14 ms·

Spent $15 in DALL·E 2 credits creating this AI image

460 points by pat-jay 4y ago

butz 4y ago
Serious question: do you actually own the generated image, or copyright is still owned by whoever owns "DALL-E 2"?
srelbo 4y ago
You can also play around for free on a slightly less sophisticated model here https://art.elbo.ai https://art.elbo.ai
coldcode 4y ago
It's fun to play around with it, but like the author found, what you get is often strange or useless. I also find 1k images too small to do much with but I realize making 4k images would be cost prohibitive. I also wish it could generate vector images as well as pixel images. That would be fun to use.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
Love the stylistic ones. Amazing how it generates such good anime and vaporwave variants, like the neon vaporwave backboard. I ran out of credits way too fast, so I like to see other people playing with it and their iterative process.
Vox_Leone 4y ago
Can I use NLP to generate input for DALL-E 2? That would be cool.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  You can, in fact, use GPT-3 to engineer prompts for DALL-E 2 in a sense. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1555626060384911360 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1555626060384911360
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I want to see a few iterations of describing an image with AI, generating it, describing it again, generating it... Like when passing a piece of text through Google translate back and forth.
  - turdnagel 4y ago
    There was a tool that could find the "equilibrium" called Translation Party. I don't think it works anymore. I'd love to see one that goes back and forth between DALL-E and an image description algorithm.
  - rmbyrro 4y ago
    According to internet popular belief, you'd end up with a picture of a certain ignominious dictator that unfortunately destroyed Europe in the 1940's. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
  - pamelafox 4y ago
    I tried that! Results were mixed: https://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/1542593090472386561 https://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/1542593090472386561 It needs a better text to image model, I think. Maybe you can fork it and improve?
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      Interesting! I really like the flute > cup > bathtub sequence. It has a real dreamlike disjointedness to it.
- jcims 4y ago
  I used GPT-3 to 'write' a children's book and asked it to include descriptions of the illustrations. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y8EE_p8bw9dIEDguT1bTWpPbrSGFpeQsS8hf-tIAepE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y8EE_p8bw9dIEDguT1bT... The fact that it's a derivative of an existing work is noteworthy, but I gave it absolutely no guidance on the topic. If i suggest something it will give it a go with similar fervor. eg https://imgur.com/a/N1qWaSV https://imgur.com/a/N1qWaSV
  - jfk13 4y ago
    Your link doesn't seem to be publicly accessible.
humbleferret 4y ago
“In working with DALL·E 2, it’s important to be specific about what you want without over-stuffing or adding redundant words.” I found this to be the most important point from this piece. Often people don't really know what they really want when it comes to creative work, let alone to some omniscient algorithm. In spite of that, it's a delight to see something you love from an unspecific prompt that you won't find with anything you receive from a human. Dall.E 2 never ceases to amaze me. For anyone interested in learning about what Dall.E 2 can do, the author also links to the Dall.E 2 prompt book (discussed in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322329).
Karawebnetwork 4y ago
I was curious to compare results with Craiyon.ai Here is "llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, shot from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, dramatic backlighting, epic, digital art": https://imgur.com/a/7LoAtRx https://imgur.com/a/7LoAtRx Here is "Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, screenshots from the Miyazaki anime movie", much worst: https://imgur.com/a/g99G7Bn https://imgur.com/a/g99G7Bn
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Craiyon did step up a lot in its understanding recently. The image quality is still not the best but it if you ignore the blurriness, the scary faces, and the weird shapes, it can sometimes be better than dall.e.
- samspenc 4y ago
  Fascinating, are there any other similar products in this same category as DALL.E and Craiyon?
  - peab 4y ago
    wombo.ai and midjourney
  - ma2rten 4y ago
    Not products, but Google Research already published papers about two different, better models: https://parti.research.google/ https://parti.research.google/ https://imagen.research.google/ https://imagen.research.google/ The models themselves are not public however.
    - itisit 4y ago
      Wow. Those models, particularly Imagen, are of an entirely separate calibre. None of that psychedelic foggy memory swirl that is characteristic of the space. I can see why Google Research is hesitant to release them.
  - 4y ago
AlwaysRock 4y ago
I love this.
kristiandupont 4y ago
I picture in a few years we will be playing around with a code generation tool, and people will be drawing similar conclusions. "You have to be really specific about what you like. If you just say 'chat tool', it will allow you to chat to one other person only."
turdnagel 4y ago
My current move is creating initial versions of images with Midjourney, which seems to be a bit more "free-spirited" (read: less _literal_, more flexible) and then using DALL-E's replace tool to fill in the weird looking bits. It works pretty well, but it's a multi-step process and requires you have pay for Midjourney and DALL-E.
aj7 4y ago
I tried “machining a Siamese cat on the lathe” but with disappointing results.
keepquestioning 4y ago
DALL-E is truly magic. It got me believing we are close to AGI. I wonder what Gary Marcus or Filip Pieknewski think about it. Surely they must be eating crow.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Yesterday I saw one of Gandalf eating samples at Costco. I was laughing hysterically for a minute. AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor. That was supposed to be the last province of the human, but it is quite awhile since a human made me laugh like that.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    What was the prompt for that image? What wrote the prompt?
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      But the prompt was not funny, only the image.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    If I write a Python script that cuts together a bunch of pictures and the output makes you laught the script hardly deserves all the credit. It's us humans that create meaning.
  - WoodenChair 4y ago
    > AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor. And this AI doesn't. Your anecdote is totally unrelated to the idea of AGI in the gp post. The fact that it made you laugh is a happenstance. It was not "trying" to make you laugh.
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      It’s only unrelated if there’s no proto-AGI going on. Many images give me a moment of doubt, even though I absolutely know that I’m looking at nothing more than the output of a pile of model weights, says I the pile of neurons.
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- spent a day with DALL-E - here are some of my favorites: https://imgur.com/a/uD5yjV3 https://imgur.com/a/uD5yjV3 --
- prashp 4y ago
  You like your lobsters
  - pigtailgirl 4y ago
    -- they're the little lobsters we have over here (アカザエ)! - quite expensive - very good =) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanephrops_japonicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanephrops_japonicus --
    - tough 4y ago
      They reminded me of this little guys we have in the med https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrops_norvegicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrops_norvegicus
- planetsprite 4y ago
  Were a lot of your prompts just "attractive girl hat and sunglasses high quality photography"
  - pigtailgirl 4y ago
    -- hat pic are playing with "variations" mode - the prompt was: “portrait photo, california beach with female model wearing hat and sunglasses, studio, lens flare, colourful, 4k, high definition, 35mm, HD” --
krisoft 4y ago
