17 ms·

DALL·E 2 vs. $10 Fiverr Commissions

310 points by sberens 4y ago

barbariangrunge 4y ago
I personally don't love that you can commission art for $10. I know that this price point is more or less the 'trial' or 'promotion' price, but still - it's so hard for artists to pay their bills, and this sort of creates a perception that their work should be available for really cheap
appleflaxen 4y ago
I agree with the other posters: this is an absolutely inspired idea, which was then executed in the worst way possible by choosing a blind spot in AI generation. The comment by nextaccountic is spot on.
funstuff007 4y ago
> A fair criticism of this post would be that I spent no time on optimizing my prompts, which has been shown to make a big difference in the quality of the output How long before someone lists "DALL-E Prompt Optimization" as a skill on LinkedIn?
deleted 4y ago
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roca 4y ago
Google staff aren't allowed to share Imagen results with you, unfortunately.
- coding123 4y ago
  y not?
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    You are asked to not share the images when you use it.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Heh, remember when you signed up and still bought into Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It's kinda sad that Google desperately wants the cool points for having its own DL models but you can only see it in the form of a store window display.
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        The are almost no companies that operate with a full public view into their in-progress projects.
        anigbrowl 4y ago
        I'm teasing about Google's 'so great you can't even see it' effort to build hype for its own offering.
      - vkou 4y ago
        > Heh, remember when you signed up and still bought into Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. They probably also remember signing an NDA, and maybe taking some training about how not all of the world's information should be made universally accessible and useful to everyone. For instance, the contents of a user's inbox.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  I just tried the prompts with Imagen and Parti. They are similar to Dalle-2, with a bit more "variety" but none reproducing the author's specific prompt the way the author wants. For the prompt "a graph with 3 lines" both produce graphs with 3 lines at least 1/6 of the time.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Curious. I've played with quite a few of these models and one of the very consistent "tells" is that they're extremely bad at counting things. A friend of mine likes tarot and I tried a few prompts... great results for the major arcana, but good luck with "ten of cups"... without capability to edit & re-prompt, the only viable strategy appears to be "ask it to draw a bunch of cups repeatedly until you've collected all the numbers." Getting 3 of something 1/6 of the time doesn't really sound like it groks the request.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      Sure, but it doesn't have to count to be useful. When I run this locally on desktop GPU, I get 16 results in a few seconds. I can visually select the 2-3 that match what I want and pick one of them. I can try again ten times for 20-30 options, and it still takes less time than Fiverr. I would not use these models for graphs yet, but for cool look tarot inspired "clipart" or background images, I think they are already usable.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        The inability to count has some interesting knock-on effects. My favorite being eyes and hands. Especially the hands. The closer you look, the creepier it gets. That thumb has fingers of its own?! Thus far, the greatest utility I've seen has been on par with B-movies.
        hey2022 4y ago
        I am somewhat surprised at how bad these tools are at generating hands and feet. Is it just a matter of not having enough images to ingest? The faces often look very good and they also have symmetric complexity and individual elements that come in a specific quantity (2 eyes, etc). Lower quality models do generate fly-like multi eye faces, but newer ones are so much more precise!
amelius 4y ago
Ugh. This could have been so much better. It's not at all surprising that an AI is bad at drawing graphs, and it is also not surprising that even a non-artist human can draw graphs pretty well.
- nullc 4y ago
  It's not even that "AI is bad at drawing graphs"-- these models were specifically trained on "aesthetic images".
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Why is it not surprising? I don't see any fundamental reason for it. I think these models will be able to produce sensible graphs fairly soon. You could equally say "it's not surprising that DALL-E can't draw words"... except that Imagen seems to be pretty good at it. I think the real reason it's not surprising to you is that you've already seen enough DALL-E results to understand its limitations. It's not surprising that DALL-E can't draw graphs.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    We don't know if it's surprising, the author never tells us their hypothesis. They don't state any particular reason for the prompt they used, they don't explore the contents or qualities of the prompt compared to other AI-generated art, and they don't run multiple trials. Because of that, we can't conclude anything useful from this article. There's no frame of reference or scientific inquiry involved. If you find it entertaining, that's fine. As a scientific comparison, this verges on parody.
    - hey2022 4y ago
      This is not a scientific experiment. The author compared results of a specific prompt. Why are so many people overthinking this?
      - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
charcircuit 4y ago
I think this is more of a showcase of these model's poor graphing skills and not a comparison between these models and fiver artists.
mgraczyk 4y ago
One missing dimension for this comparison is how long it takes to get results. I've been using Imagen/Parti/Stable Diffusion already as a replacement for "clip art" because it takes ~15 seconds to get results and they are free. Fiverr takes at least 100 times that long and costs $10. For tasks where the exact content isn't important and you can't invest more than a few seconds or wait a more than a few seconds for results, generative models are already a great solution.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Some can be had free, but I quickly run up against usage limits and end up paying for it.
  - modeless 4y ago
    There are no usage limits if you happen to have a gaming PC.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      It also takes less than 10 minutes on PC.
  - astrange 4y ago
    You can’t use Imagen/Parti unless you work at Google, so it sounds like he’s getting paid for it.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Wait, 'Fiver[r]' costs $10? I assumed it was.. a fiver. Did it start off making sense and inflate?
  - barbecue_sauce 4y ago
    I believe the creator sets their own rates on fiverr.
- hey2022 4y ago
fareesh 4y ago
Drawing graphs is probably one of the worst comparisons one can do in terms of evaluating these models. They seem to be trained to generate either photorealistic or stylized images.
- sberens 4y ago
  I had personally never seen this side of the models, so I wanted to share this finding. I agree that they were trained more on artistic images, but I was still surprised with how bad they generalized to a more theoretical(?) context.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    I think the path forward for something like this is models that learn to execute python code and incorporate the results into their outputs. There are already projects that can generate correct matplotlib calls for prompts like yours, but I don't think we are to the point where those python outputs can be automatically combined with a diffusion model for style or whatever.
  - post-it 4y ago
    It's not about it being theoretical, it's moreso that the language model is still far more simplistic than our own, and struggles with anything but the most basic relations between nouns. The "horse riding an astronaut" post is a good example of this.[0] [0] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut
    - ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
      See also “Shirt without stripes” https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
    - throwaman123 4y ago
      It’s funny to see this comment on HN, because it gets refuted so many times by now you should be able to punch into google and find it. https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176 https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176
baxtr 4y ago
