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I had to put together a presentation that was somewhat graphic-heavy. I used Dall-e 2, and the ability to get things so tailored to what I needed, so quickly, w

• jiggawatts 3y ago
  I wish MidJourney had some decent competition. Dall-E hasn’t improved since it was released, and the other good models like Google’s Imagen weren’t made public…
  • JenrHywy 3y ago
    There are public static diffusion models trained on/like midjourney, but IMO they're still lacking.
  • barrkel 3y ago
    Stable Diffusion is still good but you need to fine tune it (not that expensive with Lora) and use controlnet to get good results. The model is just too small on its own.
    • celestialcheese 3y ago
      Civitai is a good place to get these models if you don't want to train your own. NSFW partially
  • prawn 3y ago
    What's behind MidJourney, and how has it not been matched/defeated? There's a lot of interest in the space and money to be made, and MidJourney proves that quality results are possible. Is it because of the sheer costs or a secret sauce?
    • storkhm 3y ago
      Well you can gain a free GPU hour by rating images. I am pretty sure midjourney is doing some kind of reinforcement learning from human feedback. The 5.1 raw model is simply unbelievable for photo realistic images. There is 4a,4b,4c, 5, 5.1, 5.1 raw, the anime model I never use. All are interesting but how often do you read anyone mention what midjourney model they are talking about? Basically never. There are certain circumstances that I have seen stable diffusion match the output but overall I don't even think it is close. Personally, it wouldn't even occur to me to look for stock photos now as opposed to just making variations in midjourney. There is a bit of a learning curve with so many options in midjourney so I take anything I read about it with a grain of salt. Most people are using these tools to make absolute shit.
    • aenvoker 3y ago
      They combine multiple custom algorithms that are designed to run on high-RAM (>24GB) GPUs. And, they incorporate a lot of user-provided feedback into the training of new models. If you have more time on your hands than cash, you can get some free generation credit by rating images.
    • orbital-decay 3y ago
      That's mostly because they make a finished end-user product, which nobody else does (except OpenAI and DALL-E, but they are mostly focused on language processing right now). - It runs in the cloud with more VRAM available than on consumer machines, so it's able to use more parameters and custom layers. This makes it more coherent. - It's finetuned on a large RLHF dataset, which they have from the users voting for bot-generated images in their massively popular Discord server. - It includes a decent share of custom processing and manual tuning (system prompts, custom layers trained on god knows what etc) Their closest contender, Stability AI, is currently busy training SDXL, their new model, on a RLHF dataset they are collecting on their much smaller Discord channel. So Midjourney is SOTA for text-to-image. There's DeepFloyd IF which is large enough and includes a 11B LLM for natural language understanding, so it has much less issues understanding complex prompts such as "koi fish doing a handstand on a longboard rolling down the slope of a moon crater". But it's not a finished product (no complex pipelines, no RLHF), and the license is restrictive. That said, Midjourney's strengths are also its weaknesses. Midjourney is good for the text-to-image, but not much else, and image generation is much more than just text-to-image. MJ gives great results off the bat, but struggles with unusual requests, complex compositions with multiple objects, and can't use various elaborate trickery available in the much smaller Stable Diffusion (which is mediocre by default but has powerful higher-order guidance and training, and is also much better at complex things). Midjourney is also censored - you can't have Joe Biden eating a slice of porcupine.
  • rgbrgb 3y ago
    Kandinsky 2.1 is worth a shot if you haven’t tried it.
  • poulpy123 3y ago
    what about stable diffusion or the tools by adobe ?
  • famouswaffles 3y ago
    The new Bing runs on a better version of dall-e and is much better
• buildbot 3y ago
  Has been for a long time from what I have gathered. Stock photography has been a very hard way to make money as a photographer for awhile based on the forums I read.
  • dieselgate 3y ago
    Especially companies like Getty Images being so predatory towards photographers
  • shagie 3y ago
    When I looked at stock photography as a possible side income, licensing my photographs (those that Getty wanted - they didn't care for most of them because they were more artistic than stock) would have gotten pennies for each photograph. I can certainly appreciate those who take stock photography (and I've seen some of them in my travels - taking 100s photos of slightly different poses of a model at a location because the stock buyer could say "I like this one but the arm is in the wrong spot for the page layout" and go with someone else's photograph). Being a stock photographer has never been easy. In the days before digital it represented countless rolls of film shot (and processed at the photographer's expense) and now its even more digital images to ensure that you've got just the right one for some client a few years from now. It's not an easy job and no one has gotten rich off of it.
• stingraycharles 3y ago
  And the sad thing is that these models are most likely trained upon most of these stock photos to begin with. I can understand the frustration of the industry.
