7 ms·

These are not photos: landscapes created by new AI

97 points by sexy_seedbox 4y ago

fjfaase 4y ago
I wonder whether it would be possible to use this in combination with VR allowing people to look/walk around in stunning virtual worlds.
- junon 4y ago
  If these sorts of algorithms are ever able to perform animations, etc. then you're onto something here. If holodeck ever becomes a reality, it'll be built on the shoulders of this tech for sure. Interesting thought! Not sure how to feel about it.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  How long until neural networks replace rasterisation for games? (Direct3D, Vulkan, etc.)
  - winReInstall 4y ago
    I expect them to creep in at the closest up and the very far away. Filling in for skyboxes and detail textures..
  - jermaustin1 4y ago
    I believe this is how AMD and Nvidia do their "super sampling". The GPU runs the game at a super low resolution, and it gets ai upscaled to 4k. Might not be on individual textures, but I can imagine it being a pipeline in the future, where a game loads with 512px textures that then get upscaled to 1-2k, then the game runs at 720p on the GPU and is upscaled to 4k for the user.
causi 4y ago
Eh, this might be the least cool use of image-generating AI. Clearly-fantastical landscapes are one thing but the realism destroys it and all these look like shitty DeviantArt photoshops.
- xbar 4y ago
  When you start seeing them on vinyl-wrapped van conversions next year, you will still say "Yup, still looks like shitty DeviantArt photoshops when writ large." But it can still eliminate the livelihoods of a great many commercial artists.
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  Aren't said shitty DA Photoshops actually bread and butter for concept art? I can imagine that if it were able to do style transfer from prompts and a sketch it can be a very useful tool for concept artists
chrisco255 4y ago
Well, whoever works on the default desktop backgrounds for Windows is now out of a job.
- detaro 4y ago
  I just point to the windows 10 default background not being a render: https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Yes, I suppose I should have said pre-installed, but that woulda killed the tempo of the joke.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
It's interesting how completely this fails at reflections. It keeps forgetting that the reflection of a mountain range can't just be a different mountain range with a somewhat similar shape.
- amelius 4y ago
  How good is DALL-E at completing a picture of a face when (say) the left half of it has been masked out? Is the resulting face symmetrical? If so, why doesn't the same approach work with reflections?
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    I think faces are much easier than reflections for a few reasons. 1. faces aren't perfectly symmetric. There is a bunch of leeway on the small scale 2. faces can be oriented to make lack of symmetry harder to see (most photos aren't people perfectly facing the camera) 3. faces can be parametrized with relatively few parameters. You need correct position and sizing for eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and ears. If you get those right, everything else is doable based only on local information. For a mountain range reflection, you need to transfer a ton of exact information across the image (and that information can't easily be embedded in 2d. to know the reflection, you have to have a 3d map).
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Eyeballs appearing to point in different directions and really asymmetric ears are among the common 'tells' of AI generation in a lot of models too. I think the biggest challenge is that unlike facial symmetry, reflected mountains in training sets are often significantly perturbed by ripples and objects in the water. So tones in the water broadly matching the tones of the mountains above but with different texture is "good enough" for the model, and it doesn't catch finer detail mismatches in shapes of edges in the same way it catches finer detail mismatches in the shapes of eyes, which almost invariably have the same texture and similar lighting to their compatriot in images.
  - dahart 4y ago
m3kw9 4y ago
Looks like a mish mash of different hq stock photos I’ve seen and they are.
dahart 4y ago
Pretty much all the photos of water reflecting mountains are obviously fake because the reflections are wrong. Seeing the wrong mountains & clouds in the reflection kinda triggers me a little bit, I wouldn’t want to have prints of these. Are there any other major tells that this is AI, especially for the photos that don’t show reflections? I think the AI tech is really cool, and I’m sure they’ll figure out how to train accurate reflections if prints of AI landscapes start making money, but to me in this specific case, there’s something a little depressing about an auto-generated picture of a place you can’t go. The reason that good landscapes are wonderful is because they were captured, and it’s an aspirational image of somewhere you can visit. The story of the photo’s origin really matters in a lot of cases, which is true for art as well as photos, and is the main thing missing from AI imagery.
- roesel 4y ago
  The one where waves in the sea look like long-exposure photos of a waterfall are also pretty clearly wrong to the observer. It's funny that there is such a fundamental disconnect between the lifetime of the waves and the scene, similarly to the wrong reflections.
- zppln 4y ago
  Despite having read this comment prior to clicking the article I have to admit that it took a while before I noticed that the ones with reflections were off.
  - dahart 4y ago
    I’m probably extra sensitive to it; I’m both an amateur photographer and do computer graphics professionally (i.e. study the physics of reflections). Physically, reflections will always align vertically given a horizontal mirror surface, so the very first image in the article is a really pretty extreme example of incorrect reflections. It hit me immediately and pretty hard before I even had a chance to scroll and see the rest of the images. The cloud in the reflection is in the wrong place and the reflection has a big underside shadow that doesn’t exist. The mountain peaks don’t match, especially visible on the peak on the left, and the sun-lit unshadowed parts of the mountain don’t match. Once you start to see these things, it becomes second nature to recognize them and hard to unsee them. :P I used to have a kids book with an illustration that had a reflection of the moon clearly in the wrong place, and it drove me nuts.
falcolas 4y ago
Forgive the trite take, but it looks like a child was given photoshop.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  You've got some talented kids
have_faith 4y ago
What's interesting to me is that the angle that the generated images are taken from are all at a human's head height or lower. That might seem obvious but it hides the fact that the AI can only copy and merge from it's source images. Is it capable of coming up with a new perspective on it's own?
- Isinlor 4y ago
