyager 4y agoI switched backends a bunch of times because everything I tried (Go stdlib HTTP, Tornado, etc.) kept getting taken out whenever I would hit the front page, either due to CPU overload or some sort of resource leak. I ended up using Warp+Wai+Servant (https://github.com/yesodweb/wai https://github.com/yesodweb/wai) and it has been smooth sailing since then off my $3/mo VPS. It can take thousands of req/sec without flinching (which is higher than what you see from top of HN - that maxes out at a few hundred req/s).
- lagrange77 4y agoIs DALL-E 2 generating the images on every page request? ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- akamaka 4y agoAm I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you look closely. I mean, it’s an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate images at this level, but I don’t want them shown to me on a daily basis while I’m reading blogs.
- ajqreh 4y agoThe article isn't loading for me, so I can't really comment on the images it contains, but I've found telling the ai to apply an impressionistic filter does wonders for removing the unsettling aspect. Obviously that limits you to a specific style of image, but I imagine there are other stylistic filters you might apply that achieve the same goal. I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist cats" and similar queries.
- petercooper 4y agoI'm over 1000 credits into Dalle so far (I know, I know..) and you're on the money. You can go a lot further than impressionism, though. Specifying the names of famous illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting. The right combinations can yield some incredibly realistic looking things, even faces, and then for the rest of it, there's Photoshop, Gigapixel, and other tools to patch things up. (I've had more luck creating 'elements' with Dalle and then montaging them the old fashioned way.) The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you still need to think like an art director and establish a way to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle alone can't do that.
- jiggawatts 4y agoDall-E is very “first generation” in its design and interactivity with the users. It’s just a matter of time until setting a “consistent art style” becomes a feature of these things. Similarly, asking the AI to produce multiple views/poses of the same thing will likely become a common feature.
- glofish 4y agoVisit their main blog page to see a subset of the resulting images all at once https://deephaven.io/blog/ https://deephaven.io/blog/ https://deephaven.io/blog/page/2/ https://deephaven.io/blog/page/2/ etc
- Guest9081239812 4y agoI find the images fairly distracting and they take all the focus on the above page. The artwork also isn't very consistent which makes it feel like a jumbled mess. When you click a post the image takes the entire screen and pushes all the content below the fold. It's more like browsing a community art portfolio instead of a tech blog. I'd prefer smaller thumbnails or icons that give more context to the actual post. This way they could add some benefit, such as helping to visually categorize the content. As of now, they're just a bunch of random illustrations taking up valuable screen real estate. That being said, thanks for sharing, it's interesting to see an example of someone integrating DALL·E 2 into their workflow.
- system2 4y agoLooks like a hipster LA artist drew them all.
- dreadlordbone 4y agoArchived link: https://archive.ph/uNfeK https://archive.ph/uNfeK
- robocat 4y agoThat is missing the images.
- thenerdhead 4y agoWhat service did they use for $45? Is this legal to include in published works too like a book?
- jdminhbg 4y agoFrom the Dall-E terms of use: > Use of Images. Subject to your compliance with these terms and our Content Policy, you may use Generations for any legal purpose, including for commercial use. This means you may sell your rights to the Generations you create, incorporate them into works such as books, websites, and presentations, and otherwise commercialize them.
- markdown 4y agoThey must be well-funded if they're leaving money on the table like this. I'd pay a few a dollars for commercial use.
- rockbruno 4y agoIt takes several tries to generate something actually meaningful, so they're definitely making money by having people buy credits to run it
- LegitShady 4y agoLegally its still unclear if the image can be copyrighted. If you use it commercially, others may be able to use the same images if they’re generated by DALL-E.
- cowmix 4y agoI'll wait to read it when it actually comes up but until then I have to say when I finally got access to the DallE2 beta, I was underwhelmed. The mini-Dalle, while not as good in the image fidelity department, is much more fun.
- tough 4y agoThe beta is publicly available now, everyone has to pay tho
- jrochkind1 4y agoThis is very interesting, but why are all the images just showing up as blurred out pre-loads for me? Makes it a lot less communicative, since it's literally about the images! I mean, I'm guessing these aren't the intended images, since you don't need DALL-E to generate blurry splotches!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wyager 4y agoAn important lesson: >99% of your blog readers will visit during <1% of the time. If your goal is to allow people to read the stuff you write, you must be capable of serving your content to >1000 people per second. Use a good backend (I recommend Servant+Warp or Snap - the only two I've tried that could handle it, out of probably 15 popular options tested) or a good caching reverse proxy (insofar as such a thing can be said to exist) and/or a CDN.
