Online.

You can do it, but it takes two steps. Code is generally better to create such strict geometry (even from ambiguous prompts), while the image diffusion model is great for tuning style and lighting.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69e88b5c-8628-83eb-8851-f587ef2c95...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adsaiyr7Nv8

Well, considering that AI generated content can't be copyrighted (afaik at least), I think we're in very different legal territory when it comes to AI creating things. While it's true that deepfakes could be considered libel.. good luck prosecuting that if you can't even figure out where the image came from.

The problem is it's all too easy to generate - you can't really do much about an individual piece of slop because there's so much of it. I think we need a way to filter this stuff, societally.

This helps the segment of society that is interested in applying critical thinking to what they see. I am not sure that is anything like a majority or even a significant plurality. It seems like just about every image or video gets accused of being AI these days, but predictably the accusations depend on the ideology of the accuser.

It's the Stranger Things nostalgia filter. Almost all the sample pictures they had looked like they were vaguely from the 90s-00s era.

It's definitely not accidental but I'm not completely sure whether or not it is simply a "tell" or watermark or an attempt to foster brand association.

Is the situation brighter for a company who owns the hardware and the software, for Apple?

Taking a picture of an AI generated image aside, theoretically could Apple attest to origin of photos taken in the native camera app and uploaded to iCloud?

Fascinating, by the way, thank you!

Make cameras tamper resistant, like POS terminals.

Any thoughts on attempted multiple camera/360 camera solutions? Can make it cost prohibitive to generate exceptional fakes… for a little while

Kind of like showing the proctor around your room with your webcam before starting the exam.

—

I think legacy media stands a chance at coming back as long as they maintain a reputation of deeply verifying images, not being fooled.

I see signing chains as the way to go here. Your camera signs an image, you sign the signed image, your client or editor signs the image you signed etc etc. Might finally have a use for blockchain.

Maybe they just use Qwen Image under the hood ;p

HN is engineer heavy so its a bunch of people who spend their days looking at code. If it's not a coding model they'll likely never use it.

To the average HN'er, images and design are superfluous aesthetic decoration for normies.

And for those on HN who do care about aesthetics, they're using Midjourney, which blows any GPT/Gemini model out of the water when it comes to taste even if it doesn't follow your prompt very well.

The examples given on this landing page are stock image-esque trash outside of the improvements in visual text generation.

Works for me, but really weirdly on iOS: Copying to clipboard somehow seems to break transparency; saving to the iOS gallery does not. (And I’ve made sure to not accidentally depend on iOS’s background segmentation.)

You're implying social platforms aren't bad actors ;)

In seriousness, social platforms attributing images properly is a whole frontier we haven't even begun to explore, but we need to get there.

There’s actually a part of the NY state budget right now (TEDE part X, for my law nerds) that’d require social media companies to preserve non-PII provenance metadata and surface it to the user, if the uploaded image has it.

linkedin already does this--- see https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a6282984, and X’s “made with ai” feature preserves the metadata but doesn’t fully surface it (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882974/x...)

Why would the image itself have to be proprietary to have some new piece of metadata attached to it ?

C2PA is actually an open protocol, à la SMTP. the whole spec is at https://spec.c2pa.org/, available for anyone to implement.

I feel it's too much of a perfect match to be generated from the model's memory. It's pixel perfect. Gotta be a mistake.

The image is likely older than the article given this picture from over a year ago.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DGQ01bzTwyo/

Or the image was generated with AI in the first place and a test for Images 2.0

Kasparov vs Karpov ‘87 Olympiad. Move 6

In some cases I would agree with this, but image model releases including this one are beginning to incorporate and market the thinking step. It is not a reach at this point to expect the model to take liberties in order to deliver a faithful and accurate representation of your request. A model could still be accurate while navigating your lack of specificity.

What do you mean? Parent clearly describes the Queen's Gambit. 1.d4 d5 2.c4 There is no room for ambiguity here.

The paper they published last year goes over some of these transformations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09263

Zhao et al. 2023 showed any imperceptible watermark is provably removable by generative regeneration: pass the image through an img2img or VAE, the model reconstructs it visually identical but starts from a different latent. Watermark gone. SynthID and similar schemes do hold up well against normal sharing: recompression, crops, color tweaks, Twitter's pipeline. That covers most users. But the asymmetry is stuck — normally a GPU and a bit of motivation should be enough to strip it. Right? Got a tool to share? ;-)

I feel like this idea comes up often and in my opinion it doesn't solve anything. Take a picture of an AI image and you've made this approach useless. Which then goes to the argument of "well you'll see it's a picture of a picture" to which I will say there are plenty of ways to make this not appear so, and the ultimate form of this argument is that you can eventually project light directly into the photosensors, or otherwise hack the input between the photosensors and the rest of whatever digital magic that turns light into a JPG on your phone.