Cool article! I think on a more general note it underlines what I have been thinking for some time now: most people, also on HN, get this generative art stuff totally wrong. Yes, this will be the end for some artists but not for others. DALLE2 et al. are merely new tools for new generation of artists. And, we are still figuring out how to use these tools effectively. In other words: The “AI” is a tool that we humans will use to get things done faster/better etc. Nothing less, but also not much more.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  To your point, I read in a board game group the other day of an artist using AI generation for a first pass with new clients to save themselves time. "Is this close to what you want?" then does the actual art with alterations by hand. If the client says no or flakes out, a lot less effort was lost than before.
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  The more worrisome aspect for me isn’t that it’s already going to replace some artists. I always thought in my head that this level of creativity would remain our domain for centuries. Even as of like two or three years ago I thought that. It’s insane to me that today some artists feel they’re going to be replaced soon. The idea of centuries is completely shattered for me and now I don’t know if we’re a year or 50 years away from AI replacing humans entirely in the creative domain. I spent the other day completely in an existential crisis, tbh.
  - astrange 4y ago
    The only reason an artist would think they’re being replaced is someone told them they would. So the solution is to not tell them that, as it’s not true. (The main instigator on Twitter is a guy who draws “realistic Pokemon” and hates that an AI may have stolen the art he already stole from The Pokemon Company.)
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    >I always thought in my head that this level of creativity would remain our domain for centuries. From what I've seen these networks are rehashing learning set images into something matching some criteria to produce visually pleasing results. Not to belittle the results - it's impressive - but the stuff I'm not seeing here is understanding of generated material - nonsensical z-order, scale/proportions, configuration. Fantasy images are an easy target because it's all about visually pleasing nonsense.
mattnewton 4y ago
Complicated generative models are the wrong tool for the job here.. And arguable Fiverr commissions are too, these graph prompts look like they would take about the same amount of time it took to write the prompt to do in a vector art program once you got some beginner skills in one. To me this is almost like asking it to graph functions and comparing it to excel's graphing tools.
chuckwalla55 4y ago
how long before 90% of the work on fiverr is AI generated?
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  You got it.
axg11 4y ago
This is a great idea executed very poorly. I would love to see a larger sample size of AI vs Fiverr with a wider range of prompts. Graphs are difficult for current models and that was already well understood.
yieldcrv 4y ago
The only substantive comment is that this is the nerdiest most useless comparison far divorced from any utility in this trending topic Let’s show all the ways that these AI obliterate $10 Fiverr non-AI commissions, thats what people want to see
montebicyclelo 4y ago
These text-to-graph problems seem like a good candidate for someone to create a training-dataset/benchmark of. Bear in mind that the training data for these models has been mostly images and their alt text, scraped off the web. There is a good chance that there's nothing remotely like the examples given here in the training data. (People don't caption their graphs like that.) These models are undoubtably good at doing what they have been trained to do - but I think no-one disagrees that there's plenty of room for improvement. (And bear in mind that these text2image models only released this year, and that this tech in general has only been invented in the last couple of years, so it's very early days...)
ahmedbaracat 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. Interestingly, I wrote a blog post about a similar topic: What will happen if ML builders and domain experts had co-ownership of the data and the model.* I am planning to generate the first training seed images by using Fiverr and giving the logo designers ownership rights of the data/model/profits. https://blog.barac.at/a-business-experiment-in-data-dignity https://blog.barac.at/a-business-experiment-in-data-dignity * vs the current trend of training diffusion models on 400M images from the Internet (many of them being garbage) with mixed licenses and letting the user take responsibility of the generated images licensing issues.
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
The prompt he did is almost a captcha lol in terms of difficulty for AI vs human. Try a painting... Do a video game concept art or magic the gathering card. See how long it takes a human vs AI. The results are way farther to the side of AI, such that he might find it cost prohibitive to try to commission people to do it on fiverr for a blog post.
mikelemmon 4y ago
This post might as well be called “Check out what happens when you use a wrench to put in a screw”. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.
- hey2022 4y ago
  How is this not the right tool? Where on DALLE-2 website does it say that it should not be used for artistic graphs? Yes, we all have seen badly generated graphs from DALLE-2 before, so it feels like this is an obviously limitation of AI image generation tools. But why should this be such an obvious thing to absolutely everyone?
  - Rioghasarig 4y ago
    Doesn't change the fact that it's a bad experiment. Anyone familiar with DALL-E would predict this result. He should have taken some time to understand what DALL-E can do and proposed an actually interesting experiment.
    - hey2022 4y ago
      I don’t think we should limit experiments only to those areas where DALLE-2 succeeds. Seeing failures is also valuable.
dvcrn 4y ago
funny timing, just yesterday I finished a little app I was hacking on and needed a somewhat decent looking logo that was blocking the release. Instead of trying my luck in sketch and doodling around, I went to DALL E, and with my first prompt was able to generate better logos than I could have drawn. I was immediately unblocked and super happy with the results It’s just amazing that non design people like me can just conjure up decent looking, and usable stuff with AI. I will definitely use DALL E much more going forward for creative work The logos are a bit noisy and need redrawing in a proper vector tool but its a great starting point to try out different ideas immediately (The results: https://twitter.com/dvcrn/status/1578710631838289922 https://twitter.com/dvcrn/status/1578710631838289922)
mhb 4y ago
To demonstrate the flaws in DALL-E don't you just have to get it to draw anything that includes hands?
- lossolo 4y ago
  It's a lot better now, just generated this using SD: https://imgur.com/lVyUQFb https://imgur.com/lVyUQFb https://imgur.com/KJRPHi9 https://imgur.com/KJRPHi9 But it's still not perfect, a few more examples in a grid, as you can see hands are still a problem: https://imgur.com/ugpvE4a https://imgur.com/ugpvE4a
  - mhb 4y ago
    Maybe it's better when hands are a central element, but I don't think I've ever seen it draw some that aren't weird when they are just a peripheral element of an image. But I haven't used it that much and those may be better too.
thih9 4y ago
But this kind of drawing doesn't require any artistic skills; it's a graph. It seems fastest to just draw it yourself; even the pencil drawing was already decent; and you can buy color pens for less than $12.
- hey2022 4y ago
  Right, “I don’t need a designer, I can draw a logo myself”.
ThalesX 4y ago
I spent maybe over $100 on DALL-E trying to recreate a math t-shirt I used to have that I liked. Very much unsuccesful.
thorum 4y ago
Text to graph is a great idea, but you don’t want an image generation AI like DALL-E. You want a natural language-to-code model like GPT-3/Codex that is able to accurately translate your requirements into code that programatically generates the image using a good graph library. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is already possible with today’s tech, and just waiting to be built. edit: just tried OP’s prompt with Codex and Colab and generated this image: https://i.imgur.com/OyxJCbz.png https://i.imgur.com/OyxJCbz.png Not quite accurate, but shows the potential for a better language model or some prompt engineering to encourage fidelity to the prompt
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fastball 4y ago
