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Ask HN: Am I the only one tired of seeing DALL·E /Stable Diffusion posts?
Every other posts this week seems to be about the aforementioned. The novelty and breakthrough in generative art is understandable, but what are other use cases are there for the greater collective good?
- nailer 4y ago> Am I the only one tired of seeing DALL·E /Stable Diffusion posts? No, there's quite a few of us. https://imgur.com/a/9gXjJ61 https://imgur.com/a/9gXjJ61
- ThisIsMyAltFace 4y agoIt's a developing situation, like a war or a natural disaster.
- inawarminister 4y agoThe progress in the ecosystems of open source projects and SaaS springing up in the layer above Stable Diffusion is more interesting to me than the art-making itself Have we ever seen such progress in 3rd party code before? It's only a week and it seems like a lot of innovations came up chaotically from the userbase...?
- gregjor 4y agoYou aren’t alone.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoUpvote other content then? I think this is an artifact of the collaborative filtering model
- navjack27 4y agoI mean HN always picks up on the latest things and runs with it while it's in the zeitgeist. Just let it pass and let people advance it. It's technology. It's neat. Think about everything else that was a thing everyone posted about and frame it the same way. "what are other use cases are there for the greater collective good?" And you'll see how silly this sounds
- equilibrium 4y agoI understand that it may sound silly once that question is posed for other technologies that have been hyped similarly in the past and today do indeed provide utility. This was a genuine question. Maybe I'm just silly.
- noud 4y agoNot tired, but not impressed either. Looks cool, but I think it gets pretty boring after a couple of usages. Highly overrated and hyped if you ask me.
- Agingcoder 4y agoWell, I grew up with 8 and 16 bit machines, and dall-E and most sophisticated machine learning stuff looks very science fiction to me. I understand how it works, but I can't help thinking 'woah...' every time I see it!
- matt_heimer 4y agoReminds me of Next Gen Enterprise crew describing to the computer what they want in the holodeck.
- layer8 4y agoThat would be an interesting experiment to try the exact same examples from the show.
- dougmwne 4y agoIt is honestly beyond Star Trek. The Computer was extremely capable, but also very literal and creative interpretation was not a strong point. Data painted, but not very well. Reality is ending up to be more interesting than our wildest fantasies from a few years ago.
- mountainriver 4y agoWow this is shocking to hear, It’s one of the most stunning achievements we’ve ever accomplished with computers. A huge milestone in the journey to AI which is of course the future of everything
- bhj 4y agoAI (ML more accurately) helping to solve climate change would be the future of everything.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThis too will pass.
- paxys 4y agoNot sure what "every other posts" you are talking about. The current front page one is the only mention of Dall-E I have seen on this site in weeks.
- Kiro 4y agoStable Diffusion has dominated the front page recently. There has been 3-4 articles on it at all times.
- vivegi 4y agoI am hoping to soon see how we can generate a coherent set of characters in different artistic styles and perhaps build a graphic novel / comic strip using prompts. A slightly higher order application of the DALL-E/SD/MidJourney primitives.
- layer8 4y agoI might be wrong, but that seems pretty far out to me, because it requires higher-level coherent understanding in a way that the current systems don’t seem to have.
- pwinnski 4y agoStableDiffusion's img2img helps with this now, in that you can create a character, then use that character as input to future images. It's not as good as it will be, though.
- kshacker 4y agoI have always ignored them as I did not know what DALL-E was, but last night got reading the multiple stable diffusion posts and liked what I read. Interesting stuff. Now after having read, I think it is good to have one odd post here and there as there are always some people not in the know, but I agree we are seeing too many of those.
- workingdog 4y agoPlot twist: These posts are all AI generated. Including this one.
- hbogert 4y agoRepeat these kinds of posts often enough and they will end up in machine GPT-3 for generated comments on link sites.
- browningstreet 4y agoIt'd be nice to have filter words in our profiles that would excise matching posts from the front page.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y agoI think it self-regulates with time - otherwise we would be flooded with "crypto" and "web3" submissions all the time.
- browningstreet 4y agoSure, and you’re right about that, but I still think an easier to use muting mechanism would help dampen the annoyance factor, and that would make HN that much nicer a community. Kinda like, annoyed people annoy people.
- Groxx 4y agoAdblock does this pretty well tbh. target `tr.athing` which `:-abp-contains(diffusion)` or similar.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brzl 4y ago
- marban 4y ago
- derac 4y agoI'm not tired of it. I think it's the most exciting technology at the moment. IMO, ML/AI is only going to get crazier in the coming years. We're in a period of intense and rapid development that probably won't end soon. Personally I'd like to see more products than research papers.
