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This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use

This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. I bet all of that disappears over the next few months. On another note, and perhaps others are feeling similarly, but I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff, LLMs included. If, ten years ago, you told me I would have access to tools like this, I'm sure I would have responded with a never ending stream of ideas and excitement. But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day. Maybe it's the unreliability on all fronts, I don't know. I ask a lot of programming questions and appreciate some of the autocomplete in vscode, but I know I'm not anywhere close to taking full advantage of what these systems can do.

Retr0id 2y ago
I've never used a stock photo site before, so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand".
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  Their main application appears to be taking blog posts and internal memos and making them three times longer and use ten times the bandwidth to convey no more information. So exactly the application AI is ‘good’ at.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    If anything stock image websites are even worse at this then AI. With AI you come up with an image idea, then try to make the AI produce something close to it. With stock images you come up with an image idea, then hope some photographer had a similar idea and uploaded it to a stock website.
- esperent 2y ago
  I've used stock photo sites occasionally but I use vector art and icon sites multiple times a week. Even today, I used an few different sites while designing some stuff on Canva. The reason I don't use AI is because it gives me far less reliable and impossible to specify results than just searching through the limited lists of human made art. Today, for undisclosed reasons, I needed vector art of peanuts. I found imperfect but usable human made art within seconds from a search engine. I then spent around 15 - 25 minutes trying to get something closer to my vision using ChatGPT, and using the imperfect art I'd found as a style guide. I got lots of "huh that's cool what AI can do" but nothing useful. Nothing closer to my vision than what I started with. By coincidence it's the first time I'vr tried making art with AI in about a year, but back then I bought a Midjourney account and spent a month making loads of art, then installed SD on my laptop and spent another couple of weeks playing around with that. So it's not like I'm lacking experience. What I've found so far is that AI art generators are great for generating articles like this one. And they do make some genuinely cool pictures, it blows my mind that computers can do this now. It's just when I sit down with a real world task that has specific, concrete requirements... I find them useless.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand". Other than stock photos, porn is the killer app for that, but most of the AI companies don't want to allow that.
- avereveard 2y ago
  How about remove blur from your photo, remove blocking items, denoise darks and fixing whiteouts. Granted it's not quite there yet for everything but it's pretty close.
card_zero 2y ago
I was wondering yesterday how AI is coming along for tweening animation frames. I just did a quick search and apparently last year the state of the art was garbage: https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-animation-inbetweening.html https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-anima... Maybe this multimodal thing can fix that?
- GaggiX 2y ago
  That blog post is a year old. There has been a lot of progress since then: https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/ https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Very impressive. This is going to result in an explosion of content creation by pro studios, just as CG with cel-shading renderers did. I greatly prefer the hand-drawn + AI tweened look to the current low-budget CG 3D models look.
    - __loam 2y ago
      Most of the professionals in this industry actively despise this technology.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        That's true, but it will likely be newer studios with younger professionals who are going to be using it, much as Miyazaki doesn't like CGI either yet it's widely used now in anime. The young drive the advances while the older eschew them, that's generally how human progress has been.
        GaggiX 2y ago
        I don't even think it will be newer studios and that's it, probably well known studios will adopt it after a production ready solution is presented and battle tested, I doubt many will complain about not making in between frames. Probably newer studios with a smaller budget will just test it first.
loudmax 2y ago
That is a very interesting point about how little use of AI most of us making day to day, despite the potential utility that seems to be lurking. I think it just takes time for people and economies to adapt to new technology. Even if technological progress on AI were to stop today, and the best models that exist in 2030 are the same models we have now, there would still be years of social and economic change as people and companies figure out how to make use of novel technology.
- milanove 2y ago
  Unless I'm doing something simple like writing out some basic shell script or python program, it's often easier to just do something myself than take the time to explain what I want to an LLM. There's something to be said about taking the time to formulate your plan in clear steps ahead of time, but for many problems it just doesn't feel like it's worth the time to write it all out.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    I find that if a problem doesn't require planning it's probably simple enough that the LLM can handle it with little input. if it does require planning, I might as well dump it into an LLM as another evaluator and then to drive the implementation.
skybrian 2y ago
Image generation is still very slow. If it generated many images instantly like Google’s image search, it would be a lot more fun to use, and we would learn to use it more effectively with practice.
- neuroelectron 2y ago
  Some of the image generation systems are very fast.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Image generation is still very slow. Only because the free ones slow things down.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
> They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. Noticed tht. Maybe it's my algorithm but YouTube is seemingly filled with these videos now.
- rasz 2y ago