  Good thinking. Yes, it's not quite accurate, but that's not because Codex failed, it's because the author's graph is made up nonsense that doesn't actually represent any concrete properties/data.
andai 4y ago
Now I am somewhat sleep deprived but I found the description of the graph incomprehensible. "Starts near the bottom and goes up" I interpreted as, it is a vertical line, and that its direction would be expressed in the graph as a vector or something. (The horizontal position of this vertical line appeared to be unspecified, which puzzled me.) In fact, my first urge was to ask you to just draw the dang thing already, so I am very glad you included the sketch later! This might say more about me than your prompt, though, but I thought I'd share the data point. Perhaps I would have been more successful if I read the instructions with pencil in hand, sketching it out as I went along instead of trying to fit the whole instructions in my head first and then visualize it.
- hey2022 4y ago
  In my experiments with these tools I came to a conclusion that they are not very good at understanding very detailed clear directions. Which is fine! I have a lot of fun treating AI as an absurdist philosophical visualizer. Feeding it very abstract prompts and getting back bizarre results that somehow make sense!
- Zopieux 4y ago
  Agreed. What a contrived, unnecessary verbose way of describing a 3 line graph. You don't need any skill beyond basic motricity to draw a back-of-the-envelope illustration of what you need, especially in this situation that involves just a few abstract strokes, as opposed to, say, subjects/objects/animals.
Thorentis 4y ago
I was hoping for a chance to actuslly compare things like artistic license, stylistic choices, etc. But instead the author chose an absolutely terrible prompt. AI image generation is not intended to generate graphs, and I'm surprised it was even able to do anything passable given how few it was probably trained on (if anything I'm more impressed with the AI than I was expecting to be). Please do this again with a better prompt.
- darepublic 4y ago
  Stop prompt blaming this guy. It's a legit experiment in my opinion
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Please explain why you think that, because I can’t possibly imagine what your justification is
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      Not GP but I did the same thing with trying to design a t-shirt… how is this not relevant? We’re trying to asses various tools to get our jobs done, not trying to create a peer reviewed scientific paper.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    An experiment is only a single part of the scientific method, and one can easily neglect the rest of the steps. This article doesn't start with inquiry or a hypothesis from the author. We just get data and "I told you so" at the bottom, which doesn't illustrate anything. It's funny that what we don't see is a shorter prompt. If you ran this experiment with just "A graph with 3 slightly wavy lines", maybe the difference between AI and human results would be closer. Maybe that's the basis for a legitimate research project, but it's frustrating that the author takes the ball to the 80-yard-line and just gives up.
    - sberens 4y ago
madrox 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the author spent more time writing and tweaking their prompt than it would've taken them to simply draw the graph they wanted. This isn't merely a matter of illustrating prompt engineering in humans vs machines. I get the point the author is trying to make, but I really wish the example felt less contrived.
- sberens 4y ago
  The actual timeline is reversed; I started with the sketch, submitted it to fiverr, realized I wanted to make a comparison to dalle, and only then I tried to come up with a prompt that could encapsulate the whole image. I can see how it felt contrived, but I hoped to make an apples-to-apples comparison on a real use case. Then to reduce the complexity I tried it on a much simpler prompt.
darepublic 4y ago
I have used fiverr for web assets before and I really had to make clear that what I wanted were SVG assets with transparent background. Nevertheless it was routinely not understood and I always had to ask for redo for the purpose of correcting this. Also in the same manner as this author, I found that word prompts for images were inferior to me simply doodling out what I wanted and having the more artistic Adobe inclined person create a polished version with small variations.
smoldesu 4y ago
This is like asking a caricature artist to design a bridge. DALL-E is not a graphing tool, so it's weird to see it treated as one. A better version of this article might explore the differences between DALL-E and Fiverr-designed characters, to contrast how AI and humans approach visual storytelling.
- naillo 4y ago
  Almost feel like this was intentionally framed this way to build more engagement (via comments where it's posted). It's pretty well known dalle and stable diffusion are bad at text and precise vector-style graphics. Do this on a professional art piece and let's see how much $10 gets you.
  - acapybara 4y ago
    But how do we know if the Fiverr provider is using Stable Diffusion?
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Oh wow. There’s a genius but unethical short-lived market idea. BRB.
  - sberens 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on how it looks like I framed it to build more engagement?
    - extrememacaroni 4y ago
      My man just look at the title, I clicked wondering if dall-e made better anime characters than $10 fiverr artists. But all I got was plots, who in their right mind asks for plots on fiverr. Am I being engaged right now, was your comment also to generate engagement.hm.
      - aerovistae 4y ago
dchuk 4y ago
Ignoring the obvious misapplication of AI art generators: What an absolutely baffling graph idea. That thing makes no sense whatsoever
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
panzi 4y ago
AIs (at least currently) have problems counting. So anything containing a number ("3 lines") will be difficult for them. (My bias: I'm generally for art to be created by artists. I find AI generated images to be a fun game, though. Exploring the minds of those AIs, in a way.)
binarysolo 4y ago
This post is (intentional?) rage bait for nerds - as everyone else says this is the wrong comparison.
- sberens 4y ago
  I certainly didn't intend this as rage bait, but I can see how some people would have expected comparisons for typical dalle prompts. I had never seen someone try to generate graphs with dalle so I thought it was worth sharing.
- amanuonsense 4y ago
  Wait, why is this the wrong comparison? Where does it say that those models can't generate graphs? Why is everyone so sure that this is not one of the intended applications of image generation? Who made up those rules that drive nerds to rage when they're broken? Where are those rules written down? Can you point at them? Or have people just made up those rules in response to that post?
arcastroe 4y ago
Ha. This is is great. One part that caught my eye was in regards to the first Fiverr drawing. The author says: > However, it seems they didn’t catch the part where I said the black line should go between the first and third lines. To me it seems the Fiverr person did attempt this part, but misinterpreted it. The black line is behind the blue line, but in front of the green and red lines. Does that count as "between" on the z-axis?
- glitchdout 4y ago
  Why didn't he specify that he wanted a y-axis? Or vertical axis on the left side? This is the issue with prompt engineering, you need to know the concepts and their names in order to elicit the response/image that you have in your mind.
- bscphil 4y ago
  I noticed this too! I think their result is a completely valid interpretation of the original prompt.
- hey2022 4y ago
  I found this comparison interesting! DALLE-2 was being discussed as a potential end of the graphic design industry. So seeing how bad it is at interpreting and visualizing this particular use case was great. The prompt used by the author was hard to parse - I had to re-read it several times. Not surprised both some humans and AI failed.
wnkrshm 4y ago
This is the niveau of comparing the performance of a fast-food employee taking a weird order to trying to enter it on a touch-screen panel.
vanadium1st 4y ago