Hopefully the arms race will balance out with improved AI image detection, but I can see how that will never be guaranteed to be reliable.

It's going to mess up accountability.

Some politician will be recorded doing something & he'll have his people release a thousand photos/videos of him doing crimes. And they'll say, look, it's a smear campaign.

This is just one stupid example, but people will have better schemes.

Also global coordinated releases of fake content and hypertargeted possibly abusive content. Virtual kidnappings will take off, automated & scaled.

Google's naming might be misleading, currently 3.1 flash image outperforms the available pro version (3.0 pro) on most benchmarks: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-flash-...

.40 cents for high quality output is insanely cheap

it is only going to get cheaper

Perhaps for managers. But for everyone actually doing something, you used to need technical proficiency with tools. Now AI is becoming the universal tool.

How can AI be the amazing thing you say it is, but also too stupid to understand unless you get really good at communicating. Wouldn't better AI just mean it understands your ramblings better?

On the other hand LLMs are getting very good at understanding poorly constructed instructions as well.

So being able to express oneself clearly in a structured way may not be such an edge.

actually gpt-image-2 is VERY flexible with the resolution. You can use arbitrary resolution within the max pixel budget.

Generate a lower resolution image and upscale to the resolution you need.

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It's usually based on what they've been trained on. There aren't very many models that'll do higher resolutions outside of Seedream but adherency is worse.

Maybe so, but to me it conveys a headache.

I felt the same, particularly with the diagrams / magazines anyway.

I don't think it'll fail like Sora though. gpt-image-1.5 didn't fail.

Hard disagree on this, I was coming here to comment that this is the first time I really can't tell that some of the photos are AI generated.

Your single other comment is simplistic hyperbole as well, so this is presumably a bot account.

Denial is real…

That's why I want it; their motives for doing it, should they decide to, would presumably be different.

Thanks, I need to get off Zight, they used to be such an nice option for fast file share but they've really suffered some of the worst enshittification I've seen yet.

So.. sign up. "Get Sight for free". Ads everywhere bro.

My observations have been that image generation is especially challenged when asked to do things that are unusual. The fewer instances of something happening it has to train on, the worse it tends to be. Watch repair done in water fits that well - is there a single image on the internet of someone repairing a watch that is partially submerged in water? It also tends to be bad at reflections and consistency of two objects that should be the same.

The last point (reflection by front glass versus mechanism access so no front glass) is the only issue I see with it. Other than that I can easily visualize an image that satisfies the prompt. I think that the general idea is a good one because it's satisfable while having multiple competing requirements that impose geometric constraints on the scene without providing an immediate solution to said constraints as well as requiring multiple independent features (caustics, reflections, fluid dynamics, refraction, directional lighting) that are quite complicated to get right.

To illustrate that there aren't any contradictions (other than the final bit about the reflection in the glass). Consider a macro shot showing partial hands, partial tweezers, and pocket watch internals. That's much is certainly doable. Now imagine the partial left hand holding a half submerged pocket watch, fingertips of right hand holding front half of tweezers that are clasping a tiny gear, positioned above the work piece with the drop of water falling directly below. Capture the watchmaker's perspective. I could sketch that so an image model capable of 3D reasoning should have no trouble.

It's precisely the sort of scene you'd use to test a raytracer. One thing I can immediately think to add is nested dielectrics. Perhaps small transparent glass beads sitting at the bottom of the dish of water with the edge of the pocket watch resting on them, make the dish transparent glass, and place the camera level with the top of the dish facing forward?

https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2019/05/nested-dielectrics.htm...

A second thing I can think to add is a flame. Perhaps place a tealight candle on the far side of the dish, the flame visible through (and distorted by) the water and glass beads?

Maybe they're so advanced they learned to write to the palette registers mid-scanline.

There's no good scientific way to test a closed-source model with both nondeterministic and subjective output.

This example image was generated using the API on high, not the low reasoning version. (it is slow and takes 2 minutes lol)

This is the best kind of science there is: direct, empirical test.

If the results are quantifiable/objective and repeatable it's scientific, how is it not scientific?

The reasoning amount is part of the evaluation isn't it?