- abcc8 4y agoCompletely agree. Also, I believe that articles, tools, etc reaching the front page will diversify as these initial tools are built upon and taken different directions.
- Natsu 4y agoWe might be watching a mass disruption of art as a profession. I think that's worth a few HN posts.
- deltasevennine 4y agoIt's obvious. What was once a mysterious domain can now be constructed with machines. It brings the concept of "art" closer and closer to the "axiomatic theory of art". We are understanding more and more what we are from a logical standpoint. Actually this might not be for the greater collective good. It might be bad.
- hbogert 4y ago> We are understanding more and more what we are from a logical standpoint. I would not equate being able to reproduce something with ML, to understanding something logically
- deltasevennine 4y agoI would equate it to being Closer understanding it logically. Which was my point.
- WorldMaker 4y agoI don't mind them on HN because HN doesn't support image previews and I generally don't have to click in to articles. (Sometimes I'll read a few of the comments on HN, which again fortunately doesn't support image embeds.) I mind them just about everywhere else. I have a hard time to describe it and I seem to be somewhat alone in it, but the images coming out of these algorithms generally tend to trigger some revulsion reactions in me. It's possibly just an uncanny valley relative, but sometimes that revulsion hits notes of true, disgusting horror. The images tend to smell too much like nightmares for my comfort. That simile is about the best I can explain it, I think, they all smell too much like nightmares to me. I've dropped/blocked people and bots on social media for posting lots of generated images without CWs. I've threatened to drop more. I hate how much Facebook's algorithm tends to surface posts with photos over other content in general, but especially in this moment where many of those photos are these generated things that give me the creeps. There's no good way to set a filter to never show me a DALL-E/Midjourney/Stable Diffusion image ever again. TL;DR: I don't mind conversing about these algorithms in HN, but please stop posting the images themselves.
- dougmwne 4y agoInteresting! I wonder if you are hitting uncanny valley, if your knowledge about the black box leads you to interpret the images unfavorably or if you can smell the eldritch horror of a soulless computational demon masquerading as silly pictures.
- WorldMaker 4y agoYeah, I wonder, too. The answer is likely "all of the above". To wax philosophical for a long bit: I appreciate intellectually that so much of our foundational understanding of Statistics (and its core formulas and vocabulary) originates from mathematicians such as Boole, Pascal, Bayes, and others that thought that through probabilities they could find their God. Of all of the maths there is none that its history is so collectively tied up into Christian notions of the search for God and especially 18th Century Gnostic/Pseudo-Gnosticism ideas of Christian morality and ethics. It has always struck me as somewhat funny in counterpoint that Einstein's alleged gut reaction to early Quantum Mechanics was "God does not play dice with the universe" given how many such mathematicians studied dice precisely with the idea of trying to find their God. There was a lot of nuance in Einstein's actual public reaction to Quantum Mechanics from which that paraphrased quote is often pulled out of context, and I think it speaks to a heart of the contradiction in the heart of Statistics as a theological field: "many of the same early Statisticians hoping to find their God among the probabilities were often morally opposed to gambling and casinos and thought those to be possibly tools of their Devil". Einstein seemed to grapple with that instinct that "physical laws" that revolved around luck seemed morally more associated with demons than a Just God. I don't know if Statistics can ever find a god among the numbers, but I have no doubt that in this Age of Vastly Applied Sparkling Statistics we keep finding all sorts of new demons and monsters. To be fair, most of these demons seem to be "soylent": at the end of the day they still seem to be made of people (plagiarized from our collective worst qualities). But overall they still seem to be demons in the worst moral and ethical sense and we should maybe be fighting against them rather than let them consume the internet. It doesn't take a grand sense of irony to wonder if the science intended to prove the number of Angels that can dance on the head of pin might instead be much better at finding all the demons in the world, given enough computation (big enough casinos). I do sometimes worry about the existential horror that so many of our story traditions warn us to beware of magic mirrors and portals to the fairy/demo/spirit realms, and yet here we are in a time where almost all of us just casually carry a magic mirror in our pockets and handbags at all times with its near instantaneous access to the internet which sometimes seems a far larger, more deeply connected fairy realm than even those stories warned us about. Philosophers in the 1970s worried that with the rapid progression of technology an increasing number of people might have to grapple with "future shock" of living in the future, I think from this perspective we've proven that we've successfully "boiled the frog" versus those 1970s fears (for better and worse) and today's "normal" doesn't look anything like "future shock", rather it's just "normal"/pedestrian/mundane. Everyone has a phone, it connects wirelessly to the largest network of inter-connected computers in history, most people use it pass around photos of cats and complain about restaurants, and don't notice any weird significance to that or all the "future technologies" it takes to make it all work. It's simple magic that lives in their pockets and handbags. I don't know what to do with that subtle horror realization that maybe we've built the kind of fairy realm that our myths and legends and fairy tales warned us about and almost everyone today just thinks it is a normal feature of the world. I mostly just try to cope with it, and try my best professionally to bring what morality and ethics skills I can to the small bits of the overall fairy realm that I'm paid to work on.
