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Turds in AI Generated Art

82 points by luu 3y ago

naillo 3y ago
> And yes, you can paint out the turds in Midjourney and tell it to fill in the area again until it gets it right. But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. Just cleaning things up in photoshop and a tablet pen (or ipad) is much faster than drawing this from scratch.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Getting the shadows actually right? Not a chance, and I've got about 20k hours in photoshop
- nomel 3y ago
  > and the iteration time is painfully slow. Yeah, that's pretty hilarious. It show how incredibly far and fast the goalpost has moved. Two years ago, you would have to hire someone.
andybak 3y ago
I can't help but feel we've moved to quickly from astonishment to disappointment. Lots of people queueing up to pour cold water on generative AI when it's still something I have to pinch myself to remind myself it's actually real. (And yeah. I'm not denying the drawbacks. It's functionally useless for many (or even most) proposed applications. But can we still pause for a moment to be impressed it actually exists?)
- ronsor 3y ago
  This happens with every innovation. Once something becomes sufficiently commonplace, it becomes boring and a larger target for criticism.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  It's a testament to how quickly humans can set a new baseline at their circumstances. I try to remember to say "WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" at least a few times a day when using GPT and MidJourney, but it's much easier to be irritated that ChatGPT lost the context of the code it was helping me write than to be blown away that I can just casually use one of the greatest technical achievements in the history of mankind while I'm sitting here in my underwear.
  - daveguy 3y ago
    > "...one of the greatest technical achievements in the history of mankind..." ... is doing a lot of work here. This is why expectations are exceeding reality. That said, the reality of these generative AIs is pretty damn impressive. I just wouldn't put it up against computers, cars, planes, boats, nuclear energy, medicine, chemistry or any of the other technological advances that did change the world. Not until the grounding problem is solved. After that, maybe.
    - basicoperation 3y ago
      The first car didn’t change the world, nor did the first plane, etc. At least not directly. But they did pave the way for the examples that did change the world. No different here. Generative AI will change the world. Doesn’t mean these models will in and of themselves.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Most of us aren't playing with multi-modal models yet. Text can describe any world, but when it starts coming AI watching live video feeds for learning, can it base itself in reality with that?
- version_five 3y ago
  It's like when you hire a smooth talking guy who makes a great first impression but actually that's his main skill and he doesn't perform very well. I'm a natural contrarian and always used the worst first. I feel like I've warmed up a lot to generative AI (text particularly) but understand the limitations. People who came in from the other end thinking it was more than it is are naturally going to be let down when they see its performance in the sober light of day. I think more people are in this category because a big strength I see is for generative AI to produce stuff that superficially looks really great, but doesn't hold up if you actually want to do your own thing with it.
- jade-cat 3y ago
  I think it's pushback due to how AI is being sold as the ultimate tool that will replace artists/programmers/writers/whomever. Because the technology has been making big leaps over the past couple of years, the comparisons are now being made not with what used to be before, but with what is being promised. And in that regard, things do fall short. Basically the hype builders hyped things up so much they started hurting the hype.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    This is the a false conclusion so many seem to be falling for. YOU couldn't write or do art like a professional before, and now you can do 90% of it with some caveats. That's a major headwind that pros will be trying to deny understandably. When the digital camera then iPhone came and out obliterated the vast majority of professional photography, pros nitpicked in forums like this till kingdom come, but it didn't change anything.
    - jprete 3y ago
      If I draw a picture of a fantasy-world bedroom, it might not be very detailed or well-shaped, because I am emphatically not a professional illustrator. But I can tell you what every single object is supposed to be, why I thought it belonged in a fantasy-world bedroom, and why I put it in its particular spot in that bedroom.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        >but I can tell you what every single object is supposed to be, why I thought it belonged in a fantasy-world bedroom, and why I put it in its particular spot in that bedroom. I mean post ad hoc the machine could do that too. In fact, that is the only way your brain can explain anything.
        a_shovel 3y ago
        Huh? Are you saying human artists don't consider composition while creating their works?
- tlrobinson 3y ago