  Youtube Studio is has build in AI thumbnail functionality. Google actively encourages use of AI to clickbait and to generate automatic AI replies to comments ala onlyfaps giving your viewers that feeling of interaction without reading their comments.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  They insist on feeding me AI generated videos about "HOA Karens" for some odd reason. True, I do enjoy watching the LawTubers and sometimes they talk about HOAs but that is a far stretch from someone taking a reddit post and laundering it through the robots.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  All my music cover images are AI generated. At the same time I refuse to listen to AI music. We're all going to sink alone on this one. What's frustrating me is if I tell the Youtube algo 'don't recommend' to AI music video channels it stops giving me any music video channels. That's not what I want, I just don't want the AI. They need to seperate the two. But of course they need to not do that with AI cover images because otherwise it would harm me. :)
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Probably is your algorithm as mine is pretty good in not showing me those low effort channels. Check out extensions like PocketTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow to manage your YouTube feeds better.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Gasp0de 2y ago
I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results, which is good enough for the presentations I hold, online pet projects (created a squirrel-themed online math-learning game for which I previously would have needed a designer to create squirrel highschool themed imagery) and memes. For many, many websites this is going to be good enough.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  My problem with finding enjoyment in this is the same problem I have when using cheat codes in games: the doing part is the fun part, getting to the end or just permutations of the end gets really boring.
  - williamcotton 2y ago
    Trying to draw a squirrel when you have no artistic talents or experience is not the fun part. I've produced my own music recordings in the past and I've hired musicians to play the instruments that I cannot. Having exasperated recording engineers watch my 5,000th take on a drum fill that I absolutely cannot play is not the fun part. Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.
    - schwartzworld 2y ago
      > Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part. Is having the ai spit out idea after idea fun in the same way for you?
      - marcellus23 2y ago
        He's not talking about using AI to generate ideas, he's talking about using AI to turn ideas into reality.
- 2y ago
Der_Einzige 2y ago
That feeling of not knowing what to do with it is an example of humans being stupid. We are all victims of being "Johnny" in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388 https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388
genewitch 2y ago
I have the Gemini app on my phone and you can interact with it with voice only and I was like oh this is really cool I can use it while I'm driving instead of listening to music. I can never think of anything to talk to an AI about. I run LM local, as well
- JFingleton 2y ago
  Have it interview you (as-in a job interview) on your specialisation. Works your interviewer skills. Ask it to teach you a language. DnD works really well (the LLM being the game-master).
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    DnD does not work really well, I've tried that with LLMs before
mycall 2y ago
> I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.
- justlikereddit 2y ago
  I have absolutely no use for my photos being annotated by an AI. I have had use for LLMs and previous era image gens. I haven't got around to trying the last iterations that this article is about yet. That use I have had of it is very esoteric, an art mostly forgotten in the digital modernity, it's called "HAVING FUN", by myself, for curiosities, for sharing with friends. That is by far the greatest usage area and severely underrated. AI for having fun, enjoyment that feels meaningful. If you're a spam-producer or scam artist, or industrial digi-slop manufacturer or merchant of hype, or some other flavor of paid liar(journalist, influencer, spokesperson, diplomat or politician) then sure, AI will also earn you money. And the facade for this money making enterprises will look shinier for every year that passes but it will be all rotting organics and slops behind that veneer, as it have since many years before my birth. I'm in the game for the fun part, and that part is noticably improving.
dontlaugh 2y ago
The unreliability and inability to debug are why I think these tools are actually a liability for any serious work.
thordenmark 2y ago
I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.
shostack 2y ago
A restaurant near me has a framed monitor that displays some animated art with a scene of a cafe on a street corner. I looked closely and realized it was AI. Chairs were melted together, text was gibberish, trees were not branching properly etc. If a local restaurant is using this stuff we're near an inflection point of adoption.
avereveard 2y ago
It's hard to let them ruin wild because unreliability. I've built a simracing tool that's about 50% ai code now, and ai is mostly the boilerplate, accelerating prototyping and most of the data structure packing unpacking needed It never managed to did a pit stop window prediction on its own, but could create a reasonable class to handle tire overheating messages All in all what I can say from this experiment is that it enabled me to get started as I'm unfamiliar with pygame and the ux is entirely maintained by Ai. Working on classes togheter sucks as the ai puts too many null checks and try catches making the code unreadable by humans, I pretty much prefer to make sure data is correctly initialized and updated than the huge nest of condition llm produce, so I ended up with clearly defined ai and human components. It's not prefect yet but I can focus on more valuable thing. And it's a good step up from last year where I just used it to second check and enrich my technical writing and coverting notes into emails. With vision and image generation I think we're closer to create a feedback loop where the Ai can rapidly self correct it's productions, but the ceiling remains to be seen to understand how far this will go.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Its because all those projects and ideas you had- where AI could do the fun work and you would be the middle manager- just became a job.
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
> But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day. Well, that's because they suck, despite all the hype. They have a use in a professional context, i.e., as replacement for older models and algorithms like BERT or TF/IDF. But as assistants they're only good as a novelty gag.