  Yes: https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded
  - dahart 4y ago
    That might be one first step on the road to solving the problem parent is asking about, but in the case of Nerf, the views (both input and output) are being created by people, not the AI. The nerf AI is being used to create a single 3d scene representation that could be rendered from multiple views, while the DALLE AI is trained to generate 2d images by being trained on a huge corpus of images & text; they are two very different setups.
mrwh 4y ago
What I desire in a landscape photograph is the belief, no matter how naïve this is, that I could experience that sight in person. A landscape photograph as proof that the world is beautiful. Fantasy pictures don't have this dimension and so quickly become boring. Generated images, even those made of a mush of real pictures, don't have it either. There is no _there_ there.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Here's an idea, free of charge. Someone, make Smart Goggles that take the landscape around you and make the same landscape particularly beautiful, striking, or stylized to the wearer, with customizable options, so you could walk around a national park and have it look like the most beautiful photo ever taken. You'll sell them like hotcakes.
  - mplewis 4y ago
    .
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Sure - but if I could say, "make this landscape look like it was shot by Thomas Heaton..." Edit: For context, the original reply (now deleted) was about how magic mushrooms were easily obtainable.
  - batch12 4y ago
    Reminds me of the video More by Mark Osborne-- though I feel like the song has changed? https://youtu.be/cCeeTfsm8bk https://youtu.be/cCeeTfsm8bk
  - sdoering 4y ago
    Why would anyone pay money to be in nature and put a fake optimized/idealized version on top of it? I just can't understand this need to remove reality from reality. But this may be due to the fact that I seem to become a grumpy old cynical white man.
  - 4y ago
swamp40 4y ago
jvanderbot 4y ago
On first thought, I would support a US/EU bill that requires all AI-generated imagery to have the creation date, model used, and some relevant prompt information embedded into it using steganography. Any service generating imagery must keep an archive of such imagery for X years. FCC (or similar) penalty for publishing any image that was matched to an AI without attribution or with steganographic information missing would rival DCMA costs. Why? Most users won't care, but news agencies will get caught red handed posting these as real / without thinking about the repercussions. By keeping an archive, a reverse image search would trivially and automatically catch them.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Cool - you’ve just created a black market for an AI that generates imperceptibly good images without such information embedded, and killed open-source AI because open-source AI can always be edited to remove the info. But seriously - how would your system work with any open-source AI, or leaked proprietary AI? It wouldn't. The best you could do is sue someone and claim they had an unlabelled AI image, and hire an expert to try to make a case to rebut against their expert. It just falls apart and the legal system probably isn't interested in figuring out by minor artifacts whether that is AI or just compression, distortion, a bad photoshop job, a prank, etc. This is especially important as AI gets more imperceptible in the future. If I take an AI generated face, and shrink it by 50%, all artifacts are plausibly compression, not that the AI had bad hair edge generation, so you can't prove I had an AI. Too many loopholes. A proper response would be, I argue, simply basing the penalties on the harm caused. Doesn't matter whether the image was made by Photoshop, AI, or an experienced photographer with camera tricks, the harm is the cost. Edit: I keep adding more reasons, but here's another. This proposal would basically ban remixing AI images because embedding it inside another Photoshopped image, putting your face in the AI photo, resizing it, so forth might mess with the watermark. And naturally, any software capable of preserving the watermark could be easily altered to remove it, and many of these watermarks work solely by their secretive design, so good luck seeing the algorithms ever in your open-source package. Practically banning remixing of different types of photos in open-source software is a terrible idea.
  - 4y ago
commandlinefan 4y ago
I wonder how far we are away from AI creating realistic "alien" landscapes - places that don't look like anything on Earth, but look like they could exists somewhere in the universe.
- chopin 4y ago
  As the AI was trained with Earth data, I'd say we are pretty far away.
crazygringo 4y ago
What's fascinating to me is how so many of these images are "too" beautiful -- rather than actual photographs, they're more like overstuffed fantasy landscape paintings that are trying to combine mountains, moss, a volcano, sunset, and mist all in the same image (image #10 if I'm counting correctly). But then maybe that's just a result a overstuffed prompts being fed in. It's also very interesting to see both perspective and reflection inconsistencies, but how many of these aren't obvious at first glance -- only after you look for a couple of seconds.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Look up "Thomas Heaton Photography," among others. He is an actual photographer who has shot images very close to his in their dramatic scope. It is a legitimate photographic style. Edit: You are best off looking this up in Google Images, his website is quite slow. For those looking for a video, see https://youtu.be/jF76LmzY7YY?t=468 https://youtu.be/jF76LmzY7YY?t=468, which I would not have believed could be natural.
poo_clown 4y ago
I think these are ugly personally.
jnxx 4y ago
Would be great to have an AI web site that shows people their town / home landscape with twenty years on into 2.5 degree climate change. Maybe even their own house and garden.
teddyh 4y ago
I remember the 1990’s when morphing¹ was all the rage, and everyone was fascinated by the effect. (It was very common among those who could afford it, and could be seen in movies, TV shows, commercials and also, weirdly, on book covers.) Nowadays, the morph effect looks unbelievably crappy, and obviously fake. The same can be said to have happened to all older forms of special effects; we all now cringe at old movies’ stop-motion animation, rubber monster costumes, and plastic gadgets, but at the time, people thought they looked real. I would bet that the same will happen with AI-generated images; people will learn to tell the signs, and artists will have to learn to avoid these. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphing
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
riversflow 4y ago
I find it poetic that DALL-E also has trouble with symmetry. Anyone who has done much art can tell you about the time they got half of something perfect, and then just couldn’t get the opposing part to be as good.