> it was difficult to find images where the entire llama fit within the frame I had the same trouble. In my experiment I wanted to generate a Porco Rosso style seaplane. illustration. Sadly none of the generated pictured had the whole of the airplane in them. The wingtips or the tail always got left off. I found this method to be a reliable workaround: I have downloaded the image I liked the most. Used an image editing software to extend the image in the direction I wanted it to be extended and filled the new area with a solid colour. Cropped a 1024x1024 size rectangle such that it had about 40% generated image, and 60% solid colour. Uploaded the new image and asked DALL-E to infill the solid area while leaving the previously generated area unchanged. Selected from the generated extensions the one I liked the best, downloaded it and merged it with the rest of the picture. Repeated the process as required. You need a generous amount of overlap so the network can figure out which parts is already there and how best to fit the rest. It's a good idea to look at the image segment you need to be infilled. If you as a human can't figure out what it is you are seeing, then the machine won't be able to figure it out either. It will generate something, but it will look out of context once merged. The other trick I found: I wanted to make my picture a canvas print, and thus I needed a higher resolution image. Higher even then what I can reasonably hope with the above extension trick. What I did is that I have upscaled the image (used bigjpg.com, but there might be better solutions out there.) After that I had a big image, but of course there weren't many small scale details now on it. So I have sliced it up to 1024x1024 rectangles, uploaded the rectangles to DALL-E and asked it to keep the borders intact but redraw the interior of them. This second trick worked particularly well on an area of the picture which shown a city under the airplane. It has added nice small details like windows and doors and roofs with texture without disturbing the overall composition. What I did:
- devin 4y ago
  MidJourney allows you to specify other aspect ratios. DALL-E's square constraint makes a lot of things more difficult than they need to be IMO.
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    Also with Stable Diffusion. It's a really cool feature to have and playing around.
renewiltord 4y ago
This is really good fun, actually. Spent some time fucking around with it and it can make some impressive photorealistic stuff like "hoverbus in san francisco by the ferry building, digital photo". I mostly use it and Midjourney for material for my DnD campaign, but I'm going to need to do a little more work to make the whole thing coherent. Only tried it once and it was okay. The interesting part is that it can do things like "female ice giant" reasonably whereas google will just give you sexy bikini ice giant for stuff like that which is not the vibe of my campaign!
BashiBazouk 4y ago
Is there randomization or will the same prompts produce the same image sets?
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Always random. (in theory a seed is possible but not offered)
  - croes 4y ago
    So the services that sell Dall-E 2 prompts are useless
    - minimaxir 4y ago
      There's some stability offered by specific prompts though.
karaterobot 4y ago
I ran into this too. When I got my invite, I told a friend I would learn how to talk to DALL-E by having it make some concept art for the game he was designing. I ran through all of my free credits, and most of the first $15 bucket and never really got anything usable. Even when I re-used the exact prompts from the DALL-E Prompt Book, I didn't get anything near the level of quality and fidelity to the prompt that their examples did. I know it's not a scam, because it's clearly doing amazing stuff under the hood, but I went away thinking that it wasn't as miraculous as it was claimed to be.
- jfk13 4y ago
  I suspect that many of the "impressive" examples that we see from tools like this have been carefully selected by human curators. I'm sure it's not at the level of "monkeys + typewriters = Shakespeare [if you're sufficiently selective]", but the general idea is still applicable.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    Most of DALL-E2 output is great out of the box, the selection process is just fine tuning the results to create something the human in front of the computer likes. DALL-E2 can't mindread, so the image produced might not match what the human had in mind. There is however one thing to be aware of, the titles posted on /r/dalle2/ and other places are often not the prompts that DALL-E2 got. Instead they are a fun description of the image done by a human after the fact. Random example: "Chased by an amongus segway" * https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wkv7za/chased_by_an_amongus_segway/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wkv7za/chased_by_an... But the actual prompt was: "Award winning photo of a mole driving a red off road car through a field" * https://labs.openai.com/s/xnaoxiWeSjiQX1QyVUCHGkl1 https://labs.openai.com/s/xnaoxiWeSjiQX1QyVUCHGkl1 Which is quite a bit less impressive, as the actual prompt doesn't really match the image very well. And if you put "Chased by an amongus segway" into DALL-E2, you won't get an image of that quality either.
    - aetherson 4y ago
      I wouldn't at all agree that most Dall-E output is great out of the box. It has areas that it's good at and areas it's poor at. Here's a result for the prompt of "Woman with green skin, leaves instead of hair, wearing a simple dress, far shot, digital art, hyper-realistic, 8k, ultrahd," for example (all four images) https://imgur.com/a/f4d8N0u https://imgur.com/a/f4d8N0u You will note that none of them are even basically fulfilling the prompt, as well as all four being, in my estimation, ugly and uninteresting. That's not unusual for prompts that involve some element of the fantastic -- though there are corners of less-realistic digital art that it does do well.
jordanmorgan10 4y ago
A lot of these posts showing up on HN. I wonder - is it because it is so new, or is it because the ways in which we are to use this technology are so nascent that we are discovering how to use it more precisely daily?
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I believe it’s for a few reasons. First, it is jaw dropping incredible for most people in tech who have at least a hint of how most ML works. Second, the AI image generation field is racing ahead, in academics and new trained models, so there’s lots of new news. Thirdly some really great models like Dall-e have been opened for wider access and lots of everyday users are discovering its capabilities and doing blog write-up’s which are not news, but are surely interesting to most.
conception 4y ago
https://pitch.com/v/DALL-E-prompt-book-v1-tmd33y https://pitch.com/v/DALL-E-prompt-book-v1-tmd33y The DALL-E 2 prompt book. If anything, pretty neat look at how the various prompts come out and some of the art created by it.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
I wonder how this would play out with the new Stable Diffusion
- vanadium1st 4y ago
  I've tried out a couple of prompts from the post in Stable Diffusion and as expected the results were much weaker. It has drawn some alpacas and basketballs with little relation between the objects. I've been playing with Stable Diffusion a lot, and in my experience its results are much weaker then what's shown in this post. The artistic pictures that it generates are beautiful, often more beautiful then Dalle-2 ones. But it has a real problem understanding the basic concepts of anything that is not the simplest task like "draw a character in this or that style". And explaining the situations in detail doesn't help - the AI just stumbles upon basic requests. Seems like Stable Diffusion has a much more shallow understanding of what it draws and can only produce good result for things very similar to the images it learned from. For example, it could generate really good dutch still life paintings for me - with fruits, bottles and all the regular expected objects for this genre of painting. But when I've asked it to add some unusual objects to the painting (like a Nintendo switch, or a laptop) - it couldn't grasp this concept and just added more warbled fruit. Even though the system definitely knows how a Switch looks like. The results in the post are much more impressive. I doubt that Dalle-2 saw a lot of similar images in training, but in all of the styles and examples it definitely understood how a llama would interact with a basketball, what are their relative sizes and stuff like that. On surface results from different engines might look similar, but to me this is an enormous difference in quality and sophistication.
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    Stable Diffusion has a smaller text encoder than Dalle 2 and other models (Imagen, Parti, Craiyon) so that it can fit into consumer GPUs. I believe StabilityAI will train models based on a larger text encoder, the text encoder is frozen and does not require training, so scaling the text encoder is quite free. For now this is the biggest bottleneck with Stable Diffusion, the generator is really good and the image quality alone is incredible (managing to outperform Dalle 2 most of the time).
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I recently made PromptWiki[0] to try to document useful prompts and examples. I think we're at the beginning of exploring what these image models can do and what the best ways to work with them are. [0] https://promptwiki.com https://promptwiki.com
- vipermu 4y ago
  you should check out these amazing art studies by @proximasan, @EErratica, @KyrickYoung, and @sureailabs (twitter) https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/proximacentaurib/parrot-zone-74a5c04d4feb4f12b52a41fc8750b205 https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/proximacentaurib/parrot...
  - f0e4c2f7 4y ago
    Thank you!
obloid 4y ago