  I’m reminded of Louis CK’s rant “ Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 Like, nothing like this was remotely possible a year ago. I’m sure we’ll hit a wall at some point, but you certainly shouldn’t dismiss things as not possible because they’re not currently possible.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Welcome to the hype cycle! As I've gained more experience with it I feel I've seen the boundaries of what it's good at, what it isn't good at, and what it isn't useful for. It's good at like 80% of something. But there's so many things in that other 20%. In the right places it will make certain individuals more productive in may ways but I don't feel the way I did 6 months ago.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  A talking dog is very impressive when it first appears. When suddenly talking dogs are everywhere, drown out the people I want to talk to, then they are annoying. Moreover, it's not at all strange that people learned what generative AI looks. When I see it in "in the wild", it instantly in my mind becomes "generated thing". And exactly because the images are created by a process of averaging, once I'm used to them, they have a "nothing special or interesting here" feeling, which isn't a good feeling for many thing, for example accompanying illustrations.
  - andybak 3y ago
    I don't think you can tell AI generated images from real images anywhere near as much as you think you can. I'd bet good money you couldn't achieve more than say 60% in a properly controlled test
    - __loam 3y ago
      It's usually pretty obvious.
      - andybak 3y ago
        It's often most definitely not.
    - joe_the_user 3y ago
      I think you're missing the direction this AI stuff is going. I would claim to be able to tell an AI-generated image from illustration hand-draw by a person if that illustration had roughly the characteristics of standard AI-generated images. IE, sort of curvilinear magic realism feel, crude knowledge of anatomy and perspective, uniform soft lighting etc. And there are quite a few artists out like that and I shudder for their careers. The problem is the value of things that look like AI has been reduced because they're everywhere - and that include a fair number of non-AI-generated stuff, sure.
      - andybak 3y ago
- mock-possum 3y ago
  It’s only disappointment now after evangelists promised astonishment in the first place - I’m no AI-naysayer, I’m just not a true believer and I have no interest in becoming one. It’s new, it’s cool, it’s not perfect, it’s not magic, it’s not a silver bullet. It is what it is.
  - andybak 3y ago
    It's at a point I never thought we would get to in my lifetime. I remember the original AI winter and how implausible sci-fi depictions of AI seemed for decades.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
DethNinja 3y ago
Are shadows really that annoying, I’m willing to bet that most of the gamers would just glance over these defects.
MisterTea 3y ago
I clicked the article expecting to see humorous little piles of steaming excrement inserted into images. Am I to assume turds in this context mean artifacts or out-of-place mistakes?
- 4dregress 3y ago
  I was expecting the same, highly disappointing, but I guess we could whip some up in no time!
fassssst 3y ago
Yea it’s not fully automatic yet, but that’s what Photoshop Content Aware Fill (and now Generative Fill) and Healing Brush is for.
- furyofantares 3y ago
  I've only see GF on photographs; does it work for anything else yet?
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    Yes, https://twitter.com/8co28/status/1661197544914063362 https://twitter.com/8co28/status/1661197544914063362
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  We call this "inpainting" here.
Ancapistani 3y ago
I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. People don't create perfection. If you hired a graphic artist to create an image and gave them the same prompt, there would almost certainly be things that you'd want changed. So far, AI seems to do very well with ambiguous prompts that give it enough latitude to "do what it does best". Areas of an image where there is a lot of source images to work from end up great, while areas where there is little - or where there is a lot of variability in the source images - don't do so well. Maybe we'll get to the point where AI generates acceptable (or even excellent) results the first time, every time. Maybe it'll even be soon, but we're not there yet. For now, AI is a very useful tool that can multiply the productivity of professionals and let amateurs fake being entry-level. For now at least, there is a huge gap between "entry level" and "professional". Because of that, we'll need professionals for the foreseeable future.
- ivanbakel 3y ago
  The article isn't really asking for perfection. I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise (the hallucinated objects being a particularly bad example), and which are a big obstacle to taking AI-generated work seriously. Who cares if the work that AI produces is great, or even good, if it can't stop generating nonsense at the same time? The article even mentions this - you can try to work out the turds, but then productivity takes a big hit, and you're still not guaranteed any consistency. So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, from the perspective of a professional, or even an entry-level?
  - echelon 3y ago
    AI tools are in their infancy. People are so scared and threatened that they're calling AI outputs "turds". What's been accomplished thus far has been mostly pure research. Now billions of dollars and human engineering hours are going into this problem to optimize into ease of use, speed, productivity, and utility. In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period. Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.
graypegg 3y ago
I guess the retort here would be, you had to circle the turds for someone to notice. JPEG encoding creates lots of turds, actually the entire output image is riddled with them. Tons of little artifacts. If you expect perfection out of it you’re going to be disappointed but it’s pretty astonishing that it’s as difficult to be nit picky as it is currently.
- jprete 3y ago
