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I had the exact same experience. I foolishly paid for a pro account without even trying out the free version, because I was so excited by it. Only to learn that

I had the exact same experience. I foolishly paid for a pro account without even trying out the free version, because I was so excited by it. Only to learn that it took so much trial and error --- sorry, "prompt engineering" --- to get anything remotely usable. This is the same with all kinds of generative models. Humans are a critical part of the system. If this is "artificial intelligence" it only appears intelligent because there is a human gatekeeper.

yunwal 4y ago
All AI models so far are pretty much only useful as a middle visualization step in a creative process. You have to come up with a vague idea of what to draw, SD can give you a number of compositions to choose from and will get close enough that you can tell the final product would be good. You will still have to recreate or heavily edit whatever it creates though. It’s still useful, but it’s not good enough to be a revolutionary product yet or declare photoshop obsolete. Similarly, ChatGPT is a great replacement for a search engine. I can ask it to guide me through writing a metric to Prometheus from a batch job and it’ll dig out the relevant pieces from the documentation and present them to me in an easy-to-understand format. But I’m not giving it write access to main yet, or letting it make business decisions.
Slow_Hand 4y ago
This sounds like any other tool or instrument that requires practice to render good results. SD is magic, but it's not a miracle. It still requires work and understanding to get good results. It's just a different kind of work than we're used to doing. Don't expect it read your mind. It's still a computer. As a client, if I hire an illustrator to commission a specific image I'm not just hiring them for their technical ability to render images. The best illustrators are going to have a broad and deep awareness of all styles, modes of presentation, and compositional techniques. They're going to use all of their experience and knowledge to interpret what my needs are and deliver on that. That's not a trivial thing to do. Even the best contractors have to deal with clients who don't know how to ask for what they want. The "I'll know it when I see it" type of client. As the "client" in this situation, you need to know how to ask for what you want in a way that your illustrator can interpret.
- Fricken 4y ago
  When I was working as an editorial illustrator, the goal was to have a distinctive trademark visual style, so that when art directors commissioned something, they had a reasonable idea of what they could expect to get. If they wanted something in a different style, they would find an illustrator who specializes in it and hire them. Last week I was telling my artist friends that, however upsetting this technology is, the game has changed. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. I realized last night however that that is incorrect. Whatever "genie" artists have spent their lifetimes nurturing can now trivially be captured and confined to a bottle.
  - Slow_Hand 4y ago
    You're right that the game has changed and I think it's crucial for illustrators (but not necessarily artists) to realize that and account accordingly. The birth of photography did not mean the end of painting, but it did mean that certain roles for painters no longer had as much value. Portraiture mostly became the domain of the photographer and photo-realism became more trivial. Painting as an art form shifted gears into greater and greater abstraction with less emphasis on realistic representation. I think a good example of that shift is the painter Mark Tansey. His paintings, while photo-realistic, don't derive their value from their resemblance to the real world. Instead their interest lies in their allegorical representation of people and places. Their value lies in the curation of ideas and the story, concept, or idea that they convey. For now - even in the age of AI generated images - such artistic allegory is still out of reach of technology. The value still lies in the human curation of symbols and ideas. https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoise https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoi...
2devnull 4y ago
Maybe you can use gpt to automate prompt engineering and crowd source the image selection process then you can just let it run while you do other stuff? I’m pretty sure that some of the people posting chatGPT on Twitter are using Twitter to crowdsource the output review process. In other words script the loop from generation to Twitter post and use upvotes to decide what output is most interesting. Been thinking about doing this myself but I don’t use Twitter much so no users to crowdsource from.
ekidd 4y ago
> This is the same with all kinds of generative models. Humans are a critical part of the system. Part of what I find frustrating about Stable Diffusion (and to a lesser extent Dall·E) is that they're so ridiculously far behind ChatGPT in some ways. For example, I ask ChatGPT (in French) for a short story of three firefighters in the style of The Three Musketeers. And it writes me a perfectly serviceable little story about a brave and heroic rescue, with good pacing and structure. And it's written using the French "passé simple" tense, which is normal for fiction but virtually never used in speech. And I get this in a second or two, on my first try. Meanwhile, I ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of "an astronaut on a horse" (the demo prompt in my copy). And I get endless badly drawn astronauts on dismembered horses. Dall·E does a bit better, but I'd obviously have to generate dozens of images and accept something visually interesting that doesn't bear any resemblance to what I envisioned. Apparently I can do better with a lot of prompt engineering. But it's a lot more work than ChatGPT.
- potatoman22 4y ago
  SD's text embeddings aren't nearly as advanced as GPT3, so this makes sense. It'll get there; multi-modal models are only getting better.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  The scale difference between text and pixels is relevant. If you asked for a novel (less information content than a 512x512 image) from ChatGPT and judged it by how it held together at a high conceptual level relative to output from a stable diffusion image I don't think it would seem that different.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > If you asked for a novel (less information content than a 512x512 image) from ChatGPT and judged it by how it held together at a high conceptual level relative to output from a stable diffusion image I don't think it would seem that different. Try asking ChatGPT to write you a novel, chapter by chapter. The chapters may seem okay individually, but you'll find chapter 5 contains statements which completely contradict those in chapter 1. And this can still be true even if ChatGPT is producing chapter 5 based on chapters 1 to 4 as input. (I think ChatGPT could do with some more training and/or engineering on detecting and avoiding contradictions in its output.) I think one advantage of generating images, is you can notice problems with the output very quickly. With text, you might not notice the contradiction between chapters 1 and 5 until you reread it days later. Similarly, if you get two generated images, and you like bits of both of them, it isn't too hard to edit them together (even roughly) in an image editor, then use further generative techniques to smooth that roughness out. If ChatGPT writes you two different fifth chapters for your novel, and you like bits of both, merging them together can be a more tedious process.