97 points by sexy_seedbox 4y ago

I wonder whether it would be possible to use this in combination with VR allowing people to look/walk around in stunning virtual worlds.

junon 4y ago
If these sorts of algorithms are ever able to perform animations, etc. then you're onto something here. If holodeck ever becomes a reality, it'll be built on the shoulders of this tech for sure. Interesting thought! Not sure how to feel about it.
WithinReason 4y ago
How long until neural networks replace rasterisation for games? (Direct3D, Vulkan, etc.)
- winReInstall 4y ago
  I expect them to creep in at the closest up and the very far away. Filling in for skyboxes and detail textures..
- jermaustin1 4y ago
  I believe this is how AMD and Nvidia do their "super sampling". The GPU runs the game at a super low resolution, and it gets ai upscaled to 4k. Might not be on individual textures, but I can imagine it being a pipeline in the future, where a game loads with 512px textures that then get upscaled to 1-2k, then the game runs at 720p on the GPU and is upscaled to 4k for the user.

causi 4y ago

Eh, this might be the least cool use of image-generating AI. Clearly-fantastical landscapes are one thing but the realism destroys it and all these look like shitty DeviantArt photoshops.

xbar 4y ago
When you start seeing them on vinyl-wrapped van conversions next year, you will still say "Yup, still looks like shitty DeviantArt photoshops when writ large." But it can still eliminate the livelihoods of a great many commercial artists.
jhanschoo 4y ago
Aren't said shitty DA Photoshops actually bread and butter for concept art? I can imagine that if it were able to do style transfer from prompts and a sketch it can be a very useful tool for concept artists

chrisco255 4y ago

Well, whoever works on the default desktop backgrounds for Windows is now out of a job.

detaro 4y ago
I just point to the windows 10 default background not being a render: https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Yes, I suppose I should have said pre-installed, but that woulda killed the tempo of the joke.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago

It's interesting how completely this fails at reflections. It keeps forgetting that the reflection of a mountain range can't just be a different mountain range with a somewhat similar shape.