"Image intentionally modified to blur and hide faces" I thought this was strange. Why hide an AI generated face?
- ticviking 4y ago
  They’re being used to create fake profile pictures.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I'm not sure why anyone bothers. StyleGAN2 profile photos are literally all over social media and they're good enough to fool the human reviewers every time I report them.
- joooyzee 4y ago
  Hi, author here - that's a great point. When I first saw those results and how inaccurate they were, I thought there was a chance it was returning me an overfitted actual input image from training. Most likely not, but they were so realistic (and I was used to just seeing llamas until this point), that I thought I'd play it safe. Also, I came across this article which suggests that at some point users were not allowed to share images generating human faces, artificial or not: https://mixed-news.com/en/openais-dall-e-2-may-now-generate-faces/ https://mixed-news.com/en/openais-dall-e-2-may-now-generate-...
tambourine_man 4y ago
> It’s important to tell DALL·E 2 exactly what you want That’s not as easy as it sounds. Specially in the surreal cases that DALL-E is usually requested. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it. Other times you do, but are not able to express in ways that the computer can understand. I see being able to communicate efficiently with the machine as a future in demand skill
- upupandup 4y ago
  - bpye 4y ago
    I suspect this is a joke, but I did find that it was a little overzealous with the filtering. I was trying to get someone (not a specific person) shouting or with an angry expression, and a few prompts I came up with were blocked. Not banned though.
    - astrange 4y ago
      I kept getting a scene with "two people holding hands" blocked, it allowed "two people kissing" and then when I tried "and wife" instead of "two people" it banned me. (They unbanned me when I emailed them though.) Oddly, the ones it blocked were more sfw than several others it allowed, but of course I don’t know what the outputs would’ve been…
      - speedgoose 4y ago
        I’m guessing they have a filter on the prompt text, but also one on the generated pictures. I got blocked a few times with very non sexual prompts, and I suspect that the AI was a bit horny when it interpreted them.
- mattwad 4y ago
  At least 10% of web dev today is being good at search prompts for Google. (And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just about finding the right tool or pattern for your specific problem)
jiggywiggy 4y ago
Wow the blogs posted here are awesome, the octopus and this lama are awesome. Myself cant seem to get it to work. I think it's not very good at real things. Tried fitness related images, all is weird. Probably with fantasy kinda stuff its better since it has to be less accurate.
netfortius 4y ago
How could all this play into "flooding" the NFT markets?
- dymk 4y ago
  It's hard to flood the NFT market any further. It was almost all autogenerated art before DALL-E was publicly available.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  NFTs are just numbers on a blockchain. The picture is a canard. In the US I don’t think you can copyright DALL-E images as they aren’t created by a human, so you spend money to make them and anyone else can use them.
- pwython 4y ago
  They're already using DALL-E for that 2021 fad. I'm more curious of how this will effect stock photography. Soon anyone can generate the exact image they're looking for, no matter how obscure.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  There's always room for more garbage
JadoJodo 4y ago
I tried a number of these generators a week ago (or so), all with the same prompt: "A child looking longingly at a lollipop on the top shelf" with pretty abysmal (and sometimes horrifying) results. I'm not sure if my expectations are too high, but maybe I was doing it wrong?
- Marazan 4y ago
  Dalle(and others) are great, almost magical, at specific types of images and abysmal at others.
falcor84 4y ago
>the ball is positioned in such a way that the llama has no real hope of making the shot I love that we're at the level where the physical "realism" of correctly representing quadrupedals playing basketball is a thing now. I suppose the next level AI will be expected to model a full 3d environment with physical assumptions based on the prompt and then run the simulation
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  That's the only way to get reliably usable output. There's a lot of "80% there but not quite" in the current version, which makes it more of a novelty than a useful content generator. The problem with moving to 3D is there are no almost no 3D data sources that combine textures, poses (where relevant), lighting, 3D geometry and (ideally) physics. They can be inferred to some extent from 2D sources. But not reliably. Humans operate effortlessly in 3D and creative humans have no issues with using 3D perceptions creatively. But as for as most content is concerned it's a 2D world. Which is why AI art bots know the texture of everything and the geometry of nothing. AI generation is going to be stuck at nearly-but-not-quite until that changes.
  - namrog84 4y ago
    While not fully. There is a lot of freely available 3d models that can used as a starting point. Id love a dalle2 for 3d model generation. Even if no texture lighting physics was there.
- pontifier 4y ago
  Boom... Your consciousness is deleted as the DALL-E 4 output for "Evolved monkey person at a computer, wasting time" is delivered to the dinosaur that paid for it.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  The goalposts are practically galloping down the field.
pleasantpeasant 4y ago
There was a thread on r/DigitalArt about people debating if you're really an artist if you're using these AI creator websites. Some guy spent hours feeding the AI pictures he liked to get an end result he was happy with.
foobarbecue 4y ago
It's fascinating to me that in the first image, the llama's jersey has a drawing of a llama on it. I wonder if that was in the prompt?
- joooyzee 4y ago
  Hi, author here - I didn't specify that part, which is exactly why I love that image. The full prompt was "Action photo of a llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, dramatic backlighting, anime key visuals." (link to the image: https://labs.openai.com/s/5bVuPDdnv2O6xgxuleBlTZPj https://labs.openai.com/s/5bVuPDdnv2O6xgxuleBlTZPj)
_pastel 4y ago
If you're interested in browsing creative prompts, I highly recommend the reddit community at r/dalle2. Some are impressive: - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis And others are hilarious: - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital
- Nition 4y ago
  Clickable links for the lazy (it seems that the http:// http:// is required to make it work): http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_m... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_g... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_...
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    Old reddit links for the old and grumpy, like me: http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_m... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_g... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_...
- 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
Can't wait for 'Tell HN: how I make mid six figures as a prompt engineer'.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  "We let our graphic designer go so we could onboard a AI Prompt Engineer" "How much are we paying him?" "About $225k plus bonus and equity" "And how much was the graphic designer paid? "$55k" "..."
  - rfrey 4y ago
    It's the graphic design industry's own fault for not gradually renaming themselves as Pixel Intensity Engineers.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    How long does it take the prompt engineer to make a design though?
    - yunwal 4y ago
      Not a professional graphic designer, but did some graphic design classes and photography/photo editing classes in college, and still do it as a hobby. Things that at one time took days can now be done in minutes with some skillful use of Dall-E + Photoshop. IMO, any image editing software that incorporates a similar technology will take over the market and it'll be one of the most important features in any graphic designer's toolkit. A talented graphic designer who can also use a dall-e like tool is worth at least 5x the pay of one who can't (although I don't think we're going to get a "prompt engineer" title, it's really not that difficult a skill to pick up for people who already do image editing).
      - spywaregorilla 4y ago
        I think the more likely case is you'll get artists who sketch out a concept and use AI to generate the image, and then photoshop the rest.
kayfhf 4y ago
sebringj 4y ago