This feels incredibly AI generated

Because both Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT Images 2.0 have touted strong reasoning capabilities, and this particular prompt has more objective, easy-to-validate criteria as opposed to the subjective nature of images.

I have more subjective prompts to test reasoning but they're your-mileage-may-vary (however, gpt-2-image has surprisingly been doing much better on more objective criteria in my test cases)

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I wouldn’t say it’s terrible. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge step forward in terms of quality compared to what I’ve seen before from AI

This is from Gemini - https://lens.usercontent.google.com/banana?agsi=CmdnbG9iYWw6...

that is interesting cause I feel gpt-image-1 did have that feature.

(source: https://chatgpt.com/share/69e83569-b334-8320-9fbf-01404d18df...)

I'll bite: no I don't think so. If the examples are not cherry-picked and by "image model" we mean just the ability to generate pictures, this looks like parity with human excellence, there isn't much space for further improvement. The images don't just look real, they look tasteful- the model is not just generating a credible image, it's generating one that shows the talent of a good photographer/ designer/ artist.

I'm honestly unsure what could be improved at this point.

Consistency? So it fails less often?

Based on the released images, (especially the one "screenshot" of the Mac desktop) I feel like the best images from this model are so visually flawless that the only way to tell they're fake is by reasoning about the content of the image itself (ex. "Apple never made a red iPhone 15, so this image is probably fake" or "Costco prices never end in .96 so this image is probably fake")

If I may address this with both skepticism and curiosity, why. I think I speak for everyone when I say I would pay to go back to facebook 2018. No algorithm, no ai.

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If you end up creating something sufficiently similar, yes in fact you do. Or rather, you have done a copyright infringement and retroactive payment may be one of the remedies.

This also applies to AI, just worse because:

A) AI is not a human brain, and pretending that the process of human authorship is the same as AI is either a massive misunderstanding of how the mechanics and architecture of these systems, or plain disingenuous nonsense.

B) AI has no capability of original thought. Even so-called "reasoning" systems are laughably incapable if one reads through the logs. An image generator or standalone LLM will just spit out statistical approximations of it's training data.

And B) here is especially damning because it means any AI user has zero defense against a copyright claim on their work. This creates enormous legal risks.

The model for copyright trolling is trivial. You take a corpus of Open Source code, GPL if you wish to be petty much nearly all other licenses still demand attribution, and then you simply run a search on against all the code generated by AI bots on github, or any repo with AI tooling config files in it.

Won't be long before the FSF does something similar.

A very basic point of view. If you can't see how you're being disingenuous, there's no point in having a conversation with you.

Not a fair comparison... A model can ingest a countless number works in day and reproduce stylistic fingerprints on demand, at zero marginal cost. How are the people it learned from meant to compete with that?

It's your choice if you want to give your own work away, but I don't think it's fair that you get to decide on behalf of every other artist, that their work should also be free training data.

Do you want all musicians and artists to put their work behind paywalls? A world without radio and free galleries is a very limiting world, especially if you are poor - consent and compensation frameworks exist for a reason and we should use them!

Yes. And it can be done in less "communist" ways; have countries' governments invest serious capital (even if they have to raise debt - they do anyway) in income producing assets related to AI, like large stakes in AI labs, building data centres etc.

"socialise ownership and control" ... this always ends up with just one person owning(not literally) it, through sheer misuse of political power.

As far as I can see as of now, there is no "realistic" way out. It's a problem of human nature... People are corrupt, people with authority are more corrupt, and people with money and authority, even more. Come intelligent and cheaply mass-produceable robots, and we'll have a new, 4th level spinup too that will be worse than the first 3, combined.

Can you explain some of these alternatives that are so bad?

I figure capitalism may soon become obsolete. But I don’t think this speculation is going to make for interesting discussion on here.

I find the technical discussion more interesting and could do without some of the moral grandstanding in the comments.

Seize the means of production!

Is this satire?

> Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves

Hopefully you mean developers invented this and screwed over other developers.

How many folks working on the code at OpenAI have meaninfully contributed to Open Source? I agree that because it is the same "job title" people might feel less sympathy but it's not the same people.

The same developers who fed the machine, didn't make the machine.

Your comparison is incorrect.

Rob Pike cares. In other places apart from HN there is more resistance. Perceived lack of resistance has multiple reasons:

- Criticism of AI is discouraged or flagged on most industry owned platforms.

- The loudest pro-AI software engineers work for companies that financially benefit from AI.

- Many are silent because they fear reprisals.

- Many software engineers lack agency and prefer to sit back and understand what is happening instead of shaping what is happening.

