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I tried to use a couple of the AI image generators when building a landing page recently, so I can answer this. Look at the homepage for a popular site like St

by runako 4y ago

I tried to use a couple of the AI image generators when building a landing page recently, so I can answer this. Look at the homepage for a popular site like Stripe, Figma, Digital Ocean, whatever, take your pick. Try to get Midjourney to generate high-quality art like you see on those homepages, in a format where it is ready to go directly into a site without further processing in an image tool. My experience was that I could have gotten better results at Fiver.

plif 4y ago
There's no way you're going to get top quality like those sites at a place like Fiverr either. They've spent millions on branding and marketing. I can see Midjourney already replacing the low end. The question is how good can it get, and then as the bar is raised what can be done to differentiate. Answer to the latter ironically may be going back to old school human interfaces.
- runako 4y ago
  > There's no way you're going to get top quality like those sites at a place like Fiverr either. There is a grain of truth to this, but again just choose whatever lower-budget website you want. And then just try the exercise I suggested. Midjourney isn't producing work at a "bad Fiverr" quality level, it's not producing usable work at all yet (at least without a lot of hands-on prompt tuning, at which point why not just use Fiverr?). At least with Fiverr, I am likely to end up with something I can put on the site, which is not true of Midjourney yet.
  - fock 4y ago
    supposedly the Fiverr-contractor soon just will be a prompt-tuner with a large cache of "good" images.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The language models are probably more actually useful today. I've played around with writing hypothetical articles using them. For topics I know where it's a fairly straightforward, e.g. Five qualities some job role needs, it does a "decent" job. Decent in this context doesn't mean something I could just hand to an editor. But it does mean a pretty good starting point that I could amend, flesh out, add some links, add a quote or two. I could certainly see using it to give me a sort of pre-draft on some fairly evergreen topic. I could also use it to generate some boilerplate definitions or historical background to include in an article. But, sadly, I think you'll see the LLMs being used to generate a lot of blog/article content with a minimum of human effort for even less than the small amount being paid for a lot of this today.
wincy 4y ago
I fired up T100 instance of Google Collab and got something usable in about an hour of being focused on what it was I wanted, using in painting and having it redraw some parts (I was trying to get a guy holding a guitar, hands are hard and took about 20 minutes). Then the lighting was off so I threw it into GIMP, split the part I wanted with magic scissors/lasso or whatever, and color corrected that part of the image using the dropper average sampling and a layer mask based on my cutout, then changed the layer type. I never would have done any of this stuff before, and there was a LOT of super low quality art in the space (D&D character art), so low quality I never paid for it as it just didn’t tickle my fancy. Now I can get stuff that looks like a Frank Frazetta painting, which I can’t get at any price since old Frankie died in 2010.
- runako 4y ago
  That's really great for your use case! However, it fails my more workaday needs in a couple of ways: - you had to spend your time iterating on the prompts, redrawing, etc. - you had to do post-processing yourself - you had to pay for a GPU In all -- not a good substitute for e.g. Fiverr for typical work-related artwork.
ghaff 4y ago
With a lot of prompt hacking, you can get pretty impressive results from the generative art models especially if they don't involve people's anatomy and they just need to be displayed as fairly small images on the web. But, hiring someone with decent drawing ability for simple tasks is pretty cheap and they can produce something to your exact specifications (and/or show some creativity). A co-worker did a book cover for me recently that wasn't technically complex but was far better than anything I would have designed on my own or an AI would have come up with. Also a lot of Creative Commons and public domain content out there too. Furthermore, no company is going to (or at least should) make official use of generative AI work until any potential legal issues get worked out. The open source IP lawyers I know think it's probably OK but no one is really sure.

by runako 4y ago

plif 4y ago

There's no way you're going to get top quality like those sites at a place like Fiverr either. They've spent millions on branding and marketing. I can see Midjourney already replacing the low end. The question is how good can it get, and then as the bar is raised what can be done to differentiate. Answer to the latter ironically may be going back to old school human interfaces.

runako 4y ago
> There's no way you're going to get top quality like those sites at a place like Fiverr either. There is a grain of truth to this, but again just choose whatever lower-budget website you want. And then just try the exercise I suggested. Midjourney isn't producing work at a "bad Fiverr" quality level, it's not producing usable work at all yet (at least without a lot of hands-on prompt tuning, at which point why not just use Fiverr?). At least with Fiverr, I am likely to end up with something I can put on the site, which is not true of Midjourney yet.
- fock 4y ago
  supposedly the Fiverr-contractor soon just will be a prompt-tuner with a large cache of "good" images.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The language models are probably more actually useful today. I've played around with writing hypothetical articles using them. For topics I know where it's a fairly straightforward, e.g. Five qualities some job role needs, it does a "decent" job. Decent in this context doesn't mean something I could just hand to an editor. But it does mean a pretty good starting point that I could amend, flesh out, add some links, add a quote or two. I could certainly see using it to give me a sort of pre-draft on some fairly evergreen topic. I could also use it to generate some boilerplate definitions or historical background to include in an article. But, sadly, I think you'll see the LLMs being used to generate a lot of blog/article content with a minimum of human effort for even less than the small amount being paid for a lot of this today.

wincy 4y ago

I fired up T100 instance of Google Collab and got something usable in about an hour of being focused on what it was I wanted, using in painting and having it redraw some parts (I was trying to get a guy holding a guitar, hands are hard and took about 20 minutes). Then the lighting was off so I threw it into GIMP, split the part I wanted with magic scissors/lasso or whatever, and color corrected that part of the image using the dropper average sampling and a layer mask based on my cutout, then changed the layer type. I never would have done any of this stuff before, and there was a LOT of super low quality art in the space (D&D character art), so low quality I never paid for it as it just didn’t tickle my fancy. Now I can get stuff that looks like a Frank Frazetta painting, which I can’t get at any price since old Frankie died in 2010.

runako 4y ago
That's really great for your use case! However, it fails my more workaday needs in a couple of ways: - you had to spend your time iterating on the prompts, redrawing, etc. - you had to do post-processing yourself - you had to pay for a GPU In all -- not a good substitute for e.g. Fiverr for typical work-related artwork.

ghaff 4y ago

With a lot of prompt hacking, you can get pretty impressive results from the generative art models especially if they don't involve people's anatomy and they just need to be displayed as fairly small images on the web. But, hiring someone with decent drawing ability for simple tasks is pretty cheap and they can produce something to your exact specifications (and/or show some creativity). A co-worker did a book cover for me recently that wasn't technically complex but was far better than anything I would have designed on my own or an AI would have come up with. Also a lot of Creative Commons and public domain content out there too. Furthermore, no company is going to (or at least should) make official use of generative AI work until any potential legal issues get worked out. The open source IP lawyers I know think it's probably OK but no one is really sure.