The images remind me of one of my dreams where logic and reasoning are thrown out and the pure gist of the thing is taken. I wonder if it is because it is built with vector operations and calculus to determine the closest match or fuzzy matches for essentially everything it eventually determines sans cognition, things would tend to be more fuzzy or quasi-close but not quite there. Very entertaining post. I have my own api key as well but not with DALL-E 2 access just yet but seems similar in terms of prompting text in stages to get what you want. It feels kind of like negotiating with it in some way.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > The images remind me of one of my dreams (...) A lot of dreams scenery seems to throw logic and reasoning out of the window. Even small sensory inputs can make a huge difference to a dream sequence. And in many case they don't make sense even in the context of the dream. I haven't personally experienced any hallucinations myself, but some DALL-E images seem awfully familiar to what some people describe. I know that comparisons between brains and machine learning (including neural networks) are superficial at best, but I still wonder if DALL-E is mimicking, in its own way, a portion of our larger brain processing 'pipeline'.
  - sebringj 4y ago
    Spot on, like the more basic part of a raw dream feed without rhyme or reason. Maybe even laying the groundwork for an experience architecture's input when that day finally comes, who knows.
- antoniuschan99 4y ago
  first thing I noticed was that it had no distinct features of a basketball. looks more like a bowling ball with the swirly things on it. Kind of adds to your dream thought.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    Human dream sequences often have problems with faces, text and mirrors. You can train yourself to try to focus on these features when dreaming. Most people in our dreams don't even have faces that we would recognize. When they do have faces, sometimes it is not even the right face.
simias 4y ago
I'm usually very much a skeptic when it comes to "revolutionary" tech. I think the blockchain is crap. I think fully self-driving cars are still a long way away. I think that VR and the metaverse are going to remain gimmicks in the foreseeable future. But this DALL-E thing, it's really blowing my mind. That and deep fakes, now that's sci-fi tech. It's both exciting and a bit scary. The idea that in the not so far future one will be able to create images (and I presume later, audio and video) of basically anything with just a simple text prompt is rife with potential (both good and bad). It's going to change the way we look at art, it's also going to give incredibly powerful creative tools to the masses. For me the endgame would be an AI sufficiently advanced that one could prompt "make an episode of Seinfeld that centers around deep fakes" and you'd get an episode virtually indistinguishable from a real one. Home-made, tailor-made entertainment. Terrifyingly amazing. See you in a few decades...
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  I'm in the exact same head space as you here. This is the most revolutionary thing I've seen in my entire life and I can't even begin to imagine what this is going to look like in 20 years. Looking at r/dalle2 literally blows my mind. Makes me want to give up my cushy full stack job and go all-in on ML.
vbezhenar 4y ago
Is it hard to reimplement that algorithm? I want to see what people would do with porn-enabled image generator. Hopefully pornhub already hiring data scientists.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/RwY42 https://archive.ph/RwY42
fnordpiglet 4y ago
If you think it’s hard to get an AI to render what’s in your mind, try another human artist. Specifying something visually complex with an assumption that it’ll be precisely what you’re imagining is shockingly hard. I’m not surprised prompt creation is so complex. At least with the AI bots the turn around time for iteration is tight. That said humans likely iterate fewer times, but each iteration takes a long time.
sgtFloyd 4y ago
My two cents: the techniques OP uses are absolutely valid, but I've found much more success "sampling" styles and poses from existing works. Rather than trying to perfectly describe my image, I like to use references where the source material has what you want. With minimal direction these prompts get impressively close: "larry bird as a llama, dramatic basketball dunk in a bright arena, low angle action shot, from the movie Madagascar (2005)" https://labs.openai.com/s/wxbIbXa0HRwwGUqQaKSLtzmR https://labs.openai.com/s/wxbIbXa0HRwwGUqQaKSLtzmR "Michael Jordan as a llama dunking a basketball, Space Jam (1996)" https://labs.openai.com/s/mX4T5Iak8CMO1rPAmjRb7oyH https://labs.openai.com/s/mX4T5Iak8CMO1rPAmjRb7oyH At this point I'd experiment with more stylized/recognizable references or add a couple "effects" to polish up the results.
qeternity 4y ago
Purely economic take: I’m sure that as knowledge builds over time, people will get more efficient at prompt generation, but the $15 in credits ignores the cost of the time spent to build the final prompt. I wonder how this compares to a junior graphic designer in terms of TCO.
- yunwal 4y ago
  The future is graphic designers who can proficiently use Dall-E. You can't get what you want easily with just a prompt, but you can also have it modify existing photos, so Dall-E + Photoshop is very powerful
scifibestfi 4y ago
> Tip: DALL·E 2 only stores the previous 50 generations in your history tab. Make sure to save your favourite images as you go. This is kind of funny. DALL·E is one of the most impressive pieces of software, but such a basic feature like history is curiously underpowered.
- andybak 4y ago
  History is much bigger than 50 now. 1500 is so if I recall correctly.
rayshan 4y ago
Same prompts generated by Midjourney for comparison. I'd say a lot worse, but Midjourney is good at other things like sci-fi art. Film still of a llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, low angle, show from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, indoors, dramatic backlighting. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/1007352942891900978/ray_Film_still_of_a_llama_in_a_jersey_dunking_a_basketball_like_4dfd0ce8-d767-4756-a876-1354a6a29af1.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/10... Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, screenshots from the Miyazaki anime movie https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/1007353042334646375/ray_Llama_in_a_jersey_dunking_a_basketball_like_Michael_Jordan__512e09e7-5df1-4f09-9e94-746ec43b57e2.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/10...
zamadatix 4y ago
I can't wait for access so I can put whacky but oddy relevant images into presentations.
qiller 4y ago
> It’s important to tell DALL·E 2 exactly what you want. Sounds awfully like programming...
tkgally 4y ago
> DALL·E 2 struggles to generate realistic faces. According to some sources, this may have been a deliberate attempt to avoid generating deepfakes. That might be true, but after experimenting with DALL·E 2 last week (and spending more than $15), I have a different theory. My tests focused on how well it could create art works around three common themes: still life, landscape, and portrait. For the first two categories, almost all the results were works that would not have looked out of place in a museum or art gallery. In contrast, with the prompt of “A painting of a young woman sitting in a chair” and variations, while DALL·E 2 produced convincing clothing, furniture, background, etc., the faces were mostly horrible. I started adding “from the rear” and “turned to the side” to the prompt just to get the face out of the picture. I came to suspect that DALL·E 2 is bad at faces not because the developers made it that way but because human beings are uniquely hardwired to recognize faces. Most people are able to recognize and remember hundreds of faces, and we are very sensitive to minor changes in their configurations (i.e., facial expressions). When we look at a painting of a person sitting in a chair, we don’t care if aspects of the chair, the person’s clothing, etc. are not precisely accurate; a slight distortion of the face, however, can ruin the entire work. DALL·E 2 does not seem to have been trained to have the same sensitivity to faces that humans have. If anyone is interested, the works that DALL·E 2 created for me are at [1]; video slideshows with musical accompaniment are at [2]. [1] http://www.gally.net/temp/dalleimages/index.html http://www.gally.net/temp/dalleimages/index.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj4urky_8icRPzgFS_b98Ks_dPDkNOCvc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj4urky_8icRPzgFS_b98...
- l33tman 4y ago
  It's only small faces that are distorted, and they are often heavily distorted, it's not an "uncanny valley effect", they look like disfigured pieces of meat and skin. It's the same in dalle-mini. Dalle2 can clearly generate super-realistic faces without any problem, if you look at most of the posts at r/dalle2 The issue with small faces might be architectural if there is context-aware upscaling going on in the network, where a face needs to start larger than some smallest scale or it won't survive that process. That in turn might be an issue of too little training. A small face in a photo in the training data won't generate as much error gradient if it goes wrong as a larger face, but as you suggest we as viewers are much more prone to scrutinize faces even though they are small.
joshxyz 4y ago
thats a lot of llamas playing basketball to see in a day

