6 ms·

Show HN: I made 7k images with DALL-E 2 to create a reference/inspiration table

96 points by davidbarker 4y ago

dsmmcken 4y ago
I tried quite a few of them in stable diffusion, and while I found the results typically look worse, it was still interesting. How much curation of the output did you do or was it that exact prompt and the first result? I would love to see it re-run with stable diffusion, and have those added along side/or ability to toggle.
- davidbarker 4y ago
  I guess there are two scenarios: 1. The original prompt I gave it wasn't quite right, so I'd try a few different prompts with slightly different wording until I got something I was happy with. This happened with maybe 10% of the prompts I ran. 2. The prompt text was correct but it gave one or two bad images. In this case, I typically kept them rather than re-running them. I thought it would be a good showcase of its limitations. There's one particular type of image that I constantly (maybe 4 times) would get. It's so unique and I have no idea why it would generate that amongst other more "normal" images. You can see it here: https://generrated.com/prompts/extremeBokeh?prompt=extremeBokeh&subject=horse&number=4 https://generrated.com/prompts/extremeBokeh?prompt=extremeBo... — it's like a real estate listing. Quite strange.
cocokechun 4y ago
This is fantastic! I know there's another platform https://openart.ai https://openart.ai that is a search engine for dalle2 prompts. Could be a good complimentary to this.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
End of the day, unless it's opened up Dall-E 2 will be seen as an evolutionary dead end of this tech and a misstep. It's gone from potentially one of the most innovative companies on the horizon to a dead product now I can spin up equivalent tech on my own machine, hook into my workflow and tools in an afternoon all because Stable Diffusion released their model into the wild.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Yeah, until Stable Diffusion became available, I felt that Dall-E 2 stance on not opening it up was sorta reasonable. Mostly because "groundbreaking tech producing all these impressive results that cost a ton to build, and I bet stable diffusion announcements were all just riding the hype, and it will disappoint at the end." I have never eaten my words as fast as I did when stable diffusion had finally released. Such a gamechanger while running locally, it isn't even funny. All these parameters and samplers one could play with, use a one-click simple gui or cli or a web front-end or even hook it up to any existing code flow that you have going. And it all just works well, with every week bringing new advancements (like img2img). I haven't heard anyone talk about Dall-E 2 in over a month. Like, at all. All while stable diffusion overtook pretty much every single social circle related to image generation that I was in. Major props to the stable diffusion team. They had a very high bar to reach, and not only they managed to do it extremely fast, they blew way past it. Leading by example, in the face of all the "no no no, we gotta keep the model and everything closed, and you shouldnt be able to run it locally, oh and also we hardcoded input filters because safety and we know better than you do" bs arguments was extremely satisfying to watch.
  - capitalsigma 4y ago
    My stable diffusion output looks awful. I've been trying to recreate the xkcd about Joe Biden eating sandwiches, so I try something like "Joe Biden eating a sandwich in the oval office, 4k render, photograph" and I get nightmare fuel with pieces of bread attached to his head, faces that dissolve into random geometric shapes, toppings that melt into hands while a sandwich sits on a plate in front of him, etc. I had high hopes based on posts from the SD subreddit, and I figured Biden would be well represented in the training data. Am I missing something?
    - dickholesalad 4y ago
      You might try using image to image with the comic and previously mentioned prompt as inputs.
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
glial 4y ago
DALL-E tech aside, this is a great reference for artistic style.
- yunwal 4y ago
  I also think it’s really funny to have Sol LeWitt on there because he sort of pioneered the idea of translating text instructions to art. He’s probably the first person to explore the idea of diffusion through a neural network (art history experts feel free to correct me here).
  - yunwal 4y ago
    Btw if anyone was curious I tried feeding some Sol LeWitt-style instructions to Dall-E 2. It didn’t produce an accurate representation unsurprisingly although it might have made the connection to LeWitt https://labs.openai.com/s/GSthErBUTNJMho6aXJnWf6Yu https://labs.openai.com/s/GSthErBUTNJMho6aXJnWf6Yu
- davidbarker 4y ago
  Thank you! I actually ended up learning far more about particular artists than I expected. Either names I'd heard of but didn't know much about (https://generrated.com/prompts/edvardMunch https://generrated.com/prompts/edvardMunch), or brand new artists whose style I now love (https://generrated.com/prompts/okudaSanMiguel https://generrated.com/prompts/okudaSanMiguel).