- phone8675309 4y agoNo. Good native ad team though.
- thrill 4y agoWell, I'm certainly tired of hearing all the bitching about it and other cutting edge technologies.
- runjake 4y agoIf you weren't they wouldn't be upvoted and on the front page. Per the guidelines[1], you can flag a post if you'd like. Personally, the generative art part is pretty exciting to me. It's a good way to come up with new ideas. I don't see that usefulness going away. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- woeirua 4y agoI am, after the fiasco that was Github Copilot. It seemed like every post was filled with people dooming over how Copilot was going to make developers obsolete. Then I used Copilot, and I can't see how anyone could possibly think that would be the case. Maybe if all you do is write sort algorithms day in and day out, but otherwise, I think our jobs are quite secure, and I think that will be the case with SD / DallE too (especially after having used Dall-E 2).
- ericsoderstrom 4y agoWhy was copilot a fiasco? This [0] hn thread from two months ago is filled with predominantly positive reviews [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825742
- nailer 4y agoGitHub copilot is trained on Open Source code bases, and regenerates OSS code in your proprietary apps, potentially breaking the licensing of the OSS code or your proprietary app.
- ShamelessC 4y agoA vocal minority of e.g. GPL proponents is just like, really really mad about it. They tend to claim they are worried about open source. Really they are worried about a smaller sub-culture of open source who doesn’t want their code used for profit without being paid.
- AlexandrB 4y agoWhat about the sub-culture of open source who doesn't want their code used for profit without the result also being open sourced? To put it another way, why should we have to treat Microsoft's EULA and licenses as ironclad while Microsoft gets to ignore licensing terms of code they want to use for their own products? Seems like an imbalance that's only possible because one side is more well-funded than the other.
- colechristensen 4y agoEh. An overhyped technology where I'm thinking "oh that's neat" but meh, it's a trend I'm not interested in, one gets used to that kind of thing. It doesn't bother me until it starts having significant negative effects (like crypto hype).
- j0hnyl 4y agoWhat about significant positive effects?
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoI'm tired of people acting like it just came into being out of nowhere. I've known about the training of the model for months, and about the predecessor Latent-Diffusion for a long time. Then there was DALLE-MINI/DALLE-MEGA. 4chan was all over SD and the leaked model before Hackernews was raving about it.
- aaron695 4y ago
- dougmwne 4y agoOne of the most interesting developments in computation in my lifetime? Nah, let’s have the millionth article about privacy, crypto or regulation instead. Saying that this is uninteresting because art does not advance the collective good is a pretty narrow view of humanity.
- fullshark 4y agoBetter than political/web3/VC worship posts
- z9znz 4y agoThis branch of research and technology is going to have immense impact. It is basically visualization of words and expressions, and I expect we will see it woven into many parts of our daily life in the near future. It will not put artists out of business, although it may significantly impact stock photo services. Everywhere you look - any place that has a photo or illustration - may soon be using generated images. I even expect meta versions which can take large amounts of text (such as an entire paragraph or essay) and generate images which seem to fit the topic or feel. This tech will give non-artists the ability to express and visualize ideas (for fun or profit), and it will be a boon to professional content creators who labor over image collection and selection. Heck, at some point the images will be generated on the fly by our browsers for content or even ads.
- steve76 4y ago
- revskill 4y agoAI techs is really good at "artistic" domains where the product is to make people feel. Can't be used where u want 100% correct output.
- IceMetalPunk 4y agoOn the other hand, humans also don't give 100% correct output in anything, either :D
- jerjerjer 4y ago> what are other use cases are there for the greater collective good? It could radically change how humans produce and perceive art. I just wish there were more technical discussions around prompt engineering, so far most of the articles focus on particularly good examples authors got out of DALL-E, MJ, SD.