460 points by pat-jay 4y ago

butz 4y ago

Serious question: do you actually own the generated image, or copyright is still owned by whoever owns "DALL-E 2"?

srelbo 4y ago

You can also play around for free on a slightly less sophisticated model here https://art.elbo.ai https://art.elbo.ai

coldcode 4y ago

It's fun to play around with it, but like the author found, what you get is often strange or useless. I also find 1k images too small to do much with but I realize making 4k images would be cost prohibitive. I also wish it could generate vector images as well as pixel images. That would be fun to use.

hombre_fatal 4y ago

Love the stylistic ones. Amazing how it generates such good anime and vaporwave variants, like the neon vaporwave backboard. I ran out of credits way too fast, so I like to see other people playing with it and their iterative process.

Vox_Leone 4y ago

Can I use NLP to generate input for DALL-E 2? That would be cool.

minimaxir 4y ago
You can, in fact, use GPT-3 to engineer prompts for DALL-E 2 in a sense. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1555626060384911360 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1555626060384911360
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I want to see a few iterations of describing an image with AI, generating it, describing it again, generating it... Like when passing a piece of text through Google translate back and forth.
- turdnagel 4y ago
  There was a tool that could find the "equilibrium" called Translation Party. I don't think it works anymore. I'd love to see one that goes back and forth between DALL-E and an image description algorithm.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  According to internet popular belief, you'd end up with a picture of a certain ignominious dictator that unfortunately destroyed Europe in the 1940's. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
- pamelafox 4y ago
  I tried that! Results were mixed: https://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/1542593090472386561 https://twitter.com/pamelafox/status/1542593090472386561 It needs a better text to image model, I think. Maybe you can fork it and improve?
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Interesting! I really like the flute > cup > bathtub sequence. It has a real dreamlike disjointedness to it.
jcims 4y ago
I used GPT-3 to 'write' a children's book and asked it to include descriptions of the illustrations. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y8EE_p8bw9dIEDguT1bTWpPbrSGFpeQsS8hf-tIAepE/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y8EE_p8bw9dIEDguT1bT... The fact that it's a derivative of an existing work is noteworthy, but I gave it absolutely no guidance on the topic. If i suggest something it will give it a go with similar fervor. eg https://imgur.com/a/N1qWaSV https://imgur.com/a/N1qWaSV
- jfk13 4y ago
  Your link doesn't seem to be publicly accessible.

humbleferret 4y ago

“In working with DALL·E 2, it’s important to be specific about what you want without over-stuffing or adding redundant words.” I found this to be the most important point from this piece. Often people don't really know what they really want when it comes to creative work, let alone to some omniscient algorithm. In spite of that, it's a delight to see something you love from an unspecific prompt that you won't find with anything you receive from a human. Dall.E 2 never ceases to amaze me. For anyone interested in learning about what Dall.E 2 can do, the author also links to the Dall.E 2 prompt book (discussed in this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32322329).

Karawebnetwork 4y ago

I was curious to compare results with Craiyon.ai Here is "llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, shot from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, dramatic backlighting, epic, digital art": https://imgur.com/a/7LoAtRx https://imgur.com/a/7LoAtRx Here is "Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, screenshots from the Miyazaki anime movie", much worst: https://imgur.com/a/g99G7Bn https://imgur.com/a/g99G7Bn

speedgoose 4y ago
Craiyon did step up a lot in its understanding recently. The image quality is still not the best but it if you ignore the blurriness, the scary faces, and the weird shapes, it can sometimes be better than dall.e.
samspenc 4y ago
Fascinating, are there any other similar products in this same category as DALL.E and Craiyon?
- peab 4y ago
  wombo.ai and midjourney
- ma2rten 4y ago
  Not products, but Google Research already published papers about two different, better models: https://parti.research.google/ https://parti.research.google/ https://imagen.research.google/ https://imagen.research.google/ The models themselves are not public however.
  - itisit 4y ago
    Wow. Those models, particularly Imagen, are of an entirely separate calibre. None of that psychedelic foggy memory swirl that is characteristic of the space. I can see why Google Research is hesitant to release them.
- 4y ago

AlwaysRock 4y ago

I love this.

kristiandupont 4y ago

I picture in a few years we will be playing around with a code generation tool, and people will be drawing similar conclusions. "You have to be really specific about what you like. If you just say 'chat tool', it will allow you to chat to one other person only."

turdnagel 4y ago

My current move is creating initial versions of images with Midjourney, which seems to be a bit more "free-spirited" (read: less _literal_, more flexible) and then using DALL-E's replace tool to fill in the weird looking bits. It works pretty well, but it's a multi-step process and requires you have pay for Midjourney and DALL-E.

aj7 4y ago

I tried “machining a Siamese cat on the lathe” but with disappointing results.

keepquestioning 4y ago

DALL-E is truly magic. It got me believing we are close to AGI. I wonder what Gary Marcus or Filip Pieknewski think about it. Surely they must be eating crow.

dougmwne 4y ago
Yesterday I saw one of Gandalf eating samples at Costco. I was laughing hysterically for a minute. AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor. That was supposed to be the last province of the human, but it is quite awhile since a human made me laugh like that.
- NateEag 4y ago
  What was the prompt for that image? What wrote the prompt?
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    But the prompt was not funny, only the image.
- Comevius 4y ago
  If I write a Python script that cuts together a bunch of pictures and the output makes you laught the script hardly deserves all the credit. It's us humans that create meaning.
- WoodenChair 4y ago
  > AI is not supposed to have a sense of humor. And this AI doesn't. Your anecdote is totally unrelated to the idea of AGI in the gp post. The fact that it made you laugh is a happenstance. It was not "trying" to make you laugh.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    It’s only unrelated if there’s no proto-AGI going on. Many images give me a moment of doubt, even though I absolutely know that I’m looking at nothing more than the output of a pile of model weights, says I the pile of neurons.

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- spent a day with DALL-E - here are some of my favorites: https://imgur.com/a/uD5yjV3 https://imgur.com/a/uD5yjV3 --

prashp 4y ago
You like your lobsters
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- they're the little lobsters we have over here (アカザエ)! - quite expensive - very good =) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanephrops_japonicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanephrops_japonicus --
  - tough 4y ago
    They reminded me of this little guys we have in the med https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrops_norvegicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrops_norvegicus
planetsprite 4y ago
Were a lot of your prompts just "attractive girl hat and sunglasses high quality photography"
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- hat pic are playing with "variations" mode - the prompt was: “portrait photo, california beach with female model wearing hat and sunglasses, studio, lens flare, colourful, 4k, high definition, 35mm, HD” --

krisoft 4y ago

> it was difficult to find images where the entire llama fit within the frame I had the same trouble. In my experiment I wanted to generate a Porco Rosso style seaplane. illustration. Sadly none of the generated pictured had the whole of the airplane in them. The wingtips or the tail always got left off. I found this method to be a reliable workaround: I have downloaded the image I liked the most. Used an image editing software to extend the image in the direction I wanted it to be extended and filled the new area with a solid colour. Cropped a 1024x1024 size rectangle such that it had about 40% generated image, and 60% solid colour. Uploaded the new image and asked DALL-E to infill the solid area while leaving the previously generated area unchanged. Selected from the generated extensions the one I liked the best, downloaded it and merged it with the rest of the picture. Repeated the process as required. You need a generous amount of overlap so the network can figure out which parts is already there and how best to fit the rest. It's a good idea to look at the image segment you need to be infilled. If you as a human can't figure out what it is you are seeing, then the machine won't be able to figure it out either. It will generate something, but it will look out of context once merged. The other trick I found: I wanted to make my picture a canvas print, and thus I needed a higher resolution image. Higher even then what I can reasonably hope with the above extension trick. What I did is that I have upscaled the image (used bigjpg.com, but there might be better solutions out there.) After that I had a big image, but of course there weren't many small scale details now on it. So I have sliced it up to 1024x1024 rectangles, uploaded the rectangles to DALL-E and asked it to keep the borders intact but redraw the interior of them. This second trick worked particularly well on an area of the picture which shown a city under the airplane. It has added nice small details like windows and doors and roofs with texture without disturbing the overall composition. What I did:

devin 4y ago
MidJourney allows you to specify other aspect ratios. DALL-E's square constraint makes a lot of things more difficult than they need to be IMO.
- GaggiX 4y ago
  Also with Stable Diffusion. It's a really cool feature to have and playing around.