  If I glance at an AI-generated image of an imaginary object or space, the overall impression looks correct. If I engage my brain at all, the turds are really obvious really fast, whether someone points them out or not.
andreyk 3y ago
"But I feel like something that gets lost in the discussion of AI-generated artwork is the turds." You know, we already have a word for this... "flaws". Does the notion that AI-generated artwork has flaws really get lost in the discussion? Midjourney not being able to do hands until recently was a whole meme...
- mcphage 3y ago
  It's a specific kind of flaw—an indistinct, unexpected object in the image.
  - throwaway675309 3y ago
    The author could've chosen a better descriptor. What they're really looking for is overall image "coherence". Essentially things within the scene that are visually incongruous.
    - mcphage 3y ago
      They could have, yeah. Even when the items aren't bad, or out of place, MidJourney can't help but fill the space with details. It doesn't like whitespace.
severak_cz 3y ago
This is just a noise in similar way how earlier AI generators cannot do fingers and piano (and computer) keyboards.
Fauntleroy 3y ago
A bizarre post that points out the flaws of AI generated content without providing any sort of salient point about it. Capping it off with "I don't want to hear about the fixes for this" is the icing on this particular "turd" cake.
yantrams 3y ago
Hold my beer. [1] NSFW of the revolting kind. No nudity / violence / gore but they are a bit disgusting depending on your taste. They aren't turds but sorta look like them. [1] https://imgur.com/a/7cwzlrk https://imgur.com/a/7cwzlrk
renewiltord 3y ago
Delta between AI and artist is reducing but non-zero. This is a good outcome.
- pixl97 3y ago
  This is my take on most AI discussion Many are like "Oh yea, AI isn't at good as us doing..." And my response is "Thank fucking god, we aren't ready yet". Sudden society changing events aren't great, especially when they start coming rapid fire. You can go from "there's a few angry starving artists" to "why are people rioting in the streets" pretty damned quickly.
vsareto 3y ago
>But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. I seriously doubt this can be described as painfully slow compared to an average artists making the equivalent assets, especially if you get into the local UIs that have tools like inpainting/masking, plugins, loras, checkpoints, and all that jazz.
klyrs 3y ago
I was looking for actual turds in the picture. Disappointed.
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  Me too! Damn clickbait.
- permo-w 3y ago
  yeah I was looking at the bushes in the plant pots and thinking "are these the turds?" until I found out that the author is just being extremely picky. I do like to imagine a future dominated by AI where we get weird emergent patterns like the AI just secretly including turds everywhere it can though
  - __loam 3y ago
    I don't think they're being picky at all. These are obvious mistakes.
    - permo-w 3y ago
      you’re right once you look carefully. the reason I’m reluctant to swim with this article is because this is exactly what I expect from generative AI in the first place. the article's perspective seems to come from a place of naïvety
zendaven 3y ago
Most of the mistakes pointed out in the 4 images are things I would've never noticed.
derefr 3y ago
Seems strange to me to prompt an AI to generate this kind of stylized isometric video game art that's clearly intended to look like it's made out of uniform, reusable "object assets"... but as a single-shot "gestalt" of each scene. (It's like doing an oil painting of a Minecraft world, and expecting the voxels to look voxel-y.) For the sake of artistic coherence, wouldn't you rather those same tables and chairs and beds to be reused everywhere else you need a table/bed/chair in the game? Which is to say: wouldn't it make more sense to ask the AI to generate individual objects; select the best ones, over many iterations; put those together into an asset library (i.e. a tileset/spritesheet); build some training-data tilemap "scenes" out of those objects for few-shot training; and then ask the AI to generate you more tilemaps, with the tileset provided as part of the input? (In other words, to do the same thing for levels that it's doing for music when it generates MIDI.) (Heck, you might even be able to train it to do both steps at once — train it on screenshots of a tilemap-editor UX (e.g. RPG Maker or Tiled), where the tileset palette and the resulting tilemap are visible at the same time; and where the screenshots are composed such that the tilemap only uses tiles available in the tileset. You'd expect it to learn both to invent nice reusable tiles for you, and also to use those tiles to build you a scene.)
- starkparker 3y ago
  Better context for those questions from the creators of the game jam entry referenced in the post: https://blog.luden.io/generated-adventure-the-postmortem-of-a-game-made-with-chatgpt-and-midjourney-prompts-included-f87e7e615204 https://blog.luden.io/generated-adventure-the-postmortem-of-...
arroz 3y ago
I thought they were actual turds
GaggiX 3y ago
That image of the dragon seems pretty old, also as the article mentions most of this stuff can be easily remove with inpainting.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  It's funny you mention that, that overall smeared look is instantly identifiable as version 3 or earlier of midjourney. For reference, they are currently up to version 5.1.
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    Yeah I thought about the same thing, I don't know why the author brings up such image as it's not clearly the experience you would have using MJ today.
orbital-decay 3y ago