I am a guy who does those kinds of Fiverr commissions. Not the $10 ones, but plenty of $50-100 dollars ones. I have a lot of thoughts and concerns about the impact of Dalle-2 on visual arts as a whole, but I see no threat at all to my Fiverr business. 90% of my clients couldn't do anything without a human in chat that walks them through all the steps. There's no possible interface simple enough for them to do everything without my help. They can't figure out which files they want and what to do with them once they got it. If there's any possible customisation option - they will use it to make the pre-made template uglier, and then will ask me if I could do something to make it look good again. That's what they are paying me for.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Could a webform be used to ask the questions that you ask (based on a very large decision tree, of course), and then either (1) format the results in a way that AI can generate an appropriate image, or (2) have a human look at the results and in 4 minutes use AI to generate an appropriate image? Do you think that people in your line of work, or adjacent lines of work, will use AI to offload brainstorming or to get inspiration? My guess (as a complete outsider) is that the skill of drawing will remain important, but that there will emerge a new skill: an AI translator, who serves as a midwife for the creation of AI art.
  - reb 4y ago
    Bingo. Artists have a new creative tool with new constraints, tricks, and prerequisite skills. I think the idea it'll destroy other forms of art (and art-derived commerce) is an unlikely one since it can be used to fuel many of the creative arts that currently exist, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough.
  - NoToP 4y ago
    Midwaif
  - vanadium1st 4y ago
    Many services like that already exist - at this moment they are using stock images. Once AI generated images become as good and predictable as stock images - I have no doubt that the services will switch to them. But, stock images have existed for many years. They are considerably cheaper than custom work, are as professional looking and are available immediately. Sounds like an absolute game changer, but in reality the market for custom design work didn't die. I am not sure that I understand all of the reasons why people pay extra for custom design work in a world where automated stock services exist. Some of my guesses are - People don't trust their visual taste and want a trusted human to make those decisions for them - Discovery problem. People are simply unaware of such services and their benefits - People are willing to pay premium for the knowledge that their design has a human author. - Last mile problem. Even if the image looks 99% like what you want, you might still need a guy to save it / fix it / crop it / format it because you don't know how to do it yourself. I am sure that there are more factors. And even if AI images will bridge the quality gap to human-made stock images, all of this will still apply to them. Many services and technologies have been trying to solve those problems for many years. AI will add to that process, but I don't see a reason for a dramatic change in the near future.
make3 4y ago
wtf this is the worse possible use of DALL-E, it's not intended for that at all
scalablenotions 4y ago
AI Whisperer is totally going to be a job
Uptrenda 4y ago
What a ridiculous and poorly thought-out experiment. Visual art can be incredibly detailed, complex, and imaginative. None of these qualities are captured by trying to create... plots... Literally anyone can do that using Excel or Google Sheets. You can't call this 'art' and you certainly can't call this science. No attempt has been made to conduct any kind of objective analysis of the results beyond 'lol, not too shabby.' What a half-assed post. I'd love to see someone like Gwern take on such a task.
- jasonlfunk 4y ago
  I think the point was that it wasn’t a made up experiment. It was a real world problem. For all the hype around these systems currently, it’s nice to see some places where it doesn’t work.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    These AI systems create effectively dreamscapes. Apparently dream characters can't do math in lucid dreams. I think these systems are best understood as similar to the 9 portrait drawings by that guy on LSD from the 1950s. They seem to be able to simulate some forms of consciousness well such as deep sleep and psychosis and be completely oblivious to others
userbinator 4y ago
The labels in the charts are strangely reminiscent of Madoka Runes: https://wiki.puella-magi.net/File:Runes_chart_expanded.gif https://wiki.puella-magi.net/File:Runes_chart_expanded.gif
mikotodomo 4y ago
Those tools are for generating images and art, not precise schematics. The post is criticizing them for failing at something they aren't meant to do.
- amanuonsense 4y ago
  > Those tools are for generating images and art, not precise schematics. Who says that? Where does it say that Dall-E and Stable Diffusion are only for generating images and art? Why are graphs not images? And why can't they be art? Those are models that generate images from textual prompts. Aren't you just moving the goalposts by saying they can't generate specific kinds of images?
  - poopbutt5 4y ago
    The pictures on the homepage are astronauts and flamingos and stuff. The homepage defines the process: "starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image" So based on that description and context clues, I wouldn't expect it to generate a precise schematic.
    - amanuonsense 4y ago
      If I understand your interpretation correctly, you wouldn't expect it to generate anything else precise, either. For instance, you wouldn't expect it to be able to generate the precise contours of a face, correct?
NoToP 4y ago
This is not surprising for several reasons. One of which is Dalle simply can't count. Asking it for 3 of anything will give questionable results. Dalle also doesn't understand relations between objects. It will fail on anything of the form A on top of B. Indeed usually the order of words is irrelevant to the output. Lastly, features of certain length scales (such as lines below some thinness) are always garbled. Try generating the standard face cards in a deck of playing cards to see what I mean.
57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago
You make graphs using data, not aesthetics. Please don't make any more graphs not based on data. You're not making the world a better place.
Waterluvian 4y ago
For what it’s worth: I needed graphics for my personal never to be published game project. I’m baaaaad at graphics. I was going to use Fiverr but really didn’t want to spend money on what might be a project I never return to. Years later Dalle2 came around and last week I spent an evening using up all my free credits and got all the art I needed. I’m confident humans can do a better job. But for what I needed, getting about fifty images for about two hours of work was pretty amazing.
amanuonsense 4y ago
OK, so people complain that Stable Diffusion and friends are trained on art so it's not fair to ask them to produce graphs because graphs are not art. So I asked them to produce artistic graphs. Here are the results of the prompts "a graph with 3 lines in the style of X" where X in {Rembrandt, jackson pollock, studio ghibli, escher, van gogh}: https://imgur.com/a/JW5c4in https://imgur.com/a/JW5c4in So now we're producing art! Art that's nothing like the prompt.
kache_ 4y ago
Now get a 10$ fiverr guy to draw an anime picture as good as SD could.. lol
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  "Anime character wearing a t-shirt with a graph with three lines on it" Checkmate, robots.
racecar789 4y ago
Does anyone know what software/font was used to create the chart in section "Fiverr Person #3"? Thanks.
mmackh 4y ago
Excel or Numbers, backed with data, would have been the right tool for this job. However, once the wow-factor for text to image AI wears off, you start to realize: a) “AI” doesn’t understand anything about the real world (physics, proportions, shapes, etc.) You curate and pick the image that makes most sense. You start to settle. b) TTI “AI” can never evolve and become better than the data it’s been trained on. It can combine things for sure, but it will won’t start evolving and become a master artist. c) Limited applicability - there’s always going to be an edge case in every image that’s going to look off (strange blends, non-perfect circles, coloring…). You need to be a creative and know how to use photoshop to fix this stuff. Right now it’s cool for creating album art, but that’s easy [1]. Generally I just hope that creative people aren’t too worried about “AI”, otherwise we’ll run out of training data. [1] https://www.intheknow.com/post/album-cover-challenge-tiktok/ https://www.intheknow.com/post/album-cover-challenge-tiktok/
emptysongglass 4y ago
I want to make a series of profile images all in the same theme (e.g. 5 penguin members of a red-clothed theocracy in the style of Cristiano Ronaldo). Can DALL-E or any of its competitors do this yet?
sinuhe69 4y ago
I’m astounded that OP needed a outsourcing for this simple task. Take a table with a stylus, launch Concept, adjust the smoothness and you will be finish in no time at all.