renewiltord 4y ago

This is really good fun, actually. Spent some time fucking around with it and it can make some impressive photorealistic stuff like "hoverbus in san francisco by the ferry building, digital photo". I mostly use it and Midjourney for material for my DnD campaign, but I'm going to need to do a little more work to make the whole thing coherent. Only tried it once and it was okay. The interesting part is that it can do things like "female ice giant" reasonably whereas google will just give you sexy bikini ice giant for stuff like that which is not the vibe of my campaign!

BashiBazouk 4y ago

Is there randomization or will the same prompts produce the same image sets?

minimaxir 4y ago
Always random. (in theory a seed is possible but not offered)
- croes 4y ago
  So the services that sell Dall-E 2 prompts are useless
  - minimaxir 4y ago
    There's some stability offered by specific prompts though.

karaterobot 4y ago

I ran into this too. When I got my invite, I told a friend I would learn how to talk to DALL-E by having it make some concept art for the game he was designing. I ran through all of my free credits, and most of the first $15 bucket and never really got anything usable. Even when I re-used the exact prompts from the DALL-E Prompt Book, I didn't get anything near the level of quality and fidelity to the prompt that their examples did. I know it's not a scam, because it's clearly doing amazing stuff under the hood, but I went away thinking that it wasn't as miraculous as it was claimed to be.

jfk13 4y ago
I suspect that many of the "impressive" examples that we see from tools like this have been carefully selected by human curators. I'm sure it's not at the level of "monkeys + typewriters = Shakespeare [if you're sufficiently selective]", but the general idea is still applicable.
- grumbel 4y ago
  Most of DALL-E2 output is great out of the box, the selection process is just fine tuning the results to create something the human in front of the computer likes. DALL-E2 can't mindread, so the image produced might not match what the human had in mind. There is however one thing to be aware of, the titles posted on /r/dalle2/ and other places are often not the prompts that DALL-E2 got. Instead they are a fun description of the image done by a human after the fact. Random example: "Chased by an amongus segway" * https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wkv7za/chased_by_an_amongus_segway/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wkv7za/chased_by_an... But the actual prompt was: "Award winning photo of a mole driving a red off road car through a field" * https://labs.openai.com/s/xnaoxiWeSjiQX1QyVUCHGkl1 https://labs.openai.com/s/xnaoxiWeSjiQX1QyVUCHGkl1 Which is quite a bit less impressive, as the actual prompt doesn't really match the image very well. And if you put "Chased by an amongus segway" into DALL-E2, you won't get an image of that quality either.
  - aetherson 4y ago
    I wouldn't at all agree that most Dall-E output is great out of the box. It has areas that it's good at and areas it's poor at. Here's a result for the prompt of "Woman with green skin, leaves instead of hair, wearing a simple dress, far shot, digital art, hyper-realistic, 8k, ultrahd," for example (all four images) https://imgur.com/a/f4d8N0u https://imgur.com/a/f4d8N0u You will note that none of them are even basically fulfilling the prompt, as well as all four being, in my estimation, ugly and uninteresting. That's not unusual for prompts that involve some element of the fantastic -- though there are corners of less-realistic digital art that it does do well.

jordanmorgan10 4y ago

A lot of these posts showing up on HN. I wonder - is it because it is so new, or is it because the ways in which we are to use this technology are so nascent that we are discovering how to use it more precisely daily?

dougmwne 4y ago
I believe it’s for a few reasons. First, it is jaw dropping incredible for most people in tech who have at least a hint of how most ML works. Second, the AI image generation field is racing ahead, in academics and new trained models, so there’s lots of new news. Thirdly some really great models like Dall-e have been opened for wider access and lots of everyday users are discovering its capabilities and doing blog write-up’s which are not news, but are surely interesting to most.

conception 4y ago

https://pitch.com/v/DALL-E-prompt-book-v1-tmd33y https://pitch.com/v/DALL-E-prompt-book-v1-tmd33y The DALL-E 2 prompt book. If anything, pretty neat look at how the various prompts come out and some of the art created by it.

EMIRELADERO 4y ago

I wonder how this would play out with the new Stable Diffusion

vanadium1st 4y ago
I've tried out a couple of prompts from the post in Stable Diffusion and as expected the results were much weaker. It has drawn some alpacas and basketballs with little relation between the objects. I've been playing with Stable Diffusion a lot, and in my experience its results are much weaker then what's shown in this post. The artistic pictures that it generates are beautiful, often more beautiful then Dalle-2 ones. But it has a real problem understanding the basic concepts of anything that is not the simplest task like "draw a character in this or that style". And explaining the situations in detail doesn't help - the AI just stumbles upon basic requests. Seems like Stable Diffusion has a much more shallow understanding of what it draws and can only produce good result for things very similar to the images it learned from. For example, it could generate really good dutch still life paintings for me - with fruits, bottles and all the regular expected objects for this genre of painting. But when I've asked it to add some unusual objects to the painting (like a Nintendo switch, or a laptop) - it couldn't grasp this concept and just added more warbled fruit. Even though the system definitely knows how a Switch looks like. The results in the post are much more impressive. I doubt that Dalle-2 saw a lot of similar images in training, but in all of the styles and examples it definitely understood how a llama would interact with a basketball, what are their relative sizes and stuff like that. On surface results from different engines might look similar, but to me this is an enormous difference in quality and sophistication.
- GaggiX 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion has a smaller text encoder than Dalle 2 and other models (Imagen, Parti, Craiyon) so that it can fit into consumer GPUs. I believe StabilityAI will train models based on a larger text encoder, the text encoder is frozen and does not require training, so scaling the text encoder is quite free. For now this is the biggest bottleneck with Stable Diffusion, the generator is really good and the image quality alone is incredible (managing to outperform Dalle 2 most of the time).

