Context in mind, what jumps out to me is a remarkable compositional competence of the algorithm, even when given extremely vague prompts like "happy sisyphus". The images match the prompt remarkably well with a few notable exceptions like "cottagecore tech-adjacent young robert moses", where it seemed to have focused on "cottage" rather heavily, not understanding cottagecore as an aesthetic neologism, and "power bottom dad is for the people", which definitely got the "dad" part, but it looks like it still struggled to understand "power bottom" (perhaps the curation of training data may have contributed to this). Even if these were curated specifically to match the prompt, what the algorithm was able to do with profiles is amazing (especially bearing in mind that these profiles are meant to be evocative, intentionally idiosyncratic blendings of extremely complex, contextual terms that were written without visual representation in mind, even if they gesture at specific aesthetics)

Side note: what might make artists a bit relieved is the fact that artifacting is still pretty apparent even in the curated examples. Fine details or even whole figures sometime devolve into that scrambled topography familiar to AI art. Even in more compositionally competent artworks, the "brush strokes" frequently have identifiable blurs at the margins. Text also seems to be gibberish even if aesthetically coherent. Even still, these are all such minor issues that additional photoshop would be both easy and readily doable.

Overall, this is frankly stunning and I'm really excited to see what others come up with. I feel like it's language and composition ability definitely did not disappoint the hype of its press release.

Obviously, from the AI point of view, this is just amazing and frankly terrifying.

OK, I'll be the guy who brings the snark. It seems that when Silicon Valley tech people create AI, it makes exactly the art you'd expect Silicon Valley tech people to like. I.e. this is very much the style you see in NFTs, or, as someone else said, in Dixit. It's quirky and stoner-ish, very "transcendental"... for an AI, it's amazing...

For a human, it would be dross.

Yeah, yeah, I know, art is subjective, well I like it, how can you impose your tastes on the rest of the world, et cetera et cetera. Sorry, but it's dross! It's the kind of work the guy in the art shop up the road churns out, and sells to the ignorant locals in my town. It's the art equivalent of Visual Basic. (I'm trying to get through to you that in this world, too, things can not just be done, but be done well or badly.)

If there's a lesson on the AI side here (and maybe there isn't) it is just that these machines are still copying. They were trained on a bunch of art - and you can clearly see the kind of art that was used. Presumably, if it were just trained on Old Masters and Picasso, Dall-E would be mass-producing the stuff I, an intellectual, like.

Note the difference, though, with a real artist. A real artist takes as input the real world - Rouen cathedral, the horrors of war in Spain, a Campbell's soup can - and produces art as output. This takes as input art and produces more art.

This tweet provides important context: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081...

They weren’t just copying/pasting prompts there was human creativity involved as well

This is so interesting. If anyone has played the board game Dixit, the images generated here feel like they would fit right in. I could totally see this being used for custom decks in Tabletop Simulator.

For those unfamiliar, you can see some examples of the actual game cards here: https://www.libellud.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DIXIT_OV... (PDF warning)

One could argue that image generation has been possible for years, using tools like Photoshop, but the prospect of mass automated production of images to order catapults us into a whole new world where our concept of evidence is severely undermined.

“Dall-E, generate a collection of images showing plausible war crimes from the current conflict”

“Dall-E, take this image of Dallas in 1963 and infer a new angle showing the real shooter”

“Dall-E, generate a photoshoot showing a supportive crowd rallying round the leader cheering his latest policy. Work with GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles, timelines and memes with 3 to 8 year history for each one of the supporters, including fake arguments, 78% of which are won by the pro-leader account.”

Creative industries are on the cusp of a massive upset.

Relatively soon, there will be commercial models of this quality for music/code/text/speech/images/3d models etc.

Once these AI generated assets flow like water into the hands of creators, it will significantly change the way people work.

I'm sure some people in this thread have had a taste of this working with Copilot. For me, it's most useful as an un-sticking tool, to get me moving again, or providing half remembered syntax for a language I don't use as frequently.

There's no reason to expect that similar use cases won't make their way into other industries.

- Rapid prototypes of models/textures for video games.