- jzellis 4y agoI've played with them a bit. I understand at least a lot of the science behind it, and the tech is interesting, but what people seem to want to do with it is kind of boring to me. I've been working with generative art for a long time, but for some reason this doesn't really move me the way that far less technically impressive stuff does. I'm especially bored with the "Will AI replace artists?" breathlessness. It's tedious. Of course not. These tools are each like an artist in and of themselves. Did Picasso replace Rembrandt? Did Warhol replace Picasso? Nah. No AI will create what I'd create, or what Takashi Murakami would create, or any given high school kid with a paintbrush. If all you think art is is being able to complete a commission, then sure, you'd probably see this as replacing what you think the purpose of an artist is. But you'd be wrong, and wrong in such a boring way that it's not worth debating. Even if these AIs started generating their own ideas, it would be amazing and fascinating and worth celebrating, but it's not replacing anything. Just adding something new and cool into the world.
- IceMetalPunk 4y agoCompletely agree. Also, "Even if these AIs started generating their own ideas, it would be amazing and fascinating and worth celebrating": they already can, if you combine them with something like GPT-3 :)
- stocknoob 4y agoI’m similarly bored with “AI won’t have any meaningful impact on arists” takes. Think of a well-reviewed game like Slay the Spire (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slay_the_Spire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slay_the_Spire). Excellent gameplay, amateurish art which they had still to commission for ~thousands of dollars. Now they can get better quality art, for pennies, in minutes. Is this a boring example not worth discussing?
- cityofdelusion 4y agoIt took me a couple of hours to get 5 generated images that had a semi-consistent theme and look that I wanted -- for PowerPoint slides. I don't see how AI art in its current state could possibly be used for something like the art in Slay the Spire. I challenge the "now... better quality, for pennies, in minutes" assertion. Maybe in a few years.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoMETA: Isn't this one? I'm not tired of it, as we often have "deluges" of posts about current events. It'll die down.
- felipelalli 4y agoYes.
- dang 4y agoIt's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) so we apply the SNI test: if an article contains Significant New Information, then it's probably ok, otherwise we'll tend to downweight it. We learned this approach the hard way after HN got inundated by topic avalanches in the past (e.g. Snowden in 2013). It works fairly well, but it requires us to see the posts, so if you notice a follow-up submission that isn't singing particularly well for its supper, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com so we can downweight it. Past explanations, if anyone wants more, can be found by scrolling back through these links: 'significant new information' is key when there's a major ongoing topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... we tend to downweight follow-ups unless they're particularly good - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... repetition is bad for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... diffs are what's interesting - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- dr_dshiv 4y agoOk, but there has been a LOT of massive progress in a week, as a community effect. Below are just the mindbending stories I didn’t see on HN front page. Aesthetic dataset at heart of stability diffusion https://laion.ai/blog/laion-aesthetics/ https://laion.ai/blog/laion-aesthetics/ Basis of said dataset https://github.com/JD-P/simulacra-aesthetic-captions https://github.com/JD-P/simulacra-aesthetic-captions Latent space walk through studio Ghibli https://youtu.be/nkliw2ue5ak https://youtu.be/nkliw2ue5ak Automated Aesthetic optimization of prompts https://twitter.com/omorfiamorphism/status/1564633854119477257?s=24&t=8vaG1UX3x3lyfccJZmJTbA https://twitter.com/omorfiamorphism/status/15646338541194772... Fashion inpainting https://twitter.com/karenxcheng/status/1564626773001719813 https://twitter.com/karenxcheng/status/1564626773001719813 Prompt search engine https://lexica.art/ https://lexica.art/ Probably just missed them, but the point is that there is so much diverse innovation taking place right now in this MOT. It’s not just diverse reporting/opinion but diverse innovation. Note: it is hard to search for this topic with “stability” as the keyword. I looked for stories in the past week and it gave me one small incomplete page.
- namelosw 4y agoGenerative art posts are being posted from time to time on HN for years. (eg. There are many "This X does not exist" posts) But recently it is booming. The reason is not related to DALL·E, but Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is 1) open sourced 2) the model is small and easy enough to run on people's computer. As a result, it can embed in a lot of tools and services, so people are getting excited and start building ecosystem and business around it. When people can create art without effort, how to streamline the creative process and dealing with giant amount of arts are going to be the problems that worth solving. As for use cases, I can see it either replacing a lot of artists or being one of the most important tool for artists, or both. Also, it might flood the Internet with its creations in the following years so be prepared.
- throwaway743 4y agoNot yet, but likely will once they're in mass use and add to existing internet/content pollution. Not saying early adopter content os any better, just wary of the quality to volume of whatever will be produced.