- motoboi 4y agoStatic html, from a cloud bucket.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brundolf 4y agoArchive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20220808212448/https://deephaven.io/blog/2022/08/08/AI-generated-blog-thumbnails/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220808212448/https://deephaven... Unfortunately the images are cached at a very low resolution
- jwaterhouse 4y agoI take your point about images and increased engagement but I'm so over useless imagery in blog/article content. I think I first really noticed it with Medium. So many pointless header images that very rarely have anything to do with the article. Just visual noise. My prediction is that a lot of blogs will do what you've done too, and then they'll all look/feel the same. New models will come out I guess, but then they'll proliferate too and everything will look the same again. And then maybe to differentiate, those few that value it/can afford it will make the effort to find actually relevant images or commission artwork.
- sfink 4y agoUgh, this immediately drives home the realization that representative images are soon going to be devalued and useless, to the point that we'll all be ignoring them soon. Possibly even stripping them with ad blockers or similar tools. I actually think it's really awesome to be able to do this with a series of blog posts, and even if you look past the stylistic inconsistencies and oddities, this particular usage is good and adds value. Which is kind of the problem. Relatively low cost, currently high benefit? It's going to be driven into the ground. We've seen this over and over again. Some reliable form of signal, or of value, becomes inexpensive enough to produce that it gets commoditized, monetized, and weaponized against us all. Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random unsolicited messages—if they even make it pass the automated filters. Same for text messages. Bold images and lettering used to be good for highlighting and accentuating important information. Now we don't see them, even if they make it past our ad blockers, because the neural networks living in our skulls know to filter them out as negative-value advertisements. The same thing will happen here. Nearly all blogs will soon be sprouting cutesy images to go along with the posts. Initially, many of them will be useful and add value, suggesting a metaphor or analogy or simply providing a visual anchor to make the content more memorable. But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're at -1%! (If you put work into the prompt and curate carefully, it will still be a net positive to your content. But it won't matter for long in terms of traffic/engagement, because everyone will be mentally ignoring it.)
- jedberg 4y ago> But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're at -1%! Too late. It already started happening a while ago. Tons of blogs with annoying animated gifs and now browsers have the ability to block them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 4y ago> Maybe it was because this was my first attempt, but with 100 more posts to go, I hoped I could get better with practice. It would be super cool to just feed DALL-E a whole blog post and have something great pop out, but even with some GPT-3 magic we probably aren’t there yet. I see a business opportunity here. Feed text into GPT-3 and have it generate DALL-E prompts to make appropriate images. Then you have it do the same thing for a children's book.
- gbrindisi 4y agoAlready done: https://medium.com/@glan1k/dall-e-gpt-3-d1aaaff38639 https://medium.com/@glan1k/dall-e-gpt-3-d1aaaff38639
- danielbln 4y agoI've done something similar a while ago, turned out great (according to my toddler): https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ueizwz/i_printed_a_dalle_generated_childrens_book_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/ueizwz/i_printed_a_...
- brundolf 4y agoHonestly, this is an awesome use of DALL-E and I'll probably start doing the same for my blog It's perfect because: - The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to be perfect - It's a low-value enough use of images that you'd probably never commission a human artist to do them; instead you'd either use stock photos, or skip having images completely - The nature of header images for a tech blog tends toward the abstract/surreal, which means it's either hard to find the right stock images, or the ones you do find will be super abstract to the point of being boring All of these make it a great use of the technology
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago>The images just need to get across a vibe I can't speak for everyone, but with my own experience of reading (at least partially) a dozen or two technical articles almost every day for many years, pointless media is a hallmark of low quality. these days, I just immediately bail with Ctrl+W as soon as I encounter a twitter-pop-culture meme/gif in the header or anywhere near the top. sure, it does mean I skip the 5 out of 100 that were worth reading, I save a lot of time by skipping the 95 out of 100 that weren't.