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I recently made PromptWiki[0] to try to document useful prompts and examples. I think we're at the beginning of exploring what these image models can do and what the best ways to work with them are. [0] https://promptwiki.com https://promptwiki.com

vipermu 4y ago
you should check out these amazing art studies by @proximasan, @EErratica, @KyrickYoung, and @sureailabs (twitter) https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/proximacentaurib/parrot-zone-74a5c04d4feb4f12b52a41fc8750b205 https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/proximacentaurib/parrot...
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  Thank you!

obloid 4y ago

"Image intentionally modified to blur and hide faces" I thought this was strange. Why hide an AI generated face?

ticviking 4y ago
They’re being used to create fake profile pictures.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I'm not sure why anyone bothers. StyleGAN2 profile photos are literally all over social media and they're good enough to fool the human reviewers every time I report them.
joooyzee 4y ago
Hi, author here - that's a great point. When I first saw those results and how inaccurate they were, I thought there was a chance it was returning me an overfitted actual input image from training. Most likely not, but they were so realistic (and I was used to just seeing llamas until this point), that I thought I'd play it safe. Also, I came across this article which suggests that at some point users were not allowed to share images generating human faces, artificial or not: https://mixed-news.com/en/openais-dall-e-2-may-now-generate-faces/ https://mixed-news.com/en/openais-dall-e-2-may-now-generate-...

tambourine_man 4y ago

> It’s important to tell DALL·E 2 exactly what you want That’s not as easy as it sounds. Specially in the surreal cases that DALL-E is usually requested. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it. Other times you do, but are not able to express in ways that the computer can understand. I see being able to communicate efficiently with the machine as a future in demand skill

upupandup 4y ago
- bpye 4y ago
  I suspect this is a joke, but I did find that it was a little overzealous with the filtering. I was trying to get someone (not a specific person) shouting or with an angry expression, and a few prompts I came up with were blocked. Not banned though.
  - astrange 4y ago
    I kept getting a scene with "two people holding hands" blocked, it allowed "two people kissing" and then when I tried "and wife" instead of "two people" it banned me. (They unbanned me when I emailed them though.) Oddly, the ones it blocked were more sfw than several others it allowed, but of course I don’t know what the outputs would’ve been…
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      I’m guessing they have a filter on the prompt text, but also one on the generated pictures. I got blocked a few times with very non sexual prompts, and I suspect that the AI was a bit horny when it interpreted them.
mattwad 4y ago
At least 10% of web dev today is being good at search prompts for Google. (And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just about finding the right tool or pattern for your specific problem)

jiggywiggy 4y ago

Wow the blogs posted here are awesome, the octopus and this lama are awesome. Myself cant seem to get it to work. I think it's not very good at real things. Tried fitness related images, all is weird. Probably with fantasy kinda stuff its better since it has to be less accurate.

netfortius 4y ago

How could all this play into "flooding" the NFT markets?

dymk 4y ago
It's hard to flood the NFT market any further. It was almost all autogenerated art before DALL-E was publicly available.
LegitShady 4y ago
NFTs are just numbers on a blockchain. The picture is a canard. In the US I don’t think you can copyright DALL-E images as they aren’t created by a human, so you spend money to make them and anyone else can use them.
pwython 4y ago
They're already using DALL-E for that 2021 fad. I'm more curious of how this will effect stock photography. Soon anyone can generate the exact image they're looking for, no matter how obscure.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
There's always room for more garbage

JadoJodo 4y ago

I tried a number of these generators a week ago (or so), all with the same prompt: "A child looking longingly at a lollipop on the top shelf" with pretty abysmal (and sometimes horrifying) results. I'm not sure if my expectations are too high, but maybe I was doing it wrong?

Marazan 4y ago
Dalle(and others) are great, almost magical, at specific types of images and abysmal at others.

falcor84 4y ago

>the ball is positioned in such a way that the llama has no real hope of making the shot I love that we're at the level where the physical "realism" of correctly representing quadrupedals playing basketball is a thing now. I suppose the next level AI will be expected to model a full 3d environment with physical assumptions based on the prompt and then run the simulation

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
That's the only way to get reliably usable output. There's a lot of "80% there but not quite" in the current version, which makes it more of a novelty than a useful content generator. The problem with moving to 3D is there are no almost no 3D data sources that combine textures, poses (where relevant), lighting, 3D geometry and (ideally) physics. They can be inferred to some extent from 2D sources. But not reliably. Humans operate effortlessly in 3D and creative humans have no issues with using 3D perceptions creatively. But as for as most content is concerned it's a 2D world. Which is why AI art bots know the texture of everything and the geometry of nothing. AI generation is going to be stuck at nearly-but-not-quite until that changes.
- namrog84 4y ago
  While not fully. There is a lot of freely available 3d models that can used as a starting point. Id love a dalle2 for 3d model generation. Even if no texture lighting physics was there.
pontifier 4y ago
Boom... Your consciousness is deleted as the DALL-E 4 output for "Evolved monkey person at a computer, wasting time" is delivered to the dinosaur that paid for it.
mr_toad 4y ago
The goalposts are practically galloping down the field.

pleasantpeasant 4y ago

There was a thread on r/DigitalArt about people debating if you're really an artist if you're using these AI creator websites. Some guy spent hours feeding the AI pictures he liked to get an end result he was happy with.

foobarbecue 4y ago

It's fascinating to me that in the first image, the llama's jersey has a drawing of a llama on it. I wonder if that was in the prompt?

joooyzee 4y ago
Hi, author here - I didn't specify that part, which is exactly why I love that image. The full prompt was "Action photo of a llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, dramatic backlighting, anime key visuals." (link to the image: https://labs.openai.com/s/5bVuPDdnv2O6xgxuleBlTZPj https://labs.openai.com/s/5bVuPDdnv2O6xgxuleBlTZPj)

_pastel 4y ago

If you're interested in browsing creative prompts, I highly recommend the reddit community at r/dalle2. Some are impressive: - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis And others are hilarious: - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds - www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital

Nition 4y ago
Clickable links for the lazy (it seems that the http:// http:// is required to make it work): http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_m... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_g... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_... http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital http://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_...
- Handytinge 4y ago
  Old reddit links for the old and grumpy, like me: http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_mona_lisa http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uzosy1/the_rest_of_m... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_getting_his_citizenship_at_ellis http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/vstuns/super_mario_g... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_of_a_street_sign_that_warns_drivers http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/v0pjfr/a_photograph_... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_at_mcdonalds http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wbbkbb/healthy_food_... http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_of_fire_water_earth_and_air_digital http://old.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/wlfpax/the_elements_...
4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

Can't wait for 'Tell HN: how I make mid six figures as a prompt engineer'.

Workaccount2 4y ago
"We let our graphic designer go so we could onboard a AI Prompt Engineer" "How much are we paying him?" "About $225k plus bonus and equity" "And how much was the graphic designer paid? "$55k" "..."
- rfrey 4y ago
  It's the graphic design industry's own fault for not gradually renaming themselves as Pixel Intensity Engineers.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  How long does it take the prompt engineer to make a design though?
  - yunwal 4y ago
    Not a professional graphic designer, but did some graphic design classes and photography/photo editing classes in college, and still do it as a hobby. Things that at one time took days can now be done in minutes with some skillful use of Dall-E + Photoshop. IMO, any image editing software that incorporates a similar technology will take over the market and it'll be one of the most important features in any graphic designer's toolkit. A talented graphic designer who can also use a dall-e like tool is worth at least 5x the pay of one who can't (although I don't think we're going to get a "prompt engineer" title, it's really not that difficult a skill to pick up for people who already do image editing).
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      I think the more likely case is you'll get artists who sketch out a concept and use AI to generate the image, and then photoshop the rest.

kayfhf 4y ago

sebringj 4y ago

The images remind me of one of my dreams where logic and reasoning are thrown out and the pure gist of the thing is taken. I wonder if it is because it is built with vector operations and calculus to determine the closest match or fuzzy matches for essentially everything it eventually determines sans cognition, things would tend to be more fuzzy or quasi-close but not quite there. Very entertaining post. I have my own api key as well but not with DALL-E 2 access just yet but seems similar in terms of prompting text in stages to get what you want. It feels kind of like negotiating with it in some way.