310 points by sberens 4y ago

I personally don't love that you can commission art for $10. I know that this price point is more or less the 'trial' or 'promotion' price, but still - it's so hard for artists to pay their bills, and this sort of creates a perception that their work should be available for really cheap

appleflaxen 4y ago

I agree with the other posters: this is an absolutely inspired idea, which was then executed in the worst way possible by choosing a blind spot in AI generation. The comment by nextaccountic is spot on.

funstuff007 4y ago

> A fair criticism of this post would be that I spent no time on optimizing my prompts, which has been shown to make a big difference in the quality of the output How long before someone lists "DALL-E Prompt Optimization" as a skill on LinkedIn?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

roca 4y ago

Google staff aren't allowed to share Imagen results with you, unfortunately.

coding123 4y ago
y not?
- saagarjha 4y ago
  You are asked to not share the images when you use it.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Heh, remember when you signed up and still bought into Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. It's kinda sad that Google desperately wants the cool points for having its own DL models but you can only see it in the form of a store window display.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      The are almost no companies that operate with a full public view into their in-progress projects.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        I'm teasing about Google's 'so great you can't even see it' effort to build hype for its own offering.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > Heh, remember when you signed up and still bought into Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. They probably also remember signing an NDA, and maybe taking some training about how not all of the world's information should be made universally accessible and useful to everyone. For instance, the contents of a user's inbox.
mgraczyk 4y ago
I just tried the prompts with Imagen and Parti. They are similar to Dalle-2, with a bit more "variety" but none reproducing the author's specific prompt the way the author wants. For the prompt "a graph with 3 lines" both produce graphs with 3 lines at least 1/6 of the time.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Curious. I've played with quite a few of these models and one of the very consistent "tells" is that they're extremely bad at counting things. A friend of mine likes tarot and I tried a few prompts... great results for the major arcana, but good luck with "ten of cups"... without capability to edit & re-prompt, the only viable strategy appears to be "ask it to draw a bunch of cups repeatedly until you've collected all the numbers." Getting 3 of something 1/6 of the time doesn't really sound like it groks the request.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Sure, but it doesn't have to count to be useful. When I run this locally on desktop GPU, I get 16 results in a few seconds. I can visually select the 2-3 that match what I want and pick one of them. I can try again ten times for 20-30 options, and it still takes less time than Fiverr. I would not use these models for graphs yet, but for cool look tarot inspired "clipart" or background images, I think they are already usable.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      The inability to count has some interesting knock-on effects. My favorite being eyes and hands. Especially the hands. The closer you look, the creepier it gets. That thumb has fingers of its own?! Thus far, the greatest utility I've seen has been on par with B-movies.
      - hey2022 4y ago
        I am somewhat surprised at how bad these tools are at generating hands and feet. Is it just a matter of not having enough images to ingest? The faces often look very good and they also have symmetric complexity and individual elements that come in a specific quantity (2 eyes, etc). Lower quality models do generate fly-like multi eye faces, but newer ones are so much more precise!

amelius 4y ago

Ugh. This could have been so much better. It's not at all surprising that an AI is bad at drawing graphs, and it is also not surprising that even a non-artist human can draw graphs pretty well.

nullc 4y ago
It's not even that "AI is bad at drawing graphs"-- these models were specifically trained on "aesthetic images".
IshKebab 4y ago
Why is it not surprising? I don't see any fundamental reason for it. I think these models will be able to produce sensible graphs fairly soon. You could equally say "it's not surprising that DALL-E can't draw words"... except that Imagen seems to be pretty good at it. I think the real reason it's not surprising to you is that you've already seen enough DALL-E results to understand its limitations. It's not surprising that DALL-E can't draw graphs.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  We don't know if it's surprising, the author never tells us their hypothesis. They don't state any particular reason for the prompt they used, they don't explore the contents or qualities of the prompt compared to other AI-generated art, and they don't run multiple trials. Because of that, we can't conclude anything useful from this article. There's no frame of reference or scientific inquiry involved. If you find it entertaining, that's fine. As a scientific comparison, this verges on parody.
  - hey2022 4y ago
    This is not a scientific experiment. The author compared results of a specific prompt. Why are so many people overthinking this?
    - LudwigNagasena 4y ago

charcircuit 4y ago

I think this is more of a showcase of these model's poor graphing skills and not a comparison between these models and fiver artists.

mgraczyk 4y ago

One missing dimension for this comparison is how long it takes to get results. I've been using Imagen/Parti/Stable Diffusion already as a replacement for "clip art" because it takes ~15 seconds to get results and they are free. Fiverr takes at least 100 times that long and costs $10. For tasks where the exact content isn't important and you can't invest more than a few seconds or wait a more than a few seconds for results, generative models are already a great solution.

jvanderbot 4y ago
Some can be had free, but I quickly run up against usage limits and end up paying for it.
- modeless 4y ago
  There are no usage limits if you happen to have a gaming PC.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    It also takes less than 10 minutes on PC.
- astrange 4y ago
  You can’t use Imagen/Parti unless you work at Google, so it sounds like he’s getting paid for it.
OJFord 4y ago
Wait, 'Fiver[r]' costs $10? I assumed it was.. a fiver. Did it start off making sense and inflate?
- barbecue_sauce 4y ago
  I believe the creator sets their own rates on fiverr.
hey2022 4y ago

fareesh 4y ago

Drawing graphs is probably one of the worst comparisons one can do in terms of evaluating these models. They seem to be trained to generate either photorealistic or stylized images.

sberens 4y ago
I had personally never seen this side of the models, so I wanted to share this finding. I agree that they were trained more on artistic images, but I was still surprised with how bad they generalized to a more theoretical(?) context.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  I think the path forward for something like this is models that learn to execute python code and incorporate the results into their outputs. There are already projects that can generate correct matplotlib calls for prompts like yours, but I don't think we are to the point where those python outputs can be automatically combined with a diffusion model for style or whatever.
- post-it 4y ago
  It's not about it being theoretical, it's moreso that the language model is still far more simplistic than our own, and struggles with anything but the most basic relations between nouns. The "horse riding an astronaut" post is a good example of this.[0] [0] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut
  - ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
    See also “Shirt without stripes” https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
  - throwaman123 4y ago
    It’s funny to see this comment on HN, because it gets refuted so many times by now you should be able to punch into google and find it. https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176 https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1529013919682994176

baxtr 4y ago

Cool article! I think on a more general note it underlines what I have been thinking for some time now: most people, also on HN, get this generative art stuff totally wrong. Yes, this will be the end for some artists but not for others. DALLE2 et al. are merely new tools for new generation of artists. And, we are still figuring out how to use these tools effectively. In other words: The “AI” is a tool that we humans will use to get things done faster/better etc. Nothing less, but also not much more.