Retr0id 2y ago

I've never used a stock photo site before, so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand".

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
Their main application appears to be taking blog posts and internal memos and making them three times longer and use ten times the bandwidth to convey no more information. So exactly the application AI is ‘good’ at.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  If anything stock image websites are even worse at this then AI. With AI you come up with an image idea, then try to make the AI produce something close to it. With stock images you come up with an image idea, then hope some photographer had a similar idea and uploaded it to a stock website.
esperent 2y ago
I've used stock photo sites occasionally but I use vector art and icon sites multiple times a week. Even today, I used an few different sites while designing some stuff on Canva. The reason I don't use AI is because it gives me far less reliable and impossible to specify results than just searching through the limited lists of human made art. Today, for undisclosed reasons, I needed vector art of peanuts. I found imperfect but usable human made art within seconds from a search engine. I then spent around 15 - 25 minutes trying to get something closer to my vision using ChatGPT, and using the imperfect art I'd found as a style guide. I got lots of "huh that's cool what AI can do" but nothing useful. Nothing closer to my vision than what I started with. By coincidence it's the first time I'vr tried making art with AI in about a year, but back then I bought a Midjourney account and spent a month making loads of art, then installed SD on my laptop and spent another couple of weeks playing around with that. So it's not like I'm lacking experience. What I've found so far is that AI art generators are great for generating articles like this one. And they do make some genuinely cool pictures, it blows my mind that computers can do this now. It's just when I sit down with a real world task that has specific, concrete requirements... I find them useless.
Suppafly 2y ago
>so I suppose it's no surprise I have no real use for "generate any image on demand". Other than stock photos, porn is the killer app for that, but most of the AI companies don't want to allow that.
avereveard 2y ago
How about remove blur from your photo, remove blocking items, denoise darks and fixing whiteouts. Granted it's not quite there yet for everything but it's pretty close.

card_zero 2y ago

I was wondering yesterday how AI is coming along for tweening animation frames. I just did a quick search and apparently last year the state of the art was garbage: https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-animation-inbetweening.html https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-anima... Maybe this multimodal thing can fix that?

GaggiX 2y ago
That blog post is a year old. There has been a lot of progress since then: https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/ https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Very impressive. This is going to result in an explosion of content creation by pro studios, just as CG with cel-shading renderers did. I greatly prefer the hand-drawn + AI tweened look to the current low-budget CG 3D models look.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Most of the professionals in this industry actively despise this technology.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      That's true, but it will likely be newer studios with younger professionals who are going to be using it, much as Miyazaki doesn't like CGI either yet it's widely used now in anime. The young drive the advances while the older eschew them, that's generally how human progress has been.
      - GaggiX 2y ago
        I don't even think it will be newer studios and that's it, probably well known studios will adopt it after a production ready solution is presented and battle tested, I doubt many will complain about not making in between frames. Probably newer studios with a smaller budget will just test it first.

loudmax 2y ago

That is a very interesting point about how little use of AI most of us making day to day, despite the potential utility that seems to be lurking. I think it just takes time for people and economies to adapt to new technology. Even if technological progress on AI were to stop today, and the best models that exist in 2030 are the same models we have now, there would still be years of social and economic change as people and companies figure out how to make use of novel technology.

milanove 2y ago
Unless I'm doing something simple like writing out some basic shell script or python program, it's often easier to just do something myself than take the time to explain what I want to an LLM. There's something to be said about taking the time to formulate your plan in clear steps ahead of time, but for many problems it just doesn't feel like it's worth the time to write it all out.
- danielbln 2y ago
  I find that if a problem doesn't require planning it's probably simple enough that the LLM can handle it with little input. if it does require planning, I might as well dump it into an LLM as another evaluator and then to drive the implementation.

skybrian 2y ago

Image generation is still very slow. If it generated many images instantly like Google’s image search, it would be a lot more fun to use, and we would learn to use it more effectively with practice.

neuroelectron 2y ago
Some of the image generation systems are very fast.
Suppafly 2y ago
>Image generation is still very slow. Only because the free ones slow things down.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

> They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. Noticed tht. Maybe it's my algorithm but YouTube is seemingly filled with these videos now.