Hallucinations. Larger, better trained, multimodal models are needed. All current image generation models are too small to be usable in serious settings. Until you have all that, you can minimize the hallucinations in the result. I have some tips to share (not for the music though). -1. You still have to know how to draw, otherwise you won't have the eye to spot the "turds" nor skills to fix them. It will still be faster than drawing absolutely everything by hand. 0. Don't use Midjourney for anything complex. It hallucinates well and gives good first impression, but it's simply not suited for anything that has complex composition and lots of meaningful detail that need to be controlled like the examples in the article. 1. Finetune your model on its own output and your own work. 2. Use higher order guidance, not just text. Besides the fact that current models don't understand the natural language well (let alone your intent), text is inherently unsuited for explaining artistic intent. Use controlnets on your sketches, latent noise spatial composition, and other similar tricks - they are just better at that, faster, and more precise. 3. Don't generate everything in one piece, photobash. Make complex compositions out of simpler objects. The model can't keep the track of too much stuff. Use automated workflows to save time (otherwise what's the point?). Check out ComfyUI for a powerful node-based editor - create a pipeline once and use it many times. Use plugins for the common software like Photoshop, Krita, Blender, Houdini etc. 4. Fix your errors manually. If your work is complex, it will be faster. >But I feel like something that gets lost in the discussion of AI-generated artwork is the turds. No, it's not. It's the major obstacle in the current models, and gets a lot of attention.
winkelwagen 3y ago
Think people didn’t get the link turd to polished turd in this blogpost. Is what you get when you ask a beginner artist without any guidance to create something, and instead of making something that has the right competition, perspective, proportions, colors and values etc, they tend to over render the image. Making it look “pretty”, the issue that it tries to compensate shitty foundations with glitters and sparkles, widgets, shadows and highlights. Ultimately it often doesn’t have the right impact. Ai art falls in the same category for me. Polished turds, bad writers, bad ideas, bad concepts, boring subjects. I’m hoping it mostly inspires a generation to make cool shit and enjoy it. If you take a skilled artist to use ai art, the results are good, if you take beginners and give it tools you get polished ai art turds. Things that looks cool but ultimately missing the foundation to make it work. At the same time, perhaps it doesn’t matter, and people want to have polished turds regardless. Compare this to a game like unpacking, carefully crafted rooms and smart storytelling. Or vampire survivor, addictive gameplay loop with assets that almost seem like they come straight out of some gamemaker pack. In the end, it’s all about intend, and no amount of polish is going to fix
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  > In the end, it’s all about intend Precisely, and it doesn't matter how you realize it - by hand or with something more automated (digital manipulation), or with matte painting/photobashing (the most recent resentment target), or with any ML tool. If you don't have the eye, taste, and rigor, you're going to create something boring. If you do, you'll create something interesting. The issue with the examples in OP is not the tool - it's the creators who were sloppy (and also incredibly rushing as it's just a tech demo created in 72 hours).
starkparker 3y ago
Previously: - https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-05-i-am-frustrated-with-stable-diffusion.html https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-05-i-am-frustrated-with-sta... - HN discussion of that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902248 - The author's response to HN comments on that post: https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-10-response-to-some-hacker-news-comments-on-stable-diffusion.html https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-10-response-to-some-hacker-... FWIW, the author didn't submit that post, or this one.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Seems overly petty and nitpicky article for a gamejam game.
AndrewPGameDev 3y ago
I want to emphasize something that other comments seemed to have missed - when a human artist makes a mistake, I have a sense of sadness, or pity. But when an AI makes a mistake, the types of mistakes it makes are revolting. I can't watch that beer AI video because looking at it for a couple of seconds makes me want to throw up. That's the real problem with the "turds" in AI art - they're just close enough to pass first inspection, but you only realize afterwards how messed up they really are. I honestly think for now I'd rather just deal with my own inadequacies as an artist than try to bargain with the little freaky demon in the computer to draw actually nice images.
- Clamchop 3y ago
  I find the messed-up imagery disturbing not necessarily because of what they depict but because it's such a convincing emulation of "visions" I've had when my brain is doing... not so great. Illness, fever dreams, and bad drug trips. It looks like what most people have probably seen in some capacity but wouldn't or couldn't ever put down on paper. That's deeply fascinating in its own right.
throwaway675309 3y ago
And yes, you can paint out the turds in Midjourney and tell it to fill in the area again until it gets it right. But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. ... uhh no, no you cannot. What the author seems to be describing is inpainting, which is a staple of most stable diffusion systems such as automatic 1111, but not something that mj currently supports.