mysterydip 4y ago
To your point, I read in a board game group the other day of an artist using AI generation for a first pass with new clients to save themselves time. "Is this close to what you want?" then does the actual art with alterations by hand. If the client says no or flakes out, a lot less effort was lost than before.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
The more worrisome aspect for me isn’t that it’s already going to replace some artists. I always thought in my head that this level of creativity would remain our domain for centuries. Even as of like two or three years ago I thought that. It’s insane to me that today some artists feel they’re going to be replaced soon. The idea of centuries is completely shattered for me and now I don’t know if we’re a year or 50 years away from AI replacing humans entirely in the creative domain. I spent the other day completely in an existential crisis, tbh.
- astrange 4y ago
  The only reason an artist would think they’re being replaced is someone told them they would. So the solution is to not tell them that, as it’s not true. (The main instigator on Twitter is a guy who draws “realistic Pokemon” and hates that an AI may have stolen the art he already stole from The Pokemon Company.)
- moonchrome 4y ago
  >I always thought in my head that this level of creativity would remain our domain for centuries. From what I've seen these networks are rehashing learning set images into something matching some criteria to produce visually pleasing results. Not to belittle the results - it's impressive - but the stuff I'm not seeing here is understanding of generated material - nonsensical z-order, scale/proportions, configuration. Fantasy images are an easy target because it's all about visually pleasing nonsense.

mattnewton 4y ago

Complicated generative models are the wrong tool for the job here.. And arguable Fiverr commissions are too, these graph prompts look like they would take about the same amount of time it took to write the prompt to do in a vector art program once you got some beginner skills in one. To me this is almost like asking it to graph functions and comparing it to excel's graphing tools.

chuckwalla55 4y ago

how long before 90% of the work on fiverr is AI generated?

pmayrgundter 4y ago
You got it.

axg11 4y ago

This is a great idea executed very poorly. I would love to see a larger sample size of AI vs Fiverr with a wider range of prompts. Graphs are difficult for current models and that was already well understood.

yieldcrv 4y ago

The only substantive comment is that this is the nerdiest most useless comparison far divorced from any utility in this trending topic Let’s show all the ways that these AI obliterate $10 Fiverr non-AI commissions, thats what people want to see

montebicyclelo 4y ago

These text-to-graph problems seem like a good candidate for someone to create a training-dataset/benchmark of. Bear in mind that the training data for these models has been mostly images and their alt text, scraped off the web. There is a good chance that there's nothing remotely like the examples given here in the training data. (People don't caption their graphs like that.) These models are undoubtably good at doing what they have been trained to do - but I think no-one disagrees that there's plenty of room for improvement. (And bear in mind that these text2image models only released this year, and that this tech in general has only been invented in the last couple of years, so it's very early days...)

ahmedbaracat 4y ago

Thanks for sharing. Interestingly, I wrote a blog post about a similar topic: What will happen if ML builders and domain experts had co-ownership of the data and the model.* I am planning to generate the first training seed images by using Fiverr and giving the logo designers ownership rights of the data/model/profits. https://blog.barac.at/a-business-experiment-in-data-dignity https://blog.barac.at/a-business-experiment-in-data-dignity * vs the current trend of training diffusion models on 400M images from the Internet (many of them being garbage) with mixed licenses and letting the user take responsibility of the generated images licensing issues.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

The prompt he did is almost a captcha lol in terms of difficulty for AI vs human. Try a painting... Do a video game concept art or magic the gathering card. See how long it takes a human vs AI. The results are way farther to the side of AI, such that he might find it cost prohibitive to try to commission people to do it on fiverr for a blog post.

mikelemmon 4y ago

This post might as well be called “Check out what happens when you use a wrench to put in a screw”. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.

hey2022 4y ago
How is this not the right tool? Where on DALLE-2 website does it say that it should not be used for artistic graphs? Yes, we all have seen badly generated graphs from DALLE-2 before, so it feels like this is an obviously limitation of AI image generation tools. But why should this be such an obvious thing to absolutely everyone?
- Rioghasarig 4y ago
  Doesn't change the fact that it's a bad experiment. Anyone familiar with DALL-E would predict this result. He should have taken some time to understand what DALL-E can do and proposed an actually interesting experiment.
  - hey2022 4y ago
    I don’t think we should limit experiments only to those areas where DALLE-2 succeeds. Seeing failures is also valuable.

dvcrn 4y ago

funny timing, just yesterday I finished a little app I was hacking on and needed a somewhat decent looking logo that was blocking the release. Instead of trying my luck in sketch and doodling around, I went to DALL E, and with my first prompt was able to generate better logos than I could have drawn. I was immediately unblocked and super happy with the results It’s just amazing that non design people like me can just conjure up decent looking, and usable stuff with AI. I will definitely use DALL E much more going forward for creative work The logos are a bit noisy and need redrawing in a proper vector tool but its a great starting point to try out different ideas immediately (The results: https://twitter.com/dvcrn/status/1578710631838289922 https://twitter.com/dvcrn/status/1578710631838289922)

mhb 4y ago

To demonstrate the flaws in DALL-E don't you just have to get it to draw anything that includes hands?

lossolo 4y ago
It's a lot better now, just generated this using SD: https://imgur.com/lVyUQFb https://imgur.com/lVyUQFb https://imgur.com/KJRPHi9 https://imgur.com/KJRPHi9 But it's still not perfect, a few more examples in a grid, as you can see hands are still a problem: https://imgur.com/ugpvE4a https://imgur.com/ugpvE4a
- mhb 4y ago
  Maybe it's better when hands are a central element, but I don't think I've ever seen it draw some that aren't weird when they are just a peripheral element of an image. But I haven't used it that much and those may be better too.

thih9 4y ago

But this kind of drawing doesn't require any artistic skills; it's a graph. It seems fastest to just draw it yourself; even the pencil drawing was already decent; and you can buy color pens for less than $12.

hey2022 4y ago
Right, “I don’t need a designer, I can draw a logo myself”.

ThalesX 4y ago

I spent maybe over $100 on DALL-E trying to recreate a math t-shirt I used to have that I liked. Very much unsuccesful.

thorum 4y ago

Text to graph is a great idea, but you don’t want an image generation AI like DALL-E. You want a natural language-to-code model like GPT-3/Codex that is able to accurately translate your requirements into code that programatically generates the image using a good graph library. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is already possible with today’s tech, and just waiting to be built. edit: just tried OP’s prompt with Codex and Colab and generated this image: https://i.imgur.com/OyxJCbz.png https://i.imgur.com/OyxJCbz.png Not quite accurate, but shows the potential for a better language model or some prompt engineering to encourage fidelity to the prompt

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fastball 4y ago
Good thinking. Yes, it's not quite accurate, but that's not because Codex failed, it's because the author's graph is made up nonsense that doesn't actually represent any concrete properties/data.

andai 4y ago

Now I am somewhat sleep deprived but I found the description of the graph incomprehensible. "Starts near the bottom and goes up" I interpreted as, it is a vertical line, and that its direction would be expressed in the graph as a vector or something. (The horizontal position of this vertical line appeared to be unspecified, which puzzled me.) In fact, my first urge was to ask you to just draw the dang thing already, so I am very glad you included the sketch later! This might say more about me than your prompt, though, but I thought I'd share the data point. Perhaps I would have been more successful if I read the instructions with pencil in hand, sketching it out as I went along instead of trying to fit the whole instructions in my head first and then visualize it.

hey2022 4y ago
In my experiments with these tools I came to a conclusion that they are not very good at understanding very detailed clear directions. Which is fine! I have a lot of fun treating AI as an absurdist philosophical visualizer. Feeding it very abstract prompts and getting back bizarre results that somehow make sense!
Zopieux 4y ago
Agreed. What a contrived, unnecessary verbose way of describing a 3 line graph. You don't need any skill beyond basic motricity to draw a back-of-the-envelope illustration of what you need, especially in this situation that involves just a few abstract strokes, as opposed to, say, subjects/objects/animals.