- Many software engineers are politically naive and easily exploited.

Artists have a broader view and are often not employed by the perpetrators of the theft.

Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end) whereas professional coders have generally abandoned ownership by seeding it as "work product" to thier employers. Copy my drawings and you steal from me, a person. Copy a bit of code or a texture pack from a game and you steal from whatever private equity owns that game studio. Private equity doesnt have feelings to hurt.

Looks good to me. Would be nice to see the process. I'm having trouble with parts of the stride when the far leg is ahead. Doing 8-directional isometric right now.

Use the imagegen skill in codex and ask it to create sprites. It works really well.

Yeah, skills to make them a cool 10mn a year

eh, i don't think personalities are trained. on screen presence for sure, but you'd see right through it IRL.

Chess exists solely for the sake of the humans playing it. Even if machines solved chess, people would rather play chess against a person than a machine because it is a social activity in a way. It's like playing tennis versus a person compared to tennis against a wall.

Photographs, videos, and digital media in general, in contrast, are used for much, much more than just socializing.

"Solved" seems a tad overstated if you scroll up to Simonw's Where's Waldo test with deformed faces plus a confabulated target when prompted for an edit to highlight the hidden character with an arrow.

As someone born in 1975 I always felt until the last couple of years that I had been stuck in a long period of stagnation compared to an earlier generation. My grandmother who was born in the 1910s got to witness adoption of electricity, mass transit, radio, television, telephony, jet flights and even space exploration before I was born.

Feels like now is a bit of a catchup after pretty tepid period that was most of my life.

That's a mistake~ None of the models successfully passed the Flat Earth composition test. I've updated the passing criteria to be more explicit as well. Thanks for catching that!

OpenAI actually has really good adherence, but occasionally tends to introduce its own almost equivalent of "tone mapping", making hyper-localized edits frustrating.

I don’t know how much work it is for you, but one thing a lot of people do, myself included, is take the original image, make a change to it using something like NB, then paste that as the topmost layer in something like Krita/Pixelmator. After that, we’ll mask and feather in only the parts we actually want to change. It doesn’t always work if it changes the overall color balance or filters out certain hues, it can be a real pain but it does the job in some cases.

The Flux models (like Kontext) are actually surprisingly good at making very minimal changes to the rest of the image, but unfortunately their understanding of complex prompts is much weaker than the closed, proprietary models.

I will say that I’ve found Gemini 3.0 (NB Pro) does a relatively decent job of avoiding unnecessary changes - sometimes exceeding the more recent NB2, and it scored quite well on comparative image-editing benchmarks.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing

So the prompts are tuned and adjusted on a per-model basis. If you look at the number of attempts, each receives a specific prompt variation depending on the model. This honestly isn't as much of an issue these days because SOTA models natural language parsing (particularly the multimodal ones) has eliminated a lot of the byzantine syntax requirements of the SD/SDXL days.

The template prompt seen in each comparison gets adjusted through a guided LLM which has fine-tuned system prompts to rewrite prompts. The goal is to foster greater diversity while preserving intent, so the image model has a better chance of getting the image right.

Getting to your suggestion for posting all the raw prompts, that's actually a great idea. Too bad I didn't think about it until you suggested it. And if you multiply it out - there's 15 distinct test cases against 22 models at this point, each with an average of about 8 attempts so we’re talking about thousands of prompts many of which are scattered across my hard drive. I might try to do this as a future follow-up.

I’ll have to give it another try. Its predecessor, Hunyuan Image 2.0, scored pretty poorly when I tested it last year: 2 out of 15, so it'll be interesting to see how much it has improved.

Here's ZiT, Gpt-Image-2, and Hunyuan Image 2 for reference:

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=hy2,g2,zt

Note: It won't show up in some of the newer image comparisons (Angelic Forge, Flat Earth, etc) because it's been deprecated for a while but in the tests where it was used (Yarrctic Circle, Not the Bees, etc.) it's pretty rough.

Gemini often rejects photos of random people (even ones it generated itself) because it thinks they look too similar to some well known person.

There are models specifically for detecting well known people https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/celebritie...

I don't know tbh. I've tried it on 10-20 various level of famous standups and Gemini refuses every time

Just for testing, I just tried this https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_KJdP4FLGTo/sddefault.jpg ("Redesign this image in a brutalist graphic design style"). Gemini refuses (api as well as UI), OpenAI does it

AI will seemingly always be ...

You do realize that the whole image generation field is barely 10 years old?