- Quick and easy samples for musicians.

- Emotive speech for audio books and transcriptions.

It won't replace everything, but so much of our media uses art as noise, to fill a gap, and with this, it can be done almost everywhere on the cheap.

It was striking to:

- read the OpenAI paper

- notice there was a lot of words in the harm section

- notice the mitigations boiled down to "limit access" (a marketing strategy) & "put rando colors in a very easy place to crop out", have them note how easy it was to crop, yet they still went with that strategy

- notice no one in actual AI art community has received an invite, but random SV hoi polloi and OpenAI employees have

I had been worried about the moneyed class taking all the work we had done in the open source community informing their approach (check citations on the Dalle paper), privatize it via applying it to a large dataset they built, and not share _any_ of their data or models because "harm reduction" that amounted to marketing x not risking their ability to monetize.

It was shocking to see DallE 2 get announced and take that exact approach.

We'll keep working, LAIONs 5B dataset starts approaching the #s cited in Meta's and OpenAI's papers.

This makes Dall-E 2 both more and less impressive to me.

More impressive, because of how good it is at capturing and synthesizing a wide variety of topics in a reasonably coherent way, and how it seems like it would actually be a viable mechanism for creating actual artwork, or at the very least, a source of inspiration for a human artist to touch-up on later.

Less impressive, in that it's pretty obvious it's not any more advanced than a graphical version of GPT-2, which is parroting content and styles that it has basically memorized and is really good at interpolating between.

Because there's no such thing as a "logical contradiction" in this sort of illustration, compared to a paragraph of text or a code listing, the fact that it's just interpolating between a huge database of memorized content isn't as easy to spot as with GPT-2, and matters less in the actual end result.

These are evocative images. I love a bunch of them! Knowing that this model was trained on a huge corpus of existing images makes them feel a bit like the output of a visual search engine -- finding relevant pieces and stitching them together. But it's more than that, because the stitching happens at different levels. They are often thematically and aesthetically cohesive in a way that feels intelligent.

Maybe we're just search engines of a similar kind.

An additional aspect of human art is that it (usually) takes time to make. The artist might spend many hours creating and reflecting and creating some more. The artist's engagement with the work makes its way into the final product, and that makes human art richer. Could future Dall-E version create sketches and iterations of a work; is there a limit to this mimicry?

I'm feeling future shock; heavy future shock.

Perhaps someone can write a HN reader where headlines are fed through Dall-E, and the images appear on top of the stories.

I'm surprised how coherent most of these drawings are, instead of some warped monstronsity like you see from deepdream or thisanimedoesnotexist.

Most of them have a theme that makes sense, too.

"We've made the scarce resource abundant, finally the scarce thing is democratized!"

"Wait why doesn't anyone care about the scarce thing anymore?"

The fact that this is behind some bizarre invite-only pay-to-experiment exclusive club is disappointing and sad. Funnily enough, it brings me nostalgic memories of the days where I had to wait for hours just to get a chance to use the school's only computer for 30 minutes.

Hey everyone, Nick here creator of the linked thread. I just wanted to link to another tweet I have with some details of how I made it.

TLDR it’s not just the bio pasted directly into dall-e and the images are cherry-picked but dall-e is basically doing 95% of the work here. I have no ability to make art myself, and I found I could illustrate basically any bio I wanted in a couple minutes of playing around. My goal was to create illustrations for my friends not create a dall-e gallery but I’m glad it ended up being a good example of what dall-e can do

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1512119623315075081

Weren't the last AI-is-impossible holdouts hanging onto creativity as the domain of true intelligence?

I disregard the narrow-AI-only folks almost on principle; Terrence Tao, Albert Einstein, Mozart, and Van Gogh couldn't do each others' jobs.

These are so good, it's breaking my brain a little.

They're not just conceptually accurate, but to my eyes they're pleasing to look at from a purely artistic point of view. I'd put these on my wall.

I already take a fairly bullish position on the potential of AI, given a long enough timeframe, but it does feel like we're reaching a bit of a tipping point here.

It's starting to prod at the paradigms I hold in my head about what I think "art" is.