amelius 4y ago
How good is DALL-E at completing a picture of a face when (say) the left half of it has been masked out? Is the resulting face symmetrical? If so, why doesn't the same approach work with reflections?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  I think faces are much easier than reflections for a few reasons. 1. faces aren't perfectly symmetric. There is a bunch of leeway on the small scale 2. faces can be oriented to make lack of symmetry harder to see (most photos aren't people perfectly facing the camera) 3. faces can be parametrized with relatively few parameters. You need correct position and sizing for eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and ears. If you get those right, everything else is doable based only on local information. For a mountain range reflection, you need to transfer a ton of exact information across the image (and that information can't easily be embedded in 2d. to know the reflection, you have to have a 3d map).
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Eyeballs appearing to point in different directions and really asymmetric ears are among the common 'tells' of AI generation in a lot of models too. I think the biggest challenge is that unlike facial symmetry, reflected mountains in training sets are often significantly perturbed by ripples and objects in the water. So tones in the water broadly matching the tones of the mountains above but with different texture is "good enough" for the model, and it doesn't catch finer detail mismatches in shapes of edges in the same way it catches finer detail mismatches in the shapes of eyes, which almost invariably have the same texture and similar lighting to their compatriot in images.
- dahart 4y ago

m3kw9 4y ago

Looks like a mish mash of different hq stock photos I’ve seen and they are.

dahart 4y ago

Pretty much all the photos of water reflecting mountains are obviously fake because the reflections are wrong. Seeing the wrong mountains & clouds in the reflection kinda triggers me a little bit, I wouldn’t want to have prints of these. Are there any other major tells that this is AI, especially for the photos that don’t show reflections? I think the AI tech is really cool, and I’m sure they’ll figure out how to train accurate reflections if prints of AI landscapes start making money, but to me in this specific case, there’s something a little depressing about an auto-generated picture of a place you can’t go. The reason that good landscapes are wonderful is because they were captured, and it’s an aspirational image of somewhere you can visit. The story of the photo’s origin really matters in a lot of cases, which is true for art as well as photos, and is the main thing missing from AI imagery.

roesel 4y ago
The one where waves in the sea look like long-exposure photos of a waterfall are also pretty clearly wrong to the observer. It's funny that there is such a fundamental disconnect between the lifetime of the waves and the scene, similarly to the wrong reflections.
zppln 4y ago
Despite having read this comment prior to clicking the article I have to admit that it took a while before I noticed that the ones with reflections were off.
- dahart 4y ago
  I’m probably extra sensitive to it; I’m both an amateur photographer and do computer graphics professionally (i.e. study the physics of reflections). Physically, reflections will always align vertically given a horizontal mirror surface, so the very first image in the article is a really pretty extreme example of incorrect reflections. It hit me immediately and pretty hard before I even had a chance to scroll and see the rest of the images. The cloud in the reflection is in the wrong place and the reflection has a big underside shadow that doesn’t exist. The mountain peaks don’t match, especially visible on the peak on the left, and the sun-lit unshadowed parts of the mountain don’t match. Once you start to see these things, it becomes second nature to recognize them and hard to unsee them. :P I used to have a kids book with an illustration that had a reflection of the moon clearly in the wrong place, and it drove me nuts.

falcolas 4y ago

Forgive the trite take, but it looks like a child was given photoshop.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
You've got some talented kids

have_faith 4y ago

What's interesting to me is that the angle that the generated images are taken from are all at a human's head height or lower. That might seem obvious but it hides the fact that the AI can only copy and merge from it's source images. Is it capable of coming up with a new perspective on it's own?

Isinlor 4y ago
Yes: https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded https://captures.lumalabs.ai/unbounded
- dahart 4y ago
  That might be one first step on the road to solving the problem parent is asking about, but in the case of Nerf, the views (both input and output) are being created by people, not the AI. The nerf AI is being used to create a single 3d scene representation that could be rendered from multiple views, while the DALLE AI is trained to generate 2d images by being trained on a huge corpus of images & text; they are two very different setups.

mrwh 4y ago

What I desire in a landscape photograph is the belief, no matter how naïve this is, that I could experience that sight in person. A landscape photograph as proof that the world is beautiful. Fantasy pictures don't have this dimension and so quickly become boring. Generated images, even those made of a mush of real pictures, don't have it either. There is no _there_ there.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Here's an idea, free of charge. Someone, make Smart Goggles that take the landscape around you and make the same landscape particularly beautiful, striking, or stylized to the wearer, with customizable options, so you could walk around a national park and have it look like the most beautiful photo ever taken. You'll sell them like hotcakes.
- mplewis 4y ago
  .
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Sure - but if I could say, "make this landscape look like it was shot by Thomas Heaton..." Edit: For context, the original reply (now deleted) was about how magic mushrooms were easily obtainable.
- batch12 4y ago
  Reminds me of the video More by Mark Osborne-- though I feel like the song has changed? https://youtu.be/cCeeTfsm8bk https://youtu.be/cCeeTfsm8bk
- sdoering 4y ago
  Why would anyone pay money to be in nature and put a fake optimized/idealized version on top of it? I just can't understand this need to remove reality from reality. But this may be due to the fact that I seem to become a grumpy old cynical white man.
- 4y ago