yunwal 4y ago

All AI models so far are pretty much only useful as a middle visualization step in a creative process. You have to come up with a vague idea of what to draw, SD can give you a number of compositions to choose from and will get close enough that you can tell the final product would be good. You will still have to recreate or heavily edit whatever it creates though. It’s still useful, but it’s not good enough to be a revolutionary product yet or declare photoshop obsolete. Similarly, ChatGPT is a great replacement for a search engine. I can ask it to guide me through writing a metric to Prometheus from a batch job and it’ll dig out the relevant pieces from the documentation and present them to me in an easy-to-understand format. But I’m not giving it write access to main yet, or letting it make business decisions.

Slow_Hand 4y ago

This sounds like any other tool or instrument that requires practice to render good results. SD is magic, but it's not a miracle. It still requires work and understanding to get good results. It's just a different kind of work than we're used to doing. Don't expect it read your mind. It's still a computer. As a client, if I hire an illustrator to commission a specific image I'm not just hiring them for their technical ability to render images. The best illustrators are going to have a broad and deep awareness of all styles, modes of presentation, and compositional techniques. They're going to use all of their experience and knowledge to interpret what my needs are and deliver on that. That's not a trivial thing to do. Even the best contractors have to deal with clients who don't know how to ask for what they want. The "I'll know it when I see it" type of client. As the "client" in this situation, you need to know how to ask for what you want in a way that your illustrator can interpret.

Fricken 4y ago
When I was working as an editorial illustrator, the goal was to have a distinctive trademark visual style, so that when art directors commissioned something, they had a reasonable idea of what they could expect to get. If they wanted something in a different style, they would find an illustrator who specializes in it and hire them. Last week I was telling my artist friends that, however upsetting this technology is, the game has changed. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. I realized last night however that that is incorrect. Whatever "genie" artists have spent their lifetimes nurturing can now trivially be captured and confined to a bottle.
- Slow_Hand 4y ago
  You're right that the game has changed and I think it's crucial for illustrators (but not necessarily artists) to realize that and account accordingly. The birth of photography did not mean the end of painting, but it did mean that certain roles for painters no longer had as much value. Portraiture mostly became the domain of the photographer and photo-realism became more trivial. Painting as an art form shifted gears into greater and greater abstraction with less emphasis on realistic representation. I think a good example of that shift is the painter Mark Tansey. His paintings, while photo-realistic, don't derive their value from their resemblance to the real world. Instead their interest lies in their allegorical representation of people and places. Their value lies in the curation of ideas and the story, concept, or idea that they convey. For now - even in the age of AI generated images - such artistic allegory is still out of reach of technology. The value still lies in the human curation of symbols and ideas. https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoise https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-tansey/achilles-and-tortoi...

2devnull 4y ago

Maybe you can use gpt to automate prompt engineering and crowd source the image selection process then you can just let it run while you do other stuff? I’m pretty sure that some of the people posting chatGPT on Twitter are using Twitter to crowdsource the output review process. In other words script the loop from generation to Twitter post and use upvotes to decide what output is most interesting. Been thinking about doing this myself but I don’t use Twitter much so no users to crowdsource from.

ekidd 4y ago

> This is the same with all kinds of generative models. Humans are a critical part of the system. Part of what I find frustrating about Stable Diffusion (and to a lesser extent Dall·E) is that they're so ridiculously far behind ChatGPT in some ways. For example, I ask ChatGPT (in French) for a short story of three firefighters in the style of The Three Musketeers. And it writes me a perfectly serviceable little story about a brave and heroic rescue, with good pacing and structure. And it's written using the French "passé simple" tense, which is normal for fiction but virtually never used in speech. And I get this in a second or two, on my first try. Meanwhile, I ask Stable Diffusion for a picture of "an astronaut on a horse" (the demo prompt in my copy). And I get endless badly drawn astronauts on dismembered horses. Dall·E does a bit better, but I'd obviously have to generate dozens of images and accept something visually interesting that doesn't bear any resemblance to what I envisioned. Apparently I can do better with a lot of prompt engineering. But it's a lot more work than ChatGPT.

potatoman22 4y ago
SD's text embeddings aren't nearly as advanced as GPT3, so this makes sense. It'll get there; multi-modal models are only getting better.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
The scale difference between text and pixels is relevant. If you asked for a novel (less information content than a 512x512 image) from ChatGPT and judged it by how it held together at a high conceptual level relative to output from a stable diffusion image I don't think it would seem that different.
- skissane 4y ago
  > If you asked for a novel (less information content than a 512x512 image) from ChatGPT and judged it by how it held together at a high conceptual level relative to output from a stable diffusion image I don't think it would seem that different. Try asking ChatGPT to write you a novel, chapter by chapter. The chapters may seem okay individually, but you'll find chapter 5 contains statements which completely contradict those in chapter 1. And this can still be true even if ChatGPT is producing chapter 5 based on chapters 1 to 4 as input. (I think ChatGPT could do with some more training and/or engineering on detecting and avoiding contradictions in its output.) I think one advantage of generating images, is you can notice problems with the output very quickly. With text, you might not notice the contradiction between chapters 1 and 5 until you reread it days later. Similarly, if you get two generated images, and you like bits of both of them, it isn't too hard to edit them together (even roughly) in an image editor, then use further generative techniques to smooth that roughness out. If ChatGPT writes you two different fifth chapters for your novel, and you like bits of both, merging them together can be a more tedious process.