  • harry8 3y ago
    The photographers who took those stock photos also trained on stock photos.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • wilimitis 3y ago
      Nope - a.i. is essentially just rearranging pixels because you can formally delineate (via mathematical expressions) how to arrive from input set to output image. To compare this in any respectable degree to human creativity is not reasonable.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        How does human creativity work?
        • Kuinox 3y ago
          With something representable with math functions that nobody knows yet.
          • wilimitis 3y ago
            That is an incredibly strong assertion that evidence does not seem to support currently. So, you may take it on faith if you wish, however there is growing interest in the notion that creativity itself is that which is not systemetizable.
            • 3y ago
• giuliomagnifico 3y ago
  I don’t think AI will replace stock photos because AIs need some photos to build the AI photos. Probably AI will help photographers to cut costs, I mean by taking less “real” photos and using the AI to generate other similar variants, example: “Photos Used to Generate AI Images for Client So Photographer Never Shoots Again Photos Used to Generate AI Images for Client So Photographer Never Shoots Again” https://petapixel.com/2022/12/21/photos-used-to-generate-ai-images-for-client-so-photographer-never-shoots-again/ https://petapixel.com/2022/12/21/photos-used-to-generate-ai-...
  • ksaj 3y ago
    What do you think of this article. https://hackaday.com/2023/06/02/ai-camera-imagines-a-photo-of-what-you-point-it-at/ https://hackaday.com/2023/06/02/ai-camera-imagines-a-photo-o... It's not exactly what you've said, but it itches a scratch from around there.
    • giuliomagnifico 3y ago
      It’s a very cool project but totally different from taking only one real photo, edit it with an AI and sell the created AI photo variants to other clients.
• guax 3y ago
  There are so many photographers out there putting so many images on platforms that you get paid almost nothing for them. Unless you get a great image and have a proper agent or contact passing them along you don't get much. Payout for some of my images ranged from under 5 USD to at most 40 USD for one image one time. Some photographers just spam TONS of images on the platforms to get some cash by betting on the long tail. Someone, somewhere with a shutterstock subscription might need your image for a local magazine/paper and you get 2 dollars for it. That kind of stock photography might suffer even more with generated images. Actual premium stock or for hire photography will not.
  • indymike 3y ago
    The smarter producers will focus on building sets of images that feature common thematic elements. For example, using the same models in business situations. Or using the same style backgrounds with different subjects (people or vehicles). Sometimes it's a lot of shots of the same city with the same style. Other times it's different sets of illustrations (i.e. "corporate memphis meetings" or "ultra realistic athletes) that are the same style. This makes buyers more likely to select multiples of their work. > Someone, somewhere with a shutterstock subscription might need your image for a local magazine/paper and you get 2 dollars for it. Yep, that's how a lot of it works. > Actual premium stock or for hire photography will not. I kind of wonder about that. When I can upload a picture of my product and prompt, Photo of a scene with my product as the subject on 10 N Main street in Wherever, usa. I'm going to be a lot less likely to ship product (and get it lost or broken), commission a photographer in Wherever USA to go take the picture, wait 2 weeks for the right weather, only to find that some unreleased person's face in the reflection on the side of the product.
• jonplackett 3y ago
  I totally agree that it’s going to be very hard for stock photography - but is that a fair comparison? Would you have used stock photography for that presentation to begin with? A lot of the time people tend to just use copyright stuff for presentations because it’s just internal / client presentation use. For that kind of thing - just explaining an idea - midjourney is amazing. So much faster than making something in photoshop and so much more accurate than google searching. I think the real issues for stock libraries is when midjourney starts replacing actual output. This is starting to happen but still very early. It’s gonna get a lot worse!
• ghaff 3y ago
  I haven't had to put together a new graphics-heavy presentation recently but in the future I could absolutely see using AI to augment Creative Commons and various graphs etc. from the Web. (I don't really use stock photos because I don't have a budget.) As things stand, I would still probably use stock for "official" company marketing materials although I understand that some companies, especially smaller ones, are probably less risk adverse.
• bfuller 3y ago
  I am extremely skeptical when people say AI will replace all photographers, no one wants AI generated wedding photos. However, it has certainly replaced my use of stock photos.
• Animats 3y ago
  > The ability to charge a high price for stock photography is over though. Yes. Selling stock photos for crappy ads will be dead in a year. Unless you're at the level of Ansel Adams or Margeret Bourke-White, your content is not worth much.
  • vwcx 3y ago
    Even Margaret Bourke-White's content isn't worth much. Her vintage silver gelatin prints, sure, but none of her LOC-housed imagery, and certainly none of her work available through Getty.