7 ms·
Coarse is better
- llmsagainagain 10mo ago[dead]
- airza 10mo agoYears of refinement on the taste of people with no taste has produced a model with no taste. Crazy
- Undertow_ 10mo agoit's not shocking that this is the result of "art" from people that think complexity and accuracy are the only qualifying factors.
- drob518 10mo agoI tasted the model, but then I spit it right back out.
- mcpeepants 10mo agothey put a special coating on the model to discourage this behavior
- drob518 10mo agoAh, that explains it.
- mlpro 10mo agoLol, yeah.
- spaceman_2020 10mo agoWhile I don’t disagree with the author, these are simply two completely different tools with different use cases. Nano Banana Pro throws out fantastic images you can actually use in your marketing right away. It’s not an art tool - it’s a business tool As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
- Zak 10mo agoThe author claims the old models are better at creating art than the new ones. I disagree; art requires consciousness and intent while this type of model is capable of neither.
- LatencyKills 10mo agoI define art as something that evokes an emotion or feeling. I’ve seen people wax poetic about the ”meaning” of an imagine only to find out that the image was created synthetically. Were those “feelings” not authentic?
- neonnoodle 10mo agoIf I see a cloud in the shape of my childhood dog and start to cry, is the cloud art?
- rtldg 10mo agoYes. The Earth and its formations are art. I disagree that art requires consciousness and intent, but those admittedly do improve its value [to me]. (For reference, I value AI content/art poorly and avoid it)
- only-one1701 10mo agoEverything is art, fantastic. I see nothing wrong with this definition.
- card_zero 10mo agoWe have at least established that very boring pieces, such as Andy Warhol's Empire, Kazimir Malevich's White on White, and John Cage's As Slow As Possible, are not art.
- only-one1701 10mo ago
- nickelpro 10mo agoThe author has succeeded only in arguing one meaningless image factory produces images they find more aesthetically pleasing than another meaningless image factory. The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.
- brantmv 10mo agoWhy say this in such a rude way?
- cluckindan 10mo agoFound the zealot. Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk? If so, then why lambast the lesser folk over their ignorance of the secret knowledge?
- only-one1701 10mo agoPeople are aren’t entitled to get entry into every space they want to with no effort!
- nativeit 10mo ago> Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk? Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.
- Demiurge 10mo agoI don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.
- raincole 10mo agoIt's ridiculous lol. Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models. If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers. [0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
- jamblewamble 10mo agoIt is what has underpinned all of human progress towards automation. It isn't a bad thing. Every time we automate something the luddites cry out about the coming mass unemployment. It has never happened.
- vlovich123 10mo agoExcept all the manufacturing jobs got shipped overseas and now those people are Walmart greeters or similar unskilled labor. Having a shit job isn’t unemployment but it’s not a huge step up
- loeg 10mo agoThat isn't what happened. American jobs are more productive than ever. Americans are richer than ever. The modern luddites dramatically underestimate how bad the past was.
- vlovich123 10mo ago> Americans are richer than ever. By what metric? One way is to look at the Gini coefficient - that’s worse than ever. The bottom 20% has 2-3% of total net worth in the US. The middle 40% has seen a decline from 36% in 1989 to 28% in 2020. The top 0.1% has seen their net worth capture double from 7% in 1989 to 14% today. The subtle thing that net worth ignores of course is inflation from growth in costs, so actually it’s harder for most people than in 1989, unless you’re talking about the ease of buying a TV or phone. Technology is more available and cheaper than ever but food and medicine is more expensive than ever.
- pornel 10mo agoThe author is using special prompts exploiting flaws of the old models, and doesn't like that new models interpret the hacks literally instead. The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
- RHSeeger 10mo agoThe prompts bothered me a lot, too. I don't do a lot of work with AI, but > A painting sold at Sotheby's and > A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's convey very different meaning (to me).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- andy99 10mo agoYou’re definitely on to something, people wouldn’t criticize as much as they are otherwise, they’d ignore it. I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
- only-one1701 10mo agoAI doesn’t make art. The OP is trying to fit the square peg of their intuitive understanding about the art creation process into the round hole of generating it via AI
- jellyroll42 10mo agoCorrect! The process and struggle of creation is a large part of what makes art art. Removing friction from the process makes something artless.