swamp40 4y ago

jvanderbot 4y ago

On first thought, I would support a US/EU bill that requires all AI-generated imagery to have the creation date, model used, and some relevant prompt information embedded into it using steganography. Any service generating imagery must keep an archive of such imagery for X years. FCC (or similar) penalty for publishing any image that was matched to an AI without attribution or with steganographic information missing would rival DCMA costs. Why? Most users won't care, but news agencies will get caught red handed posting these as real / without thinking about the repercussions. By keeping an archive, a reverse image search would trivially and automatically catch them.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Cool - you’ve just created a black market for an AI that generates imperceptibly good images without such information embedded, and killed open-source AI because open-source AI can always be edited to remove the info. But seriously - how would your system work with any open-source AI, or leaked proprietary AI? It wouldn't. The best you could do is sue someone and claim they had an unlabelled AI image, and hire an expert to try to make a case to rebut against their expert. It just falls apart and the legal system probably isn't interested in figuring out by minor artifacts whether that is AI or just compression, distortion, a bad photoshop job, a prank, etc. This is especially important as AI gets more imperceptible in the future. If I take an AI generated face, and shrink it by 50%, all artifacts are plausibly compression, not that the AI had bad hair edge generation, so you can't prove I had an AI. Too many loopholes. A proper response would be, I argue, simply basing the penalties on the harm caused. Doesn't matter whether the image was made by Photoshop, AI, or an experienced photographer with camera tricks, the harm is the cost. Edit: I keep adding more reasons, but here's another. This proposal would basically ban remixing AI images because embedding it inside another Photoshopped image, putting your face in the AI photo, resizing it, so forth might mess with the watermark. And naturally, any software capable of preserving the watermark could be easily altered to remove it, and many of these watermarks work solely by their secretive design, so good luck seeing the algorithms ever in your open-source package. Practically banning remixing of different types of photos in open-source software is a terrible idea.
- 4y ago

commandlinefan 4y ago

I wonder how far we are away from AI creating realistic "alien" landscapes - places that don't look like anything on Earth, but look like they could exists somewhere in the universe.

chopin 4y ago
As the AI was trained with Earth data, I'd say we are pretty far away.

crazygringo 4y ago

What's fascinating to me is how so many of these images are "too" beautiful -- rather than actual photographs, they're more like overstuffed fantasy landscape paintings that are trying to combine mountains, moss, a volcano, sunset, and mist all in the same image (image #10 if I'm counting correctly). But then maybe that's just a result a overstuffed prompts being fed in. It's also very interesting to see both perspective and reflection inconsistencies, but how many of these aren't obvious at first glance -- only after you look for a couple of seconds.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Look up "Thomas Heaton Photography," among others. He is an actual photographer who has shot images very close to his in their dramatic scope. It is a legitimate photographic style. Edit: You are best off looking this up in Google Images, his website is quite slow. For those looking for a video, see https://youtu.be/jF76LmzY7YY?t=468 https://youtu.be/jF76LmzY7YY?t=468, which I would not have believed could be natural.

poo_clown 4y ago

I think these are ugly personally.

jnxx 4y ago

Would be great to have an AI web site that shows people their town / home landscape with twenty years on into 2.5 degree climate change. Maybe even their own house and garden.

teddyh 4y ago

I remember the 1990’s when morphing¹ was all the rage, and everyone was fascinated by the effect. (It was very common among those who could afford it, and could be seen in movies, TV shows, commercials and also, weirdly, on book covers.) Nowadays, the morph effect looks unbelievably crappy, and obviously fake. The same can be said to have happened to all older forms of special effects; we all now cringe at old movies’ stop-motion animation, rubber monster costumes, and plastic gadgets, but at the time, people thought they looked real. I would bet that the same will happen with AI-generated images; people will learn to tell the signs, and artists will have to learn to avoid these. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphing

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

riversflow 4y ago

I find it poetic that DALL-E also has trouble with symmetry. Anyone who has done much art can tell you about the time they got half of something perfect, and then just couldn’t get the opposing part to be as good.