rasz 2y ago
Youtube Studio is has build in AI thumbnail functionality. Google actively encourages use of AI to clickbait and to generate automatic AI replies to comments ala onlyfaps giving your viewers that feeling of interaction without reading their comments.
UncleEntity 2y ago
They insist on feeding me AI generated videos about "HOA Karens" for some odd reason. True, I do enjoy watching the LawTubers and sometimes they talk about HOAs but that is a far stretch from someone taking a reddit post and laundering it through the robots.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
All my music cover images are AI generated. At the same time I refuse to listen to AI music. We're all going to sink alone on this one. What's frustrating me is if I tell the Youtube algo 'don't recommend' to AI music video channels it stops giving me any music video channels. That's not what I want, I just don't want the AI. They need to seperate the two. But of course they need to not do that with AI cover images because otherwise it would harm me. :)
satvikpendem 2y ago
Probably is your algorithm as mine is pretty good in not showing me those low effort channels. Check out extensions like PocketTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow to manage your YouTube feeds better.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Gasp0de 2y ago

I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results, which is good enough for the presentations I hold, online pet projects (created a squirrel-themed online math-learning game for which I previously would have needed a designer to create squirrel highschool themed imagery) and memes. For many, many websites this is going to be good enough.

candiddevmike 2y ago
My problem with finding enjoyment in this is the same problem I have when using cheat codes in games: the doing part is the fun part, getting to the end or just permutations of the end gets really boring.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  Trying to draw a squirrel when you have no artistic talents or experience is not the fun part. I've produced my own music recordings in the past and I've hired musicians to play the instruments that I cannot. Having exasperated recording engineers watch my 5,000th take on a drum fill that I absolutely cannot play is not the fun part. Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.
  - schwartzworld 2y ago
    > Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part. Is having the ai spit out idea after idea fun in the same way for you?
    - marcellus23 2y ago
      He's not talking about using AI to generate ideas, he's talking about using AI to turn ideas into reality.
2y ago

Der_Einzige 2y ago

That feeling of not knowing what to do with it is an example of humans being stupid. We are all victims of being "Johnny" in this paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388 https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388

genewitch 2y ago

I have the Gemini app on my phone and you can interact with it with voice only and I was like oh this is really cool I can use it while I'm driving instead of listening to music. I can never think of anything to talk to an AI about. I run LM local, as well

JFingleton 2y ago
Have it interview you (as-in a job interview) on your specialisation. Works your interviewer skills. Ask it to teach you a language. DnD works really well (the LLM being the game-master).
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  DnD does not work really well, I've tried that with LLMs before

mycall 2y ago

> I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.

justlikereddit 2y ago
I have absolutely no use for my photos being annotated by an AI. I have had use for LLMs and previous era image gens. I haven't got around to trying the last iterations that this article is about yet. That use I have had of it is very esoteric, an art mostly forgotten in the digital modernity, it's called "HAVING FUN", by myself, for curiosities, for sharing with friends. That is by far the greatest usage area and severely underrated. AI for having fun, enjoyment that feels meaningful. If you're a spam-producer or scam artist, or industrial digi-slop manufacturer or merchant of hype, or some other flavor of paid liar(journalist, influencer, spokesperson, diplomat or politician) then sure, AI will also earn you money. And the facade for this money making enterprises will look shinier for every year that passes but it will be all rotting organics and slops behind that veneer, as it have since many years before my birth. I'm in the game for the fun part, and that part is noticably improving.

dontlaugh 2y ago

The unreliability and inability to debug are why I think these tools are actually a liability for any serious work.

thordenmark 2y ago

I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.

shostack 2y ago

A restaurant near me has a framed monitor that displays some animated art with a scene of a cafe on a street corner. I looked closely and realized it was AI. Chairs were melted together, text was gibberish, trees were not branching properly etc. If a local restaurant is using this stuff we're near an inflection point of adoption.

avereveard 2y ago

It's hard to let them ruin wild because unreliability. I've built a simracing tool that's about 50% ai code now, and ai is mostly the boilerplate, accelerating prototyping and most of the data structure packing unpacking needed It never managed to did a pit stop window prediction on its own, but could create a reasonable class to handle tire overheating messages All in all what I can say from this experiment is that it enabled me to get started as I'm unfamiliar with pygame and the ux is entirely maintained by Ai. Working on classes togheter sucks as the ai puts too many null checks and try catches making the code unreadable by humans, I pretty much prefer to make sure data is correctly initialized and updated than the huge nest of condition llm produce, so I ended up with clearly defined ai and human components. It's not prefect yet but I can focus on more valuable thing. And it's a good step up from last year where I just used it to second check and enrich my technical writing and coverting notes into emails. With vision and image generation I think we're closer to create a feedback loop where the Ai can rapidly self correct it's productions, but the ceiling remains to be seen to understand how far this will go.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

Its because all those projects and ideas you had- where AI could do the fun work and you would be the middle manager- just became a job.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago

> But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day. Well, that's because they suck, despite all the hype. They have a use in a professional context, i.e., as replacement for older models and algorithms like BERT or TF/IDF. But as assistants they're only good as a novelty gag.