82 points by luu 3y ago

> And yes, you can paint out the turds in Midjourney and tell it to fill in the area again until it gets it right. But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. Just cleaning things up in photoshop and a tablet pen (or ipad) is much faster than drawing this from scratch.

chefandy 3y ago
Getting the shadows actually right? Not a chance, and I've got about 20k hours in photoshop
nomel 3y ago
> and the iteration time is painfully slow. Yeah, that's pretty hilarious. It show how incredibly far and fast the goalpost has moved. Two years ago, you would have to hire someone.

andybak 3y ago

I can't help but feel we've moved to quickly from astonishment to disappointment. Lots of people queueing up to pour cold water on generative AI when it's still something I have to pinch myself to remind myself it's actually real. (And yeah. I'm not denying the drawbacks. It's functionally useless for many (or even most) proposed applications. But can we still pause for a moment to be impressed it actually exists?)

ronsor 3y ago
This happens with every innovation. Once something becomes sufficiently commonplace, it becomes boring and a larger target for criticism.
idopmstuff 3y ago
It's a testament to how quickly humans can set a new baseline at their circumstances. I try to remember to say "WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" at least a few times a day when using GPT and MidJourney, but it's much easier to be irritated that ChatGPT lost the context of the code it was helping me write than to be blown away that I can just casually use one of the greatest technical achievements in the history of mankind while I'm sitting here in my underwear.
- daveguy 3y ago
  > "...one of the greatest technical achievements in the history of mankind..." ... is doing a lot of work here. This is why expectations are exceeding reality. That said, the reality of these generative AIs is pretty damn impressive. I just wouldn't put it up against computers, cars, planes, boats, nuclear energy, medicine, chemistry or any of the other technological advances that did change the world. Not until the grounding problem is solved. After that, maybe.
  - basicoperation 3y ago
    The first car didn’t change the world, nor did the first plane, etc. At least not directly. But they did pave the way for the examples that did change the world. No different here. Generative AI will change the world. Doesn’t mean these models will in and of themselves.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Most of us aren't playing with multi-modal models yet. Text can describe any world, but when it starts coming AI watching live video feeds for learning, can it base itself in reality with that?
version_five 3y ago
It's like when you hire a smooth talking guy who makes a great first impression but actually that's his main skill and he doesn't perform very well. I'm a natural contrarian and always used the worst first. I feel like I've warmed up a lot to generative AI (text particularly) but understand the limitations. People who came in from the other end thinking it was more than it is are naturally going to be let down when they see its performance in the sober light of day. I think more people are in this category because a big strength I see is for generative AI to produce stuff that superficially looks really great, but doesn't hold up if you actually want to do your own thing with it.
jade-cat 3y ago
I think it's pushback due to how AI is being sold as the ultimate tool that will replace artists/programmers/writers/whomever. Because the technology has been making big leaps over the past couple of years, the comparisons are now being made not with what used to be before, but with what is being promised. And in that regard, things do fall short. Basically the hype builders hyped things up so much they started hurting the hype.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  This is the a false conclusion so many seem to be falling for. YOU couldn't write or do art like a professional before, and now you can do 90% of it with some caveats. That's a major headwind that pros will be trying to deny understandably. When the digital camera then iPhone came and out obliterated the vast majority of professional photography, pros nitpicked in forums like this till kingdom come, but it didn't change anything.
  - jprete 3y ago
    If I draw a picture of a fantasy-world bedroom, it might not be very detailed or well-shaped, because I am emphatically not a professional illustrator. But I can tell you what every single object is supposed to be, why I thought it belonged in a fantasy-world bedroom, and why I put it in its particular spot in that bedroom.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >but I can tell you what every single object is supposed to be, why I thought it belonged in a fantasy-world bedroom, and why I put it in its particular spot in that bedroom. I mean post ad hoc the machine could do that too. In fact, that is the only way your brain can explain anything.
      - a_shovel 3y ago
        Huh? Are you saying human artists don't consider composition while creating their works?
tlrobinson 3y ago
I’m reminded of Louis CK’s rant “ Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 Like, nothing like this was remotely possible a year ago. I’m sure we’ll hit a wall at some point, but you certainly shouldn’t dismiss things as not possible because they’re not currently possible.
nemo44x 3y ago
Welcome to the hype cycle! As I've gained more experience with it I feel I've seen the boundaries of what it's good at, what it isn't good at, and what it isn't useful for. It's good at like 80% of something. But there's so many things in that other 20%. In the right places it will make certain individuals more productive in may ways but I don't feel the way I did 6 months ago.
joe_the_user 3y ago
A talking dog is very impressive when it first appears. When suddenly talking dogs are everywhere, drown out the people I want to talk to, then they are annoying. Moreover, it's not at all strange that people learned what generative AI looks. When I see it in "in the wild", it instantly in my mind becomes "generated thing". And exactly because the images are created by a process of averaging, once I'm used to them, they have a "nothing special or interesting here" feeling, which isn't a good feeling for many thing, for example accompanying illustrations.
- andybak 3y ago
  I don't think you can tell AI generated images from real images anywhere near as much as you think you can. I'd bet good money you couldn't achieve more than say 60% in a properly controlled test
  - __loam 3y ago
    It's usually pretty obvious.
    - andybak 3y ago
      It's often most definitely not.
  - joe_the_user 3y ago
    I think you're missing the direction this AI stuff is going. I would claim to be able to tell an AI-generated image from illustration hand-draw by a person if that illustration had roughly the characteristics of standard AI-generated images. IE, sort of curvilinear magic realism feel, crude knowledge of anatomy and perspective, uniform soft lighting etc. And there are quite a few artists out like that and I shudder for their careers. The problem is the value of things that look like AI has been reduced because they're everywhere - and that include a fair number of non-AI-generated stuff, sure.
    - andybak 3y ago
mock-possum 3y ago
It’s only disappointment now after evangelists promised astonishment in the first place - I’m no AI-naysayer, I’m just not a true believer and I have no interest in becoming one. It’s new, it’s cool, it’s not perfect, it’s not magic, it’s not a silver bullet. It is what it is.
- andybak 3y ago
  It's at a point I never thought we would get to in my lifetime. I remember the original AI winter and how implausible sci-fi depictions of AI seemed for decades.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