In a turing-syle blind test of these DALL-E artworks, I think most people would be unable to tell the AI generated art from that of human artists. And I imagine that it follows that the same will be the case for music in the near future too, and likely most other artistic endeavours eventually.

I like to write music. I respect the output of other musicians (my fellow "artists") and I am driven, by both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to keep trying to get better at my "art". But when an AI can produce works that match or exceed my art (based on whatever the measures are that we already judge art by) - it prompts some interesting questions. Does it lower the subjective value of human-produced art by virtue of reducing scarcity, and increasing accessibility?

Of course, DALL-E is trained on the output of human artists. But art is already recursive in that respect - human artists themselves are trained on the output of other artists. So that's not so different...

I guess it's the same paradigm as mass production vs hand crafting. When we pick the cheaper, mass produced item, we lose out on some of the humanity and soul that's baked into hand-crafted goods. But history has shown that we'll gladly take the cheaper, more accessible, more predictable option in most cases.

The commoditisation of art.

When things are commoditised, I tend to think that the opportunity for the creation of value (by humans) tends to move up an abstraction level. As technology becomes commoditised at a certain level, then the orchestration and management of that technology becomes the new speciality where humans are useful and can create value. When that orchestration layer is commoditised, it's the next level up that we can turn their attention to.

So the new art maybe becomes meta-art. Perhaps human artistic endeavours become more about curation rather than creation?

Or will AI art never reach a sufficient level to be considered equal to, or better than human-produced art? We can hide behind the subjectivity of all this, but something like a blind identification test (AI vs Human) removes some of that subjectivity fairly easily...

Wow, okay. I'm kind of blown away at how authentic these paintings look. Even with a very conservative prediction of how these tools could evolve and improve over the years, the signal is strong that our relationship with the meaning of "art" itself will have a fundamental shift.

Am I the only person here to think this is utter bullshit and some amazingly-developed prank?

Otherwise, my stomach is in knots, because this is terrifying.

I've had my head in the sand for a while regarding generative AI, but now I'm getting pretty scared

Oof. Editorial illustrators are about to get automated.

The two images from the "young Robert Moses" etc bio are cool, but the fact they both have such a similar layout and style, with the same "giant hands" framing that doesn't follow from the prompt in any obvious way, makes me wonder if there's some particular source art that "inspired" both. Couldn't find it on Google or Bing images, though.

I'm imaging a future where the top replies to art posted online will become "keywords please" or "what model". Hosting sites may start to enact "AI treatises" into their terms of service that segregate human- and AI- generated content into separate areas and ask users to report entries that they suspect do not belong in either. Asking "what model did you use" becomes an insult to a sizeable portion of artistic creators, a genuine question for others, and a phrase whose implications cannot be avoided for all people involved.

What belief systems will we form around AI art after it becomes clear that it's never going away? Many people say that art is subjective. I am thinking that if or when parity between art from humans and AI is achieved, some people are going to believe that a humanistic quality of some sort will be trampled upon in the realization that the two types of art really are indistinguishable. Others might believe that AI art is just another tool that they believe expresses their thoughts. The different beliefs might be fundamentally unresolvable, and this may become an unending source of distrust and sadness in certain art circles within the next decade.

I do not look forward to how this tech will interact with online culture several years from now.

This is impressive. Yet, before you go the AGI is nigh, ask yourself a simple question: will this spiral in or spiral out? If we feed everything the model comes up with back as training data, will we get Endless Forms Most Beautiful or will we get an equilibrium?

Would it be possible to have an algorithm that produces the images from the training set whose parts are most similar to the produced output? This looks super impressive but I still wonder how much the network just recycles parts of images it has seen before.

So where can we common plebs go to submit paragraphs for generation?

Can't wait for this for music. To fix the costly cherry-picking process, Spotify should play AI-generated songs in between others. Those who get good engagement should then rise to the top.

I can't help but be suspicious since there is not site to try it out, and I can't think of a good reason as to why there isn't one.