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  Is it? I only had time to go through the start of the list, but... Accurate: Berkey, Magritte Inaccurate: Arkley, Botticelli, Elvgren, Eng, Kahlo, and ironically Dali Mediocre: Bouguereau, Degas, Hopper, Kandinsky, Leighton Oh! I guess this is a great reference for "what this prompt will do to a Dall-E picture, since it usually won't resemble the original artist that much."
heypel 4y ago
This is a phenomenal reference guide - thank you so much for creating it!
ik8s 4y ago
Thank you for sharing this! I realized it was really hard to verbalize what I wanted from Stable Diffusion, so will be trying some of these and see what it comes up with.
- davidbarker 4y ago
  Wonderful to hear — I really hoped it would provide some inspiration. It's great that our prompts can be (almost) anything, but it also makes it somewhat overwhelming to know where to start. I hope these can work as some starting points.
edumucelli 4y ago
That is really great! Thanks!
ManuelKiessling 4y ago
This is not (yet) worthy of a "Show HN", so I'll drop it in here: If you are using Discord and want a low-barrier way to play around with Stable Diffusion, you can use my Bot to do so. Use https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1013373043625705513&permissions=117760&scope=applications.commands%20bot https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=101337304... to invite the bot to your Discord server, or join my demo server at https://discord.gg/nsfeutx35z https://discord.gg/nsfeutx35z. Disclaimer: while you can use the bot for free 5 times, it is not a completely free service; while I don't plan to turn this into a money-making endeavour, I cannot afford to keep the rather costy GPU instance running without outside funding. Therefore, the bot comes with a credits system - you can buy credits on https://pay-a-robot.com https://pay-a-robot.com, for $0,05 per credit. 1 credit = 1 text-to-image run with 3 result images. If you want to host the bot yourself, the source code with a step-by-step setup guide is available at https://github.com/manuelkiessling/stable-diffusion-discord-bot https://github.com/manuelkiessling/stable-diffusion-discord-....
averylamp 4y ago
This is fantastic thanks for publishing it
jimmygrapes 4y ago
The best thing about this imo is that it proved to me that these image generation algorithms aren't just regurgitating minor variations on an existing image somewhere in their database of billions of images. Although I understand the general idea of how these work, I still had my doubts. The astronaut one in particular made this stand out; many of these artists definitely did not draw astronauts, yet the resultant images do fairly well at emulating the distinct styles of the artists. Thank you for debunking one of my concerns!
- tiluha 4y ago
  I actually found 'the discovery of gravity' far more interesting. Depending on the style the interpretation was completely different.
  - davidbarker 4y ago
    I'm glad you noticed this too. With "a horse", you always get a horse, but with something more abstract like "the discovery of gravity" or "a representation of anxiety", it's far more variable between a scene — perhaps people performing an experiment, or someone falling out of a window(!) — or it's simply a large block of text without any people in the image.
- davidbarker 4y ago
  Yes! This is one of the most interesting aspects that I found. If it knows the particular style, it's typically very good at knowing how to use it. I'm glad it could help clear things up for you.
crazygringo 4y ago
This is fascinating. Obviously it's handmade, but it gets me wondering -- is there any way to produce something like this algorithmically? In other words, if you had full access to the DALL-E 2 (or Stable Diffusion or whatever) model... is there any kind of algorithm or method that could spit back the e.g. 100 most orthogonal text phrases that represent all the art styles? I know that historically neural networks have been considered to be pretty much black boxes, but I'm curious if there's been any progress made at all in terms of interpreting them?
lukeplato 4y ago
How much did it cost?
- davidbarker 4y ago
  In total, I've spent around $500 with DALL•E 2 but I would say only half of that created images that went into the site. Many of the prompts gave great results on the first try, but some of them required 5/10 attempts to get the prompt just right. I've saved all of the generations I've created and at some point I'd love to upload them all to show how slightly different text can really change the images generated.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
Wow, that's an impressive amount of images. How long did it take you to generate and curate so many?
- davidbarker 4y ago
  Thank you! I think I first started to collect the generated images 2 months ago, with the help of some scripts I wrote — I have a list of prompts (around 350), a list of subjects (5 currently), and then I rename/check all of the saved images to find the ones that are missing. Thankfully, DALL-E 2 includes the prompt text in the image filename when you download them. This was very helpful!