DethNinja 3y ago

Are shadows really that annoying, I’m willing to bet that most of the gamers would just glance over these defects.

MisterTea 3y ago

I clicked the article expecting to see humorous little piles of steaming excrement inserted into images. Am I to assume turds in this context mean artifacts or out-of-place mistakes?

4dregress 3y ago
I was expecting the same, highly disappointing, but I guess we could whip some up in no time!

fassssst 3y ago

Yea it’s not fully automatic yet, but that’s what Photoshop Content Aware Fill (and now Generative Fill) and Healing Brush is for.

furyofantares 3y ago
I've only see GF on photographs; does it work for anything else yet?
- GaggiX 3y ago
  Yes, https://twitter.com/8co28/status/1661197544914063362 https://twitter.com/8co28/status/1661197544914063362
Der_Einzige 3y ago
We call this "inpainting" here.

Ancapistani 3y ago

I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. People don't create perfection. If you hired a graphic artist to create an image and gave them the same prompt, there would almost certainly be things that you'd want changed. So far, AI seems to do very well with ambiguous prompts that give it enough latitude to "do what it does best". Areas of an image where there is a lot of source images to work from end up great, while areas where there is little - or where there is a lot of variability in the source images - don't do so well. Maybe we'll get to the point where AI generates acceptable (or even excellent) results the first time, every time. Maybe it'll even be soon, but we're not there yet. For now, AI is a very useful tool that can multiply the productivity of professionals and let amateurs fake being entry-level. For now at least, there is a huge gap between "entry level" and "professional". Because of that, we'll need professionals for the foreseeable future.

ivanbakel 3y ago
The article isn't really asking for perfection. I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise (the hallucinated objects being a particularly bad example), and which are a big obstacle to taking AI-generated work seriously. Who cares if the work that AI produces is great, or even good, if it can't stop generating nonsense at the same time? The article even mentions this - you can try to work out the turds, but then productivity takes a big hit, and you're still not guaranteed any consistency. So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, from the perspective of a professional, or even an entry-level?
- echelon 3y ago
  AI tools are in their infancy. People are so scared and threatened that they're calling AI outputs "turds". What's been accomplished thus far has been mostly pure research. Now billions of dollars and human engineering hours are going into this problem to optimize into ease of use, speed, productivity, and utility. In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period. Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.

graypegg 3y ago

I guess the retort here would be, you had to circle the turds for someone to notice. JPEG encoding creates lots of turds, actually the entire output image is riddled with them. Tons of little artifacts. If you expect perfection out of it you’re going to be disappointed but it’s pretty astonishing that it’s as difficult to be nit picky as it is currently.

jprete 3y ago
If I glance at an AI-generated image of an imaginary object or space, the overall impression looks correct. If I engage my brain at all, the turds are really obvious really fast, whether someone points them out or not.

andreyk 3y ago

"But I feel like something that gets lost in the discussion of AI-generated artwork is the turds." You know, we already have a word for this... "flaws". Does the notion that AI-generated artwork has flaws really get lost in the discussion? Midjourney not being able to do hands until recently was a whole meme...

mcphage 3y ago
It's a specific kind of flaw—an indistinct, unexpected object in the image.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  The author could've chosen a better descriptor. What they're really looking for is overall image "coherence". Essentially things within the scene that are visually incongruous.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    They could have, yeah. Even when the items aren't bad, or out of place, MidJourney can't help but fill the space with details. It doesn't like whitespace.

severak_cz 3y ago

This is just a noise in similar way how earlier AI generators cannot do fingers and piano (and computer) keyboards.