Thorentis 4y ago

I was hoping for a chance to actuslly compare things like artistic license, stylistic choices, etc. But instead the author chose an absolutely terrible prompt. AI image generation is not intended to generate graphs, and I'm surprised it was even able to do anything passable given how few it was probably trained on (if anything I'm more impressed with the AI than I was expecting to be). Please do this again with a better prompt.

darepublic 4y ago
Stop prompt blaming this guy. It's a legit experiment in my opinion
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Please explain why you think that, because I can’t possibly imagine what your justification is
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    Not GP but I did the same thing with trying to design a t-shirt… how is this not relevant? We’re trying to asses various tools to get our jobs done, not trying to create a peer reviewed scientific paper.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  An experiment is only a single part of the scientific method, and one can easily neglect the rest of the steps. This article doesn't start with inquiry or a hypothesis from the author. We just get data and "I told you so" at the bottom, which doesn't illustrate anything. It's funny that what we don't see is a shorter prompt. If you ran this experiment with just "A graph with 3 slightly wavy lines", maybe the difference between AI and human results would be closer. Maybe that's the basis for a legitimate research project, but it's frustrating that the author takes the ball to the 80-yard-line and just gives up.
  - sberens 4y ago

madrox 4y ago

I'm pretty sure the author spent more time writing and tweaking their prompt than it would've taken them to simply draw the graph they wanted. This isn't merely a matter of illustrating prompt engineering in humans vs machines. I get the point the author is trying to make, but I really wish the example felt less contrived.

sberens 4y ago
The actual timeline is reversed; I started with the sketch, submitted it to fiverr, realized I wanted to make a comparison to dalle, and only then I tried to come up with a prompt that could encapsulate the whole image. I can see how it felt contrived, but I hoped to make an apples-to-apples comparison on a real use case. Then to reduce the complexity I tried it on a much simpler prompt.

darepublic 4y ago

I have used fiverr for web assets before and I really had to make clear that what I wanted were SVG assets with transparent background. Nevertheless it was routinely not understood and I always had to ask for redo for the purpose of correcting this. Also in the same manner as this author, I found that word prompts for images were inferior to me simply doodling out what I wanted and having the more artistic Adobe inclined person create a polished version with small variations.

smoldesu 4y ago

This is like asking a caricature artist to design a bridge. DALL-E is not a graphing tool, so it's weird to see it treated as one. A better version of this article might explore the differences between DALL-E and Fiverr-designed characters, to contrast how AI and humans approach visual storytelling.

naillo 4y ago
Almost feel like this was intentionally framed this way to build more engagement (via comments where it's posted). It's pretty well known dalle and stable diffusion are bad at text and precise vector-style graphics. Do this on a professional art piece and let's see how much $10 gets you.
- acapybara 4y ago
  But how do we know if the Fiverr provider is using Stable Diffusion?
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Oh wow. There’s a genius but unethical short-lived market idea. BRB.
- sberens 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on how it looks like I framed it to build more engagement?
  - extrememacaroni 4y ago
    My man just look at the title, I clicked wondering if dall-e made better anime characters than $10 fiverr artists. But all I got was plots, who in their right mind asks for plots on fiverr. Am I being engaged right now, was your comment also to generate engagement.hm.
    - aerovistae 4y ago

dchuk 4y ago

Ignoring the obvious misapplication of AI art generators: What an absolutely baffling graph idea. That thing makes no sense whatsoever

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

panzi 4y ago

AIs (at least currently) have problems counting. So anything containing a number ("3 lines") will be difficult for them. (My bias: I'm generally for art to be created by artists. I find AI generated images to be a fun game, though. Exploring the minds of those AIs, in a way.)

binarysolo 4y ago

This post is (intentional?) rage bait for nerds - as everyone else says this is the wrong comparison.

sberens 4y ago
I certainly didn't intend this as rage bait, but I can see how some people would have expected comparisons for typical dalle prompts. I had never seen someone try to generate graphs with dalle so I thought it was worth sharing.
amanuonsense 4y ago
Wait, why is this the wrong comparison? Where does it say that those models can't generate graphs? Why is everyone so sure that this is not one of the intended applications of image generation? Who made up those rules that drive nerds to rage when they're broken? Where are those rules written down? Can you point at them? Or have people just made up those rules in response to that post?

arcastroe 4y ago

Ha. This is is great. One part that caught my eye was in regards to the first Fiverr drawing. The author says: > However, it seems they didn’t catch the part where I said the black line should go between the first and third lines. To me it seems the Fiverr person did attempt this part, but misinterpreted it. The black line is behind the blue line, but in front of the green and red lines. Does that count as "between" on the z-axis?

glitchdout 4y ago
Why didn't he specify that he wanted a y-axis? Or vertical axis on the left side? This is the issue with prompt engineering, you need to know the concepts and their names in order to elicit the response/image that you have in your mind.
bscphil 4y ago
I noticed this too! I think their result is a completely valid interpretation of the original prompt.
hey2022 4y ago
I found this comparison interesting! DALLE-2 was being discussed as a potential end of the graphic design industry. So seeing how bad it is at interpreting and visualizing this particular use case was great. The prompt used by the author was hard to parse - I had to re-read it several times. Not surprised both some humans and AI failed.

wnkrshm 4y ago

This is the niveau of comparing the performance of a fast-food employee taking a weird order to trying to enter it on a touch-screen panel.

vanadium1st 4y ago

I am a guy who does those kinds of Fiverr commissions. Not the $10 ones, but plenty of $50-100 dollars ones. I have a lot of thoughts and concerns about the impact of Dalle-2 on visual arts as a whole, but I see no threat at all to my Fiverr business. 90% of my clients couldn't do anything without a human in chat that walks them through all the steps. There's no possible interface simple enough for them to do everything without my help. They can't figure out which files they want and what to do with them once they got it. If there's any possible customisation option - they will use it to make the pre-made template uglier, and then will ask me if I could do something to make it look good again. That's what they are paying me for.