96 points by davidbarker 4y ago

I tried quite a few of them in stable diffusion, and while I found the results typically look worse, it was still interesting. How much curation of the output did you do or was it that exact prompt and the first result? I would love to see it re-run with stable diffusion, and have those added along side/or ability to toggle.

davidbarker 4y ago
I guess there are two scenarios: 1. The original prompt I gave it wasn't quite right, so I'd try a few different prompts with slightly different wording until I got something I was happy with. This happened with maybe 10% of the prompts I ran. 2. The prompt text was correct but it gave one or two bad images. In this case, I typically kept them rather than re-running them. I thought it would be a good showcase of its limitations. There's one particular type of image that I constantly (maybe 4 times) would get. It's so unique and I have no idea why it would generate that amongst other more "normal" images. You can see it here: https://generrated.com/prompts/extremeBokeh?prompt=extremeBokeh&subject=horse&number=4 https://generrated.com/prompts/extremeBokeh?prompt=extremeBo... — it's like a real estate listing. Quite strange.

cocokechun 4y ago

This is fantastic! I know there's another platform https://openart.ai https://openart.ai that is a search engine for dalle2 prompts. Could be a good complimentary to this.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

End of the day, unless it's opened up Dall-E 2 will be seen as an evolutionary dead end of this tech and a misstep. It's gone from potentially one of the most innovative companies on the horizon to a dead product now I can spin up equivalent tech on my own machine, hook into my workflow and tools in an afternoon all because Stable Diffusion released their model into the wild.

filoleg 4y ago
Yeah, until Stable Diffusion became available, I felt that Dall-E 2 stance on not opening it up was sorta reasonable. Mostly because "groundbreaking tech producing all these impressive results that cost a ton to build, and I bet stable diffusion announcements were all just riding the hype, and it will disappoint at the end." I have never eaten my words as fast as I did when stable diffusion had finally released. Such a gamechanger while running locally, it isn't even funny. All these parameters and samplers one could play with, use a one-click simple gui or cli or a web front-end or even hook it up to any existing code flow that you have going. And it all just works well, with every week bringing new advancements (like img2img). I haven't heard anyone talk about Dall-E 2 in over a month. Like, at all. All while stable diffusion overtook pretty much every single social circle related to image generation that I was in. Major props to the stable diffusion team. They had a very high bar to reach, and not only they managed to do it extremely fast, they blew way past it. Leading by example, in the face of all the "no no no, we gotta keep the model and everything closed, and you shouldnt be able to run it locally, oh and also we hardcoded input filters because safety and we know better than you do" bs arguments was extremely satisfying to watch.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  My stable diffusion output looks awful. I've been trying to recreate the xkcd about Joe Biden eating sandwiches, so I try something like "Joe Biden eating a sandwich in the oval office, 4k render, photograph" and I get nightmare fuel with pieces of bread attached to his head, faces that dissolve into random geometric shapes, toppings that melt into hands while a sandwich sits on a plate in front of him, etc. I had high hopes based on posts from the SD subreddit, and I figured Biden would be well represented in the training data. Am I missing something?
  - dickholesalad 4y ago
    You might try using image to image with the comic and previously mentioned prompt as inputs.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago

glial 4y ago

DALL-E tech aside, this is a great reference for artistic style.

yunwal 4y ago
I also think it’s really funny to have Sol LeWitt on there because he sort of pioneered the idea of translating text instructions to art. He’s probably the first person to explore the idea of diffusion through a neural network (art history experts feel free to correct me here).
- yunwal 4y ago
  Btw if anyone was curious I tried feeding some Sol LeWitt-style instructions to Dall-E 2. It didn’t produce an accurate representation unsurprisingly although it might have made the connection to LeWitt https://labs.openai.com/s/GSthErBUTNJMho6aXJnWf6Yu https://labs.openai.com/s/GSthErBUTNJMho6aXJnWf6Yu
davidbarker 4y ago
Thank you! I actually ended up learning far more about particular artists than I expected. Either names I'd heard of but didn't know much about (https://generrated.com/prompts/edvardMunch https://generrated.com/prompts/edvardMunch), or brand new artists whose style I now love (https://generrated.com/prompts/okudaSanMiguel https://generrated.com/prompts/okudaSanMiguel).
StrictDabbler 4y ago
Is it? I only had time to go through the start of the list, but... Accurate: Berkey, Magritte Inaccurate: Arkley, Botticelli, Elvgren, Eng, Kahlo, and ironically Dali Mediocre: Bouguereau, Degas, Hopper, Kandinsky, Leighton Oh! I guess this is a great reference for "what this prompt will do to a Dall-E picture, since it usually won't resemble the original artist that much."