Fauntleroy 3y ago

A bizarre post that points out the flaws of AI generated content without providing any sort of salient point about it. Capping it off with "I don't want to hear about the fixes for this" is the icing on this particular "turd" cake.

yantrams 3y ago

Hold my beer. [1] NSFW of the revolting kind. No nudity / violence / gore but they are a bit disgusting depending on your taste. They aren't turds but sorta look like them. [1] https://imgur.com/a/7cwzlrk https://imgur.com/a/7cwzlrk

renewiltord 3y ago

Delta between AI and artist is reducing but non-zero. This is a good outcome.

pixl97 3y ago
This is my take on most AI discussion Many are like "Oh yea, AI isn't at good as us doing..." And my response is "Thank fucking god, we aren't ready yet". Sudden society changing events aren't great, especially when they start coming rapid fire. You can go from "there's a few angry starving artists" to "why are people rioting in the streets" pretty damned quickly.

vsareto 3y ago

>But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. I seriously doubt this can be described as painfully slow compared to an average artists making the equivalent assets, especially if you get into the local UIs that have tools like inpainting/masking, plugins, loras, checkpoints, and all that jazz.

klyrs 3y ago

I was looking for actual turds in the picture. Disappointed.

PlunderBunny 3y ago
Me too! Damn clickbait.
permo-w 3y ago
yeah I was looking at the bushes in the plant pots and thinking "are these the turds?" until I found out that the author is just being extremely picky. I do like to imagine a future dominated by AI where we get weird emergent patterns like the AI just secretly including turds everywhere it can though
- __loam 3y ago
  I don't think they're being picky at all. These are obvious mistakes.
  - permo-w 3y ago
    you’re right once you look carefully. the reason I’m reluctant to swim with this article is because this is exactly what I expect from generative AI in the first place. the article's perspective seems to come from a place of naïvety

zendaven 3y ago

Most of the mistakes pointed out in the 4 images are things I would've never noticed.

derefr 3y ago

Seems strange to me to prompt an AI to generate this kind of stylized isometric video game art that's clearly intended to look like it's made out of uniform, reusable "object assets"... but as a single-shot "gestalt" of each scene. (It's like doing an oil painting of a Minecraft world, and expecting the voxels to look voxel-y.) For the sake of artistic coherence, wouldn't you rather those same tables and chairs and beds to be reused everywhere else you need a table/bed/chair in the game? Which is to say: wouldn't it make more sense to ask the AI to generate individual objects; select the best ones, over many iterations; put those together into an asset library (i.e. a tileset/spritesheet); build some training-data tilemap "scenes" out of those objects for few-shot training; and then ask the AI to generate you more tilemaps, with the tileset provided as part of the input? (In other words, to do the same thing for levels that it's doing for music when it generates MIDI.) (Heck, you might even be able to train it to do both steps at once — train it on screenshots of a tilemap-editor UX (e.g. RPG Maker or Tiled), where the tileset palette and the resulting tilemap are visible at the same time; and where the screenshots are composed such that the tilemap only uses tiles available in the tileset. You'd expect it to learn both to invent nice reusable tiles for you, and also to use those tiles to build you a scene.)

starkparker 3y ago
Better context for those questions from the creators of the game jam entry referenced in the post: https://blog.luden.io/generated-adventure-the-postmortem-of-a-game-made-with-chatgpt-and-midjourney-prompts-included-f87e7e615204 https://blog.luden.io/generated-adventure-the-postmortem-of-...

arroz 3y ago

I thought they were actual turds

GaggiX 3y ago

That image of the dragon seems pretty old, also as the article mentions most of this stuff can be easily remove with inpainting.

throwaway675309 3y ago
It's funny you mention that, that overall smeared look is instantly identifiable as version 3 or earlier of midjourney. For reference, they are currently up to version 5.1.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  Yeah I thought about the same thing, I don't know why the author brings up such image as it's not clearly the experience you would have using MJ today.