An archaeologist once said, "The most merciful thing in the world is the human heart that cannot associate everything together"

Everything that happens in this world has a coherent causal relationship. Whether it is technological development, territorial domination, or even unavoidable natural disasters or unexpected accidents, no one should stay out of it.

If people are willing to face it, perhaps many things will not evolve to the worst level, but in this case, people usually choose to turn a blind eye in order to protect themselves, or some people are very willing to sacrifice other things for selfishness, they It is taken for granted that only the victims will bear the consequences in the end, but it is not the case, the laws of the world will one day pay back all cause and effect.

However, this is only limited to the things that the "law" can take effect.

When "exceptions" fill the whole world, then the fate of this world will be nothing but despair.

I'm genuinely terrified.

some of these are quite beautiful... I've seen AI-generated art before, but these are outrageously better, I couldn't really distinguish a lot of these from human-created art

this is going to absolutely obliterate some markets for illustration and stock photography, unfortunately

This is going to put a lot of artists out of work in a very short time. Not happy about that.

Are there any examples of what this thing produces when run on recognizable brands or characters, i.e. Sonic, Mario, Coca Cola, Star Wars, etc. instead of generic words like "astronauts on horse"?

The one I have seen so far[1] is the Twitter logo one, but it's hard to tell if the "Twitter" had much effect here or if it's just the "blue bird" that did it.

[1] https://nitter.net/pic/media%2FFPwj5G-WUA8__UC.jpg%3Fname%3D...

These are pretty cool. They remind me of magic the gathering art and some are quite visually accurate!

At the same time I fear for my illustrator/digital artist friends.

So many questions

This makes you think what is real art? Beauty, meaning, context

Can this achieve real art? Or just composing existing art?

If we don't preserve the art industry, and global industry flocks to the lowest common denominator, what will that mean for the future of art

If an artist invents something new and someone unrelated uses it to train a model and generate 100s of compositions who should profit from it?

What was the "license" on the images used to train the model

Integrate Samsung frame art mode with DALL-E with ability to set painting style (oil, pastel, etc) for a limitless gallery.

Could someone point me how to make such images yourself? This may be a naive question as it may require non-public code and data... I've seen public colab notebooks with Dall-E but they don't work currently (package problems) and seem to produce a different style of results.

Tumblr and Twitter NSFW will not be the same after this. Like this is pure cocaine for porn addicts

Someone should make an online version of Mysterium that uses Dall-E to make the picture cards!

Article about same/similar topic:

https://arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-28-visual-poetry-humans...

Is there a future for art with this type of thing getting more advanced each year?

Stunning.

My question is whether more compute and more data will be sufficient for the AI to create its own art styles. Everything we see here are within the stylistic paradigms created by previous humans.

Dall-E will be really good for my creators on https://dulst.com (card game platform)

As always, these results are cherry picked by OpenAI. Same as GPT-2/3, the "average" output of the model is barely useable.

Oof. I’m selling my Fiverr stock right now.

Incredibly misleading, he didn't directly paste bios into the description and they were massively curated.

It's almost like these were trained using Byte magazine covers! Amazing tech.. I'm blown away.

Is there a way normal humans like me can do stuff like this. Like is there a Dall-E 2 app I can download?

Now to connect it with the Nvidia tech demo that turns 2d pictures to a 3d environment.

There is a lot of emphasis on eyes. Same thing in Google’s deep dream. Eerie.

Almost unbelievable. I'm randomly reminded of the chess automaton.

These are so fucking good-looking. Can't believe it.

Better than Beeple.

When will an API be available for the rest of us?

These are amazing!

i am surprised the only drawing of woman it generates is when the bio explicitly contains the word "female".

bias in AI I guess.

These drawings... they have personality.

I am a fresher here I’d love to learn

Remember, these are all public domain, at least in the USA which does not allow copyright assignments to the artistic output of machines.

Gangneil's curse

Cruelty Squad vibes

もりやしゅんと

マヤノトップガン

night of tokyo

The trajectory of AI is both amazing and horrifying. Most of us are born in an era where we can witness the change and play with toy versions of AI products. The next generation of people will have their lives truly changed by AI, for the better or for worse.