- card_zero 10mo agoYes, but: when I was young I used to love photorealism and hyperrealism, which is super-smooth-and-shiny art that conceals its process in order to awe simpletons. Then I bought an airbrush, and then true color computer graphics happened, and soon after that I began to appreciate brush strokes and the texture of pen marks and the idea of the personality of the artist's hand. But that doesn't mean the process-hiding stuff is non-art, or even bad art. What's wrong with creating an amazingly convincing illusion, wasn't that always the goal, historically? Also there are no prizes for effort, and if your artwork is only struggle, I don't want to see it. Unless you're really badass about it.
- nehal3m 10mo agoI really like Cory Doctorow’s description of why it feels empty, quote: “Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight.”
- card_zero 10mo ago
- chrismsimpson 10mo agoIs some kind of MoE or routing (but for image models obviously), depending on the prompt ask, a possible solve?
- TrueDuality 10mo agoI love the inherent wonder and joy in this post around the original images.
- smurda 10mo agoAnother word for coarse is impasto technique, where the paint is so thick the painting-knife or brush strokes are visible and leave a pronounced texture (e.g. Van Gogh, Rembrandt). Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.
- flir 10mo agoJust asked sora for an impasto image of a coca cola bottle. But it still came out looking like a coca cola ad/AI art. Super glossy, slick, meaningless. It didn't look like paint. (And the logo wasn't impasto, which I thought was interesting - I guess that logo's utterly ingrained in the model, it's seen it so many times).
- pluralmonad 10mo agoBackroom deals to strengthen trademark things. Can't have the brand getting diluted.
- airstrike 10mo agoI'm no image gen expert but these prompts are downright terrible even by my standards. Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum! I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their purpose. This analysis is just noise. Yawn. Ironically, even an LLM with its fake reasoning capabilities can point out the issue with the prompts if you ask it to critique this article.
- wrsh07 10mo agoIt is interesting what the nbp model takes away from the prompt, though Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt) It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp
- gwern 10mo ago> I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp NBP (and the new ChatGPT generator) are integrated with LLMs to various degrees, so seems like the obvious starting point is a reverse approach: ask them to describe the old images which has the esthetics that Fernando Borretti likes, and start generating from those prompts. If you can recover the old images, then it was just a prompting issue. ("Sampling can show the presence of knowledge but not the absence.") If you can't even with their own 'native' descriptions, then that points to mode-collapse (especially all of the 'esthetic tuning' like DPO everyone does now) as being the biggest problem.
- dan-robertson 10mo agoThese sorts of prompts used to be quite important when DALL-E was new. I do feel like a lot of the article is just that prompts should be written differently though I think there’s some truth in the idea that nanobanana feels less artistic in some ways.
- delis-thumbs-7e 10mo agoJust fucking by canvas, brushes and good quality oil paint. You need only five colours[1]. Cost you maybe 50-80 euros. And any mess you produce will give you more joy thanand shot produced by any clanker brain. Keep at it for few years, take evening classrs, look tutorials and you have learned yourself a skill. You can now travel to any majos art museum across the world and have a discussion with masters through their works hanging on the wall. And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7F67FsLaaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7F67FsLaaY
- BoredPositron 10mo agoThe OP would likely prefer Disco Diffusion if they want their art to remain coarse. Modern models possess advanced spatial understanding and adhere strictly to prompts, whereas the OP is using unstructured inputs better suited for older models with CLIP or T5 encoders that lack that spatial awareness. These legacy prompting styles are incompatible with Gen3 models that utilize VLMs as text encoders. If the OP wants to explore modern architecture, they should use Flux.2 with a LoRA or perhaps a coarser model like Zit if they prefer to rely solely on text conditioning. Nano Banana Pro requires extremely long and distinctive prompting to achieve specific aesthetics. His blog post shows a lack of understanding and a lack of adaption to modern architecture which would be fine if it wasn't that dismissive. Here is an image from NBP with an adapted prompt for Italian futurism: https://imgur.com/a/4pN0I0R https://imgur.com/a/4pN0I0R and for Kowloon: https://imgur.com/a/rDT8dfP https://imgur.com/a/rDT8dfP
- dleeftink 10mo agoEno applies: > It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
- 2b3a51 10mo agoAnd > "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."