orbital-decay 3y ago

Hallucinations. Larger, better trained, multimodal models are needed. All current image generation models are too small to be usable in serious settings. Until you have all that, you can minimize the hallucinations in the result. I have some tips to share (not for the music though). -1. You still have to know how to draw, otherwise you won't have the eye to spot the "turds" nor skills to fix them. It will still be faster than drawing absolutely everything by hand. 0. Don't use Midjourney for anything complex. It hallucinates well and gives good first impression, but it's simply not suited for anything that has complex composition and lots of meaningful detail that need to be controlled like the examples in the article. 1. Finetune your model on its own output and your own work. 2. Use higher order guidance, not just text. Besides the fact that current models don't understand the natural language well (let alone your intent), text is inherently unsuited for explaining artistic intent. Use controlnets on your sketches, latent noise spatial composition, and other similar tricks - they are just better at that, faster, and more precise. 3. Don't generate everything in one piece, photobash. Make complex compositions out of simpler objects. The model can't keep the track of too much stuff. Use automated workflows to save time (otherwise what's the point?). Check out ComfyUI for a powerful node-based editor - create a pipeline once and use it many times. Use plugins for the common software like Photoshop, Krita, Blender, Houdini etc. 4. Fix your errors manually. If your work is complex, it will be faster. >But I feel like something that gets lost in the discussion of AI-generated artwork is the turds. No, it's not. It's the major obstacle in the current models, and gets a lot of attention.

winkelwagen 3y ago

Think people didn’t get the link turd to polished turd in this blogpost. Is what you get when you ask a beginner artist without any guidance to create something, and instead of making something that has the right competition, perspective, proportions, colors and values etc, they tend to over render the image. Making it look “pretty”, the issue that it tries to compensate shitty foundations with glitters and sparkles, widgets, shadows and highlights. Ultimately it often doesn’t have the right impact. Ai art falls in the same category for me. Polished turds, bad writers, bad ideas, bad concepts, boring subjects. I’m hoping it mostly inspires a generation to make cool shit and enjoy it. If you take a skilled artist to use ai art, the results are good, if you take beginners and give it tools you get polished ai art turds. Things that looks cool but ultimately missing the foundation to make it work. At the same time, perhaps it doesn’t matter, and people want to have polished turds regardless. Compare this to a game like unpacking, carefully crafted rooms and smart storytelling. Or vampire survivor, addictive gameplay loop with assets that almost seem like they come straight out of some gamemaker pack. In the end, it’s all about intend, and no amount of polish is going to fix

orbital-decay 3y ago
> In the end, it’s all about intend Precisely, and it doesn't matter how you realize it - by hand or with something more automated (digital manipulation), or with matte painting/photobashing (the most recent resentment target), or with any ML tool. If you don't have the eye, taste, and rigor, you're going to create something boring. If you do, you'll create something interesting. The issue with the examples in OP is not the tool - it's the creators who were sloppy (and also incredibly rushing as it's just a tech demo created in 72 hours).

starkparker 3y ago

Previously: - https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-05-i-am-frustrated-with-stable-diffusion.html https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-05-i-am-frustrated-with-sta... - HN discussion of that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902248 - The author's response to HN comments on that post: https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-10-response-to-some-hacker-news-comments-on-stable-diffusion.html https://novalis.org/blog/2022-12-10-response-to-some-hacker-... FWIW, the author didn't submit that post, or this one.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Seems overly petty and nitpicky article for a gamejam game.

AndrewPGameDev 3y ago

I want to emphasize something that other comments seemed to have missed - when a human artist makes a mistake, I have a sense of sadness, or pity. But when an AI makes a mistake, the types of mistakes it makes are revolting. I can't watch that beer AI video because looking at it for a couple of seconds makes me want to throw up. That's the real problem with the "turds" in AI art - they're just close enough to pass first inspection, but you only realize afterwards how messed up they really are. I honestly think for now I'd rather just deal with my own inadequacies as an artist than try to bargain with the little freaky demon in the computer to draw actually nice images.

Clamchop 3y ago
I find the messed-up imagery disturbing not necessarily because of what they depict but because it's such a convincing emulation of "visions" I've had when my brain is doing... not so great. Illness, fever dreams, and bad drug trips. It looks like what most people have probably seen in some capacity but wouldn't or couldn't ever put down on paper. That's deeply fascinating in its own right.

throwaway675309 3y ago

And yes, you can paint out the turds in Midjourney and tell it to fill in the area again until it gets it right. But the shadows are still going to be annoying, and the iteration time is painfully slow. ... uhh no, no you cannot. What the author seems to be describing is inpainting, which is a staple of most stable diffusion systems such as automatic 1111, but not something that mj currently supports.