- t0bia_s 4y agoI'm more tired about calling it "art". It's about generating digital images. Results are mostly generative. Like artstation trending images, but with lack of details.
- mod 4y agohttps://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwork-won-first-place-at-a-state-fair-fine-arts-competition-and-artists-are-pissed https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwo... Okay, well it's winning art competitions.
- t0bia_s 4y agoOh please.. Art is not a sport to winning competitions.
- mcbrit 4y agoI do not appreciate the structure of the question. Half the front page has not been taken over by this question; moreover, no one is trotting out standard morality (collective good) frameworks, eg an act is good/moral because of its final consequences, who does it, or its intention. Those are the main lines. And then there are many many gambits, to re(mis)use chess terminology. So: what are you asking, exactly?
- hirundo 4y agoWe've just scratched the surface of the implications. I just read another story on HN about the difficulty Twitter has in identifying child sexual exploitation images, and how they have so far passed on a multi-billion dollar business opportunity because of it. Generative art seems to make such identification much more difficult. Such tech can hardly be stopped from helping to image the full range of human fantasy. CSE and every other form of crime and taboo will be included. The volume of such media will increase by orders of magnitude. Whether they are or should be legal is a fascinating topic, but it matters little to the advertisers that bankroll business models like Twitter's. I can't even guess if this results in more or less strictness around such fantasy content.
- anigbrowl 4y agoNo. It reminds me a bit of when Snapchat launched and suddenly everyone was posting selfies with terrible filters. That said, the excitement is understandable. AI/ML have been hyped a lot and there have also been a lot of unresolvable ethical questions. So there's a certain sense of relief at something objectively cool and fun, as well as recapturing the 'wow' factor of what's possible with computers. Often the latter is reserved for a game or video demonstration of what can be achieved with skill + a great toolchain + new hardware (or newly affordable or tiny hardware). It's not so often that it applies to tools, or that new tools so dramatically lower the skill barriers to creating high quality work. Since humans are so visually driven and graphics have always been the fancy chocolate of computer technology, such impressive new tools hit at a visceral level for many people. I think the biggest (but less obvious) use case is that this in combination with other tools like GPT-3 is suddenly very close to AGI. Up to now AI in computer vision has been about recognizing objects, entities, or behaviors for narrow tasks like driving or surveillance. Suddenly language models, scene decomposition, and visual feedback are good enough that we're close to having real conversations with computers: you can show your computer a picture and talk about how it has people and animals, what clothes the people are wearing, whether they're on a boat or in a field, what they're doing and so on. This is not that far off from sitting with a child and looking at a picture book together.
- Normille 4y agoNope. I said it too, earlier on. But no-one ever pays any attention to my words of wisdom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32659058#32659107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32659058#32659107
- butz 4y agoMore like annoyed, because it is not something I can easily get into. But hey, still better than all those crypto/web3 posts.
- smitty1e 4y agoIs this the thing with the images of melted people? I find corruption of the human form, in general, in lousy taste and wish people would cut that out. Just my $0.02
- senectus1 4y agoNot tired no.. its moving so fast I'm slightly scared of its rate of progression. So I'm watching it in amazed fear.
- johlits 4y agoIt is kind of similar to cryptocurrencies in that it has no real use case IMO.
- pranav_hacker 4y ago
- pranav_hacker 4y ago
- pranav_hacker 4y ago
- jacknews 4y agoJust ignore them then. The progress demonstrated in these models, particularly SD img2img is quite spectacular, and fully warrants the hype, IMHO.
- d4rkp4ttern 4y agoI have been thinking the same. These are about art and impressive as they seem, it’s curious why so many non-artists are talking about it so much. I would be far more interested in a writing assistant that functions similarly to GitHub CoPilot, but works in emails and docs of various kinds. This would actually impact my day to day. I have yet to see a near-universal plugin that helps with writing. Anyone know of something that’s free or cheap (similar to copilot $10/mo would be fine)
- shrimpx 4y agoI've been generating thousands of images with Stable Diffusion and my overall take is this is super primitive tech and it's unclear if/when there will be major breakthroughs in terms of "mainstream" use cases or general impact on society. I think it could revolutionize gaming or marketing if it gets to the point where any meaningful prompt instantly leads to mind-blowing images. Currently you have to keep laboring against its tendency to produce grotesque, mutilated, dystopian, hell-like imagery.
- IYasha 4y agoNo offense intended, but I'm also tired of personal "Ask HN" posts.