- anotherevan 4y agoI almost always bail when I see animated gifs in a technical article. They are most often meant to add a touch of humour, so of questionable value to begin with, and I find them painfully distracting from the text I'm actually trying to read. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- ziddoap 4y ago>They are most often meant to add a touch of humour, _so of questionable value to begin with_ This comes across as remarkably sad to me. Humor is of questionable value as a baseline? To each their own, I suppose. I enjoy a technical article with animations that explain things, or a well-placed joke/humorous anecdote/etc. Especially in cases where the humor also supports a point or illustrates something. I tend to remember things better when they have some sort of emotional impact, and out of the emotional impacts possible (sad, angry, etc.) I definitely prefer joy, humor, etc.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y ago>"While the role of the artist isn’t going away soon, the role of stock image sites might disappear. " Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the price for the specialized high end images will hold their value or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will continue to be valuable. It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize it for use.
- andreyk 4y agoAgreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for blog posts with specific subjects), I would say the former takes more work/time than the latter. With stock images I can just do a quick search on Shutterstock and find a lot of high quality options (usually), whereas with DALL-E 2 I need to figure out the exact prompt I want and iterate on it for a while. Stock images are not that expensive -- if you buy many it's as low as $2 per image, or on the high end (if you pay to just download a few per month) it's more like $10 per image. It does cost more, but time is money, so...
- paulcole 4y agoTime is only money if you someone will pay you for your time. If that’s not true, then it’s just a good excuse to spend your money when you could (in some cases should) be spending your time.
- andreyk 4y agoTrue - I guess I meant "time is money" in the broader sense really (ie I have other things I would prefer to spend my time doing, whether paid or not).
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoWould that be similar to a "prompt engineer" role?
- SilverBirch 4y ago> Our approach so far has been to spend 10 minutes scrolling through tangentially related but ultimately ill-fitting images from stock photo sites, download something not terrible, This just seems… Not interesting, well done you’ve recreated images that clearly even before AI everyone ignored.
- gumby 4y agoI think this just shows the pointlessness of the junk pictures on posts, like the ones Medium apparently requires. Now that pictures are cheap ven NYT articles are stuffed with photos that don’t add to the article.
- siddontang 4y agoIMO, Using AI for image generation is the trend, whether we like it or not. But for me, as a software engineer, I still insist on creating pictures for my own blogs or presentations, etc. I'm not a painter, of course I paint badly. But I find that it is not so difficult to create a picture that expresses my ideas. Mostly I try to use https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ for sketching hand-drawn, and find the free stock pictures from https://www.freepik.com/ https://www.freepik.com/. I think this is another joy of creation, like programming :-)
- bitL 4y agoDid anybody try to generate desktop icon sets for Linux?
- frozencell 4y agoI haven’t seen anybody generating “useful creations” except cover albums and thumbnails, yet.
- bradgranath 4y agoGety will become a trainingset vendor.
- imhoguy 4y agoExactly, "We don't have exctly what you ask for but maybe you would like these GettyAI(tm) generated images:"
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoI would add to "what I've learned" that DALL-E 2 will start to be used to generate real ideas for real world 3d objects. Here are cups rendered in the style of a famous architect. https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w7buyx/a_coffee_cup_designed_by_famous_architects/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w7buyx/a_coffee_cup... Dalle 2's influence will be felt outside the graphic artist realm too.
- Beaver117 4y agoSerious question, although everyone seems to avoid it, when will this or a similarly advanced system allow porn? In fact, the porn companies have been awfully quiet for a while. What are they doing? Usually they are the ones on the brink of new technology.
- donkarma 4y agoAlready out
- the_af 4y agoI've been using Crayon AI (similar project, free) to create images for a pet hobby project, free and for my own private enjoyment. Think a D&D RPG: I'm writing a bestiary and book of spells, and because I don't care about an exact fit, I can prototype tons of bizarre creatures, wizardly types, weird spells, and colorful scenery. It's pretty cool, and way easier than drawing the prototypes myself. The one thing these AIs really struggle with is faces. It's hard to get a human without a monstrous face. The best you can hope for is an abstract or blurry face.