outworlder 4y ago
> The images remind me of one of my dreams (...) A lot of dreams scenery seems to throw logic and reasoning out of the window. Even small sensory inputs can make a huge difference to a dream sequence. And in many case they don't make sense even in the context of the dream. I haven't personally experienced any hallucinations myself, but some DALL-E images seem awfully familiar to what some people describe. I know that comparisons between brains and machine learning (including neural networks) are superficial at best, but I still wonder if DALL-E is mimicking, in its own way, a portion of our larger brain processing 'pipeline'.
- sebringj 4y ago
  Spot on, like the more basic part of a raw dream feed without rhyme or reason. Maybe even laying the groundwork for an experience architecture's input when that day finally comes, who knows.
antoniuschan99 4y ago
first thing I noticed was that it had no distinct features of a basketball. looks more like a bowling ball with the swirly things on it. Kind of adds to your dream thought.
- outworlder 4y ago
  Human dream sequences often have problems with faces, text and mirrors. You can train yourself to try to focus on these features when dreaming. Most people in our dreams don't even have faces that we would recognize. When they do have faces, sometimes it is not even the right face.

simias 4y ago

I'm usually very much a skeptic when it comes to "revolutionary" tech. I think the blockchain is crap. I think fully self-driving cars are still a long way away. I think that VR and the metaverse are going to remain gimmicks in the foreseeable future. But this DALL-E thing, it's really blowing my mind. That and deep fakes, now that's sci-fi tech. It's both exciting and a bit scary. The idea that in the not so far future one will be able to create images (and I presume later, audio and video) of basically anything with just a simple text prompt is rife with potential (both good and bad). It's going to change the way we look at art, it's also going to give incredibly powerful creative tools to the masses. For me the endgame would be an AI sufficiently advanced that one could prompt "make an episode of Seinfeld that centers around deep fakes" and you'd get an episode virtually indistinguishable from a real one. Home-made, tailor-made entertainment. Terrifyingly amazing. See you in a few decades...

uejfiweun 4y ago
I'm in the exact same head space as you here. This is the most revolutionary thing I've seen in my entire life and I can't even begin to imagine what this is going to look like in 20 years. Looking at r/dalle2 literally blows my mind. Makes me want to give up my cushy full stack job and go all-in on ML.

vbezhenar 4y ago

Is it hard to reimplement that algorithm? I want to see what people would do with porn-enabled image generator. Hopefully pornhub already hiring data scientists.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/RwY42 https://archive.ph/RwY42

fnordpiglet 4y ago

If you think it’s hard to get an AI to render what’s in your mind, try another human artist. Specifying something visually complex with an assumption that it’ll be precisely what you’re imagining is shockingly hard. I’m not surprised prompt creation is so complex. At least with the AI bots the turn around time for iteration is tight. That said humans likely iterate fewer times, but each iteration takes a long time.

sgtFloyd 4y ago

My two cents: the techniques OP uses are absolutely valid, but I've found much more success "sampling" styles and poses from existing works. Rather than trying to perfectly describe my image, I like to use references where the source material has what you want. With minimal direction these prompts get impressively close: "larry bird as a llama, dramatic basketball dunk in a bright arena, low angle action shot, from the movie Madagascar (2005)" https://labs.openai.com/s/wxbIbXa0HRwwGUqQaKSLtzmR https://labs.openai.com/s/wxbIbXa0HRwwGUqQaKSLtzmR "Michael Jordan as a llama dunking a basketball, Space Jam (1996)" https://labs.openai.com/s/mX4T5Iak8CMO1rPAmjRb7oyH https://labs.openai.com/s/mX4T5Iak8CMO1rPAmjRb7oyH At this point I'd experiment with more stylized/recognizable references or add a couple "effects" to polish up the results.

qeternity 4y ago

Purely economic take: I’m sure that as knowledge builds over time, people will get more efficient at prompt generation, but the $15 in credits ignores the cost of the time spent to build the final prompt. I wonder how this compares to a junior graphic designer in terms of TCO.

yunwal 4y ago
The future is graphic designers who can proficiently use Dall-E. You can't get what you want easily with just a prompt, but you can also have it modify existing photos, so Dall-E + Photoshop is very powerful

scifibestfi 4y ago

> Tip: DALL·E 2 only stores the previous 50 generations in your history tab. Make sure to save your favourite images as you go. This is kind of funny. DALL·E is one of the most impressive pieces of software, but such a basic feature like history is curiously underpowered.

andybak 4y ago
History is much bigger than 50 now. 1500 is so if I recall correctly.

rayshan 4y ago

Same prompts generated by Midjourney for comparison. I'd say a lot worse, but Midjourney is good at other things like sci-fi art. Film still of a llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, low angle, show from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, indoors, dramatic backlighting. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/1007352942891900978/ray_Film_still_of_a_llama_in_a_jersey_dunking_a_basketball_like_4dfd0ce8-d767-4756-a876-1354a6a29af1.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/10... Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, screenshots from the Miyazaki anime movie https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/1007353042334646375/ray_Llama_in_a_jersey_dunking_a_basketball_like_Michael_Jordan__512e09e7-5df1-4f09-9e94-746ec43b57e2.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/999377404113981462/10...

zamadatix 4y ago

I can't wait for access so I can put whacky but oddy relevant images into presentations.

qiller 4y ago

> It’s important to tell DALL·E 2 exactly what you want. Sounds awfully like programming...

tkgally 4y ago

> DALL·E 2 struggles to generate realistic faces. According to some sources, this may have been a deliberate attempt to avoid generating deepfakes. That might be true, but after experimenting with DALL·E 2 last week (and spending more than $15), I have a different theory. My tests focused on how well it could create art works around three common themes: still life, landscape, and portrait. For the first two categories, almost all the results were works that would not have looked out of place in a museum or art gallery. In contrast, with the prompt of “A painting of a young woman sitting in a chair” and variations, while DALL·E 2 produced convincing clothing, furniture, background, etc., the faces were mostly horrible. I started adding “from the rear” and “turned to the side” to the prompt just to get the face out of the picture. I came to suspect that DALL·E 2 is bad at faces not because the developers made it that way but because human beings are uniquely hardwired to recognize faces. Most people are able to recognize and remember hundreds of faces, and we are very sensitive to minor changes in their configurations (i.e., facial expressions). When we look at a painting of a person sitting in a chair, we don’t care if aspects of the chair, the person’s clothing, etc. are not precisely accurate; a slight distortion of the face, however, can ruin the entire work. DALL·E 2 does not seem to have been trained to have the same sensitivity to faces that humans have. If anyone is interested, the works that DALL·E 2 created for me are at [1]; video slideshows with musical accompaniment are at [2]. [1] http://www.gally.net/temp/dalleimages/index.html http://www.gally.net/temp/dalleimages/index.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj4urky_8icRPzgFS_b98Ks_dPDkNOCvc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj4urky_8icRPzgFS_b98...

l33tman 4y ago
It's only small faces that are distorted, and they are often heavily distorted, it's not an "uncanny valley effect", they look like disfigured pieces of meat and skin. It's the same in dalle-mini. Dalle2 can clearly generate super-realistic faces without any problem, if you look at most of the posts at r/dalle2 The issue with small faces might be architectural if there is context-aware upscaling going on in the network, where a face needs to start larger than some smallest scale or it won't survive that process. That in turn might be an issue of too little training. A small face in a photo in the training data won't generate as much error gradient if it goes wrong as a larger face, but as you suggest we as viewers are much more prone to scrutinize faces even though they are small.

joshxyz 4y ago

thats a lot of llamas playing basketball to see in a day