gnicholas 4y ago
Could a webform be used to ask the questions that you ask (based on a very large decision tree, of course), and then either (1) format the results in a way that AI can generate an appropriate image, or (2) have a human look at the results and in 4 minutes use AI to generate an appropriate image? Do you think that people in your line of work, or adjacent lines of work, will use AI to offload brainstorming or to get inspiration? My guess (as a complete outsider) is that the skill of drawing will remain important, but that there will emerge a new skill: an AI translator, who serves as a midwife for the creation of AI art.
- reb 4y ago
  Bingo. Artists have a new creative tool with new constraints, tricks, and prerequisite skills. I think the idea it'll destroy other forms of art (and art-derived commerce) is an unlikely one since it can be used to fuel many of the creative arts that currently exist, but I suppose we'll find out soon enough.
- NoToP 4y ago
  Midwaif
- vanadium1st 4y ago
  Many services like that already exist - at this moment they are using stock images. Once AI generated images become as good and predictable as stock images - I have no doubt that the services will switch to them. But, stock images have existed for many years. They are considerably cheaper than custom work, are as professional looking and are available immediately. Sounds like an absolute game changer, but in reality the market for custom design work didn't die. I am not sure that I understand all of the reasons why people pay extra for custom design work in a world where automated stock services exist. Some of my guesses are - People don't trust their visual taste and want a trusted human to make those decisions for them - Discovery problem. People are simply unaware of such services and their benefits - People are willing to pay premium for the knowledge that their design has a human author. - Last mile problem. Even if the image looks 99% like what you want, you might still need a guy to save it / fix it / crop it / format it because you don't know how to do it yourself. I am sure that there are more factors. And even if AI images will bridge the quality gap to human-made stock images, all of this will still apply to them. Many services and technologies have been trying to solve those problems for many years. AI will add to that process, but I don't see a reason for a dramatic change in the near future.

make3 4y ago

wtf this is the worse possible use of DALL-E, it's not intended for that at all

scalablenotions 4y ago

AI Whisperer is totally going to be a job

Uptrenda 4y ago

What a ridiculous and poorly thought-out experiment. Visual art can be incredibly detailed, complex, and imaginative. None of these qualities are captured by trying to create... plots... Literally anyone can do that using Excel or Google Sheets. You can't call this 'art' and you certainly can't call this science. No attempt has been made to conduct any kind of objective analysis of the results beyond 'lol, not too shabby.' What a half-assed post. I'd love to see someone like Gwern take on such a task.

jasonlfunk 4y ago
I think the point was that it wasn’t a made up experiment. It was a real world problem. For all the hype around these systems currently, it’s nice to see some places where it doesn’t work.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  These AI systems create effectively dreamscapes. Apparently dream characters can't do math in lucid dreams. I think these systems are best understood as similar to the 9 portrait drawings by that guy on LSD from the 1950s. They seem to be able to simulate some forms of consciousness well such as deep sleep and psychosis and be completely oblivious to others

userbinator 4y ago

The labels in the charts are strangely reminiscent of Madoka Runes: https://wiki.puella-magi.net/File:Runes_chart_expanded.gif https://wiki.puella-magi.net/File:Runes_chart_expanded.gif

mikotodomo 4y ago

Those tools are for generating images and art, not precise schematics. The post is criticizing them for failing at something they aren't meant to do.

amanuonsense 4y ago
> Those tools are for generating images and art, not precise schematics. Who says that? Where does it say that Dall-E and Stable Diffusion are only for generating images and art? Why are graphs not images? And why can't they be art? Those are models that generate images from textual prompts. Aren't you just moving the goalposts by saying they can't generate specific kinds of images?
- poopbutt5 4y ago
  The pictures on the homepage are astronauts and flamingos and stuff. The homepage defines the process: "starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image" So based on that description and context clues, I wouldn't expect it to generate a precise schematic.
  - amanuonsense 4y ago
    If I understand your interpretation correctly, you wouldn't expect it to generate anything else precise, either. For instance, you wouldn't expect it to be able to generate the precise contours of a face, correct?

NoToP 4y ago

This is not surprising for several reasons. One of which is Dalle simply can't count. Asking it for 3 of anything will give questionable results. Dalle also doesn't understand relations between objects. It will fail on anything of the form A on top of B. Indeed usually the order of words is irrelevant to the output. Lastly, features of certain length scales (such as lines below some thinness) are always garbled. Try generating the standard face cards in a deck of playing cards to see what I mean.

57FkMytWjyFu 4y ago

You make graphs using data, not aesthetics. Please don't make any more graphs not based on data. You're not making the world a better place.

Waterluvian 4y ago

For what it’s worth: I needed graphics for my personal never to be published game project. I’m baaaaad at graphics. I was going to use Fiverr but really didn’t want to spend money on what might be a project I never return to. Years later Dalle2 came around and last week I spent an evening using up all my free credits and got all the art I needed. I’m confident humans can do a better job. But for what I needed, getting about fifty images for about two hours of work was pretty amazing.

amanuonsense 4y ago

OK, so people complain that Stable Diffusion and friends are trained on art so it's not fair to ask them to produce graphs because graphs are not art. So I asked them to produce artistic graphs. Here are the results of the prompts "a graph with 3 lines in the style of X" where X in {Rembrandt, jackson pollock, studio ghibli, escher, van gogh}: https://imgur.com/a/JW5c4in https://imgur.com/a/JW5c4in So now we're producing art! Art that's nothing like the prompt.

kache_ 4y ago

Now get a 10$ fiverr guy to draw an anime picture as good as SD could.. lol

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
"Anime character wearing a t-shirt with a graph with three lines on it" Checkmate, robots.

racecar789 4y ago

Does anyone know what software/font was used to create the chart in section "Fiverr Person #3"? Thanks.

mmackh 4y ago

Excel or Numbers, backed with data, would have been the right tool for this job. However, once the wow-factor for text to image AI wears off, you start to realize: a) “AI” doesn’t understand anything about the real world (physics, proportions, shapes, etc.) You curate and pick the image that makes most sense. You start to settle. b) TTI “AI” can never evolve and become better than the data it’s been trained on. It can combine things for sure, but it will won’t start evolving and become a master artist. c) Limited applicability - there’s always going to be an edge case in every image that’s going to look off (strange blends, non-perfect circles, coloring…). You need to be a creative and know how to use photoshop to fix this stuff. Right now it’s cool for creating album art, but that’s easy [1]. Generally I just hope that creative people aren’t too worried about “AI”, otherwise we’ll run out of training data. [1] https://www.intheknow.com/post/album-cover-challenge-tiktok/ https://www.intheknow.com/post/album-cover-challenge-tiktok/

emptysongglass 4y ago

I want to make a series of profile images all in the same theme (e.g. 5 penguin members of a red-clothed theocracy in the style of Cristiano Ronaldo). Can DALL-E or any of its competitors do this yet?

sinuhe69 4y ago

I’m astounded that OP needed a outsourcing for this simple task. Take a table with a stylus, launch Concept, adjust the smoothness and you will be finish in no time at all.