- egypturnash 4y agoGod it’s so fucking depressing to see all you techies debating whether or not the skill I have dedicated my life to getting good enough at to earn a quiet, modest living with should be automated away or not. And insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you. At least I can take solace in the fact that for now these things aren’t gonna be taking a bite out of the furry art commissions I like to take, since that’s way too associated with crazy cartoon porn for them to not censor relevant keywords.
- julianlam 4y agoDon't worry, while the rest of the industry is busy making artsy abstract images of chimpanzees surfing on a wave of coronavirii, you can quietly work on UX design I guess.
- egypturnash 4y agoGod that’s a fucking sure route to suicide right there. From sitting at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to shitting out buttons for yet another fucking weather app on Dribble.
- roughly 4y agoNot to mention that the whole goddamn trick here is basically taking the output you and your peers have created, anonymizing it, throwing it in a blender, and then acting like the AI has generated something new and humans aren't needed anymore.
- egypturnash 4y agoYep! “Draw me Elon Musk fellating a Bitcoin in the style of an artist who spent decades refining their craft and producing enough art to train a neural network to make something resembling it, and completely ignore any potential copyright issues because it’s maybe right on the edge of sufficiently transformative, and anyway we have no idea what’s going on in these damn black boxes any more.” That’ll be one compute token, please.
- julianlam 4y agoI'd like to see O'Reilly switch to using DALL•E to generate their book covers, using their existing corpus as training material.
- hamasho 4y agoFirst time to hear "Prompt engineering" but I feel familiar with this term. It's my daily job to adjust google search queries to get the information I need, even though sometimes I don't know what I need.First time to hear "Prompt engineering" but I feel really familiar with this term. It's my daily job to engineer google search queries to get the information I nee.
- Valakas_ 4y agoPrompt "engineering" will last a couple of years, until the UI improves to the point any dummy can do it, just like with instagram filters.
- frozencell 4y agoRight, the best prompt engineers might develop the best prompt UIs.
- c3534l 4y agoI thought it was going to autogenerate a prompt pased on the article's text. This seems no better than using stock photos. Actually worse.
- balaselvam 4y agoHow do you think copyrights around these images will evolve? No copyrights? Full ownership to the one creating the prompt? Copyrights based on specific context?
- bayesian_horse 4y agoI signed up months ago for the beta and I'm still not in.
- madduci 4y agoMe too, that's awkward
- Valakas_ 4y agoThey choose who to accept based on their shared accounts (linkedin, instagram, etc).
- frozencell 4y agoReal name LinkedIn probably. Basically the user needs to be traceable, that’s the Microsoft/US “safe anything policy” right?
- mastazi 4y agoThe "Bonus killer feature request for Google" kinda exists in PowerPoint in Office365, except that it's based on stock pictures, rather than synthetic images. It selects a picture based on the text currently present in the slide. So, unlike the "feature request", you don't even need to type a description. The feature is called "Design Ideas".
- rg111 4y agoI used this feature so much when I was in school. And I was thinking exactly this.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoThe problem with using DALLE2 is that seemingly the only publicly accessible version available on the "hugging face" site constantly hits limits.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoImages look very nice but also, browsing the blog archive, pointless, since they mostly have nothing to do with a post's context. The later is something that low effort blogs tend to have in common and I immediately go away when see it.
- nudpiedo 4y agoI guess these images cannot be copyrighted for a blog post since dalle could generate either the same or very similar ones. Some less capable algorithms are quite repetitive in such aspect. Perhaps after some time it will be like blog theming where everyone has the same style.
- MayeulC 4y ago> But how do you even have a signature style when it is the AI generating your images? Style transfer? It was one of the first CNN applications, and it would be nice to see that included in image generation pipelines.
- wardour 4y agoWhat about royalties to the designers / artists that created the art being used to train these systems?
- personalidea 4y agoEvery time an artist looks at a painting, gets inspiration from that experience and creates an image themselves, they need to pay royalties?
- fiat_fandango 4y agoI assume those who currently have access to DALL.E 2 are legally prevented from selling second-hand use of their access? I'm currently on the waitlist and I've been curious if there's any way to bill access like this as "design consulting" or something? Posts like this are absolutely fascinating!
- stainablesteel 4y agois there a way to know for sure if something was generated by it?
- fiat_fandango 4y agoProvably better than 80% of fiverr "artists" ;)