- stephantul 10mo agoWhere did you get this from? Searching for it, in a weird irony I guess, just leads me back to this post.
- cryzinger 10mo agoI recognize it as a quote from A Year With Swollen Appendices, which is a great read even if you aren't an Eno fan (although I am, which admittedly makes me biased :P)
- stephantul 10mo agoThank you! I’ll check that out
- amram_art 10mo agoThe problem is not in the image models rather the training data and its context. "British museum" for MJ is the image source, "British museum" is the setting for Nano Banana.
- nailherwithrust 10mo ago[flagged]
- CubicLettuce 10mo ago[dead]
- inquirerGeneral 10mo ago[dead]
- yoan9224 10mo agoThe author's prompts are fighting against what Nano Banana was optimized for. Saying "British Museum" to MJv2 worked because it blurred all images tagged with museums into the aesthetic. NBP interprets it literally: show me something IN a museum. This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool. If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for. The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.
- speedgoose 10mo agoThanks ChatGPT. I’m wondering about the motivation to spam HN with LLM generated comments. Not the worst comments though.
- flexagoon 10mo agoI don't think that comment is LLM generated. I would've certainly written it like that myself.
- DrammBA 10mo ago> It's not X - it's Y, it's Z. > Consider: consideration. That's what you should consider. Come on man
- flexagoon 10mo agoThe second point I agree with, but I hate that the "It's not ... it's ..." construct is a sign of LLMs now, because I use it all the time
- speedgoose 10mo agoCheck the account comments history. A lot of good comments of a similar length posted very closely in time. I don’t think a human can write that well, so quickly, on so many topics.
- recursivecaveat 10mo agoMaybe it's better that this author is using LLMs because they would be an immensely frustrating client for an artist. Asks for futurism: complains about getting it. Wants bright colors: refuses to ask. Parts of the request are supposed to be evocative and parts are supposed to be literal, who knows which.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- efitz 10mo agoWhy does anyone serious about art want to make art with AI? A large part of the magic of art is the human choices that go into it.
- userbinator 10mo agoPrompting an AI and then filtering the results is a "human choice".
- spaqin 10mo agoTwo choices - one of prompt, one of the result, versus hundreds or thousands from the subject and composition, through the medium, to every single brushstroke, where one may have a significant meaning. To be improved upon when your skill improves as well. This is more akin to going to a supermarket and buying peanut butter (prompt: peanut butter, filter by brand/price/taste). The product may be tasty and enjoyable but I am not impressed by that.
- effnorwood 10mo agoPeanut butter. Agree.
- mlinksva 10mo agoGood title!
- seph-reed 10mo agoI had similar feelings with art generation. The early midjourney was definitely impressionistic, and I just kind of like impressionism. It's cool how accurate these have become, but they also feel closer to uncanny or boring.
- atoav 10mo ago"This is somewhat better, but why is it so drab and colourless? Is the machine trying to make me depressed?" They asked the machine to produce a picture from a dystopian place and somehow expected the machine to know they like it to be colorful? Just tell the machine it needs to be colorful if that is what you want.
- p4bl0 10mo agoWith a title like this I was expecting an interesting discussion about pour over coffee. Titles should probably be edited when they're this vague.
- tete 10mo agoNot sure, about the Kowloon Walled City, but that picture reminded me of the empty square in the Walled City. There aren't many pictures of it, but my mind jumped to that right away. I think I've seen a documentary where it looks a lot more similar. In particular that hallway in the middle, where I remember that there was a statue kind of as a worship place. And on the right side of that dark halway there is what appears to be a statue. Sadly all I was able to find were these: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/kowloon-city-photos-17.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/... https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fzvcz3yc3ip421.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz... https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fxdjs1t8hnr5d1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D968%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D2079830e198f3ac31f35cde9338be4152097aa7a https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... Given these and that it changed over its history I think it's kind of a stretch to just say "it looks nothing like the Kowloon Walled City".