heypel 4y ago

This is a phenomenal reference guide - thank you so much for creating it!

ik8s 4y ago

Thank you for sharing this! I realized it was really hard to verbalize what I wanted from Stable Diffusion, so will be trying some of these and see what it comes up with.

davidbarker 4y ago
Wonderful to hear — I really hoped it would provide some inspiration. It's great that our prompts can be (almost) anything, but it also makes it somewhat overwhelming to know where to start. I hope these can work as some starting points.

edumucelli 4y ago

That is really great! Thanks!

ManuelKiessling 4y ago

This is not (yet) worthy of a "Show HN", so I'll drop it in here: If you are using Discord and want a low-barrier way to play around with Stable Diffusion, you can use my Bot to do so. Use https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1013373043625705513&permissions=117760&scope=applications.commands%20bot https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=101337304... to invite the bot to your Discord server, or join my demo server at https://discord.gg/nsfeutx35z https://discord.gg/nsfeutx35z. Disclaimer: while you can use the bot for free 5 times, it is not a completely free service; while I don't plan to turn this into a money-making endeavour, I cannot afford to keep the rather costy GPU instance running without outside funding. Therefore, the bot comes with a credits system - you can buy credits on https://pay-a-robot.com https://pay-a-robot.com, for $0,05 per credit. 1 credit = 1 text-to-image run with 3 result images. If you want to host the bot yourself, the source code with a step-by-step setup guide is available at https://github.com/manuelkiessling/stable-diffusion-discord-bot https://github.com/manuelkiessling/stable-diffusion-discord-....

averylamp 4y ago

This is fantastic thanks for publishing it

jimmygrapes 4y ago

The best thing about this imo is that it proved to me that these image generation algorithms aren't just regurgitating minor variations on an existing image somewhere in their database of billions of images. Although I understand the general idea of how these work, I still had my doubts. The astronaut one in particular made this stand out; many of these artists definitely did not draw astronauts, yet the resultant images do fairly well at emulating the distinct styles of the artists. Thank you for debunking one of my concerns!

tiluha 4y ago
I actually found 'the discovery of gravity' far more interesting. Depending on the style the interpretation was completely different.
- davidbarker 4y ago
  I'm glad you noticed this too. With "a horse", you always get a horse, but with something more abstract like "the discovery of gravity" or "a representation of anxiety", it's far more variable between a scene — perhaps people performing an experiment, or someone falling out of a window(!) — or it's simply a large block of text without any people in the image.
davidbarker 4y ago
Yes! This is one of the most interesting aspects that I found. If it knows the particular style, it's typically very good at knowing how to use it. I'm glad it could help clear things up for you.

crazygringo 4y ago

This is fascinating. Obviously it's handmade, but it gets me wondering -- is there any way to produce something like this algorithmically? In other words, if you had full access to the DALL-E 2 (or Stable Diffusion or whatever) model... is there any kind of algorithm or method that could spit back the e.g. 100 most orthogonal text phrases that represent all the art styles? I know that historically neural networks have been considered to be pretty much black boxes, but I'm curious if there's been any progress made at all in terms of interpreting them?

lukeplato 4y ago

How much did it cost?

davidbarker 4y ago
In total, I've spent around $500 with DALL•E 2 but I would say only half of that created images that went into the site. Many of the prompts gave great results on the first try, but some of them required 5/10 attempts to get the prompt just right. I've saved all of the generations I've created and at some point I'd love to upload them all to show how slightly different text can really change the images generated.

tomatotomato37 4y ago

Wow, that's an impressive amount of images. How long did it take you to generate and curate so many?

davidbarker 4y ago
Thank you! I think I first started to collect the generated images 2 months ago, with the help of some scripts I wrote — I have a list of prompts (around 350), a list of subjects (5 currently), and then I rename/check all of the saved images to find the ones that are missing. Thankfully, DALL-E 2 includes the prompt text in the image filename when you download them. This was very helpful!