I remember how I was able to generate mnist digits for the first time about 10 years ago - that seemed almost like magic!

This happens all too frequently when you ask a GenAI model to create an image with a large crowd especially a “Where’s Waldo?” style scenes, where by definition you’re going to be examining individual faces very closely.

What about the faces of the people ChatGPT killed?

There have already been several attempts to procedurally generate Where’s Waldo? style images since the early Stable Diffusion days, including experiments that used a YOLO filter on each face and then processed them with ADetailer.

It's a difficult test for genai to pass. As I mentioned in a different thread, it requires a holistic understanding (in that there can only be one Waldo Highlander style), while also holding up to scrutiny when you examine any individual, ordinary figure.

I've actually been feeding them into Claude Opus 4.7 with its new high resolution image inputs, with mixed results - in one case there was no raccoon but it was SURE there was and told me it was definitely there but it couldn't find it.

Is there? The moment you look closely at the puzzle (which is... the whole point of Where's Waldo), you notice all the deformities and errors.

I tried

> please add a giant red arrow to a red circle around the raccoon holding a ham radio or add a cross through the entire image if one does not exist

and got this. I'm not sure I know what a ham radio looks like though.

https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/ffef1a8e639bc85b71b692c3ba1...

Funny how it can look convincing from far away but once you zoom in you find out most characters have a mix of leprosy and skin cancer.

Cost me < 1 cents - https://elsrc.com/elsrc/waldo/wojak.jpg

And this medium quality, high resolution https://elsrc.com/elsrc/waldo/10_wojaks.jpg was 13cents

p.s. aaaand that's soft launch my SaaS above, you can replace wojak.jpg with anything you want and it will paint that. It's basically appending to prompt defined by elsrc's dashboard. Hopefully a more sane way to manage genai content. Be gentle to my server, hn!

I found it on the 2nd image! On the 1st one not yet...

Can it generate non halloween version though?

This lower-is-better danse macabre, nightmares inducing ratio feels like interesting proxy for models capability.

The real NFTs where the images we generated along the way

The people in this image remind me of early this person does not exist, in the best way

I tried it on the ChatGPT web UI and it also worked, although the ham radio looks like a handbag to me.

https://postimg.cc/wyxgCgNY

>I think that image cost 40 cents.

Kinda made me sad assuming the author didn't license anything to OpenAI.

I recognize it could revert (99% of?) progress if all the labs moved to consent-based training sets exclusively, but I can't think of any other fair way.

$.40 does not represent the appropriate value to me considering the desirability of the IP and its earning potential in print and elsewhere. If the world has to wait until it’s fair, what of value will be lost? (I suppose this is where the big wrinkle of foreign open weight models comes in.)

The faces...that's nice that it turned a kid's book into an abomination

A startling number of people either have no arms, one arm, a half of an arm, or a shrunken arm; how odd!

Fed into a clear Claude Code max effort session with : "Inspect waldo2.png, and give me the pixel location of a raccoon holding a ham radio.". It sliced the image into small sections and gave:

"Found the raccoon holding a ham radio in waldo2.png (3840×2160).

  - Raccoon center: roughly (460, 1680)                                                                                            
  - Ham radio (walkie-talkie) center: roughly (505, 1650) — antenna tip around (510, 1585)                                         
  - Bounding box (raccoon + radio): approx x: 370–540, y: 1550–1780                                                                
                                                                                                                                   
  It's in the lower-left area of the image, just right of the red-and-white striped souvenir umbrella, wearing a green vest. "

Oh my. You still make those? Ever since model chupacobra 2.46 we have AI agents making those for us. At one point I was on the fence about totally outsourcing it to agents but it's way more efficient. Now I have 50 posts a day under different names.

Scale matters. Using Photoshop took vastly more time and skill to pull off realistic images, limiting how many could be made. With image generation there's no practical limit. Some of it will be used for relatively innocuous purposes like making joke images for friends or menus for restaurants. But the floodgates are open for more socially negative uses.

If you're the only one in the world with an internal combustion engine, the environmental impact doesn't matter at all. When they're as common as they are now, we should start thinking about large-scale effects.

It turns out that effort matters

You audit thousands of genAI prototype candidates?

Are those sufficiently valuable that the death of photographic evidence is worth it?

That's a multimodal model with text output, I think GP is asking about image generators.

Repetition rather than novelty is good for learning.

So the use case is just IP theft so you can get more Paw Patrol?

AI aside, if you’ve truly exhausted all the simple readers, maybe she should move on to more advanced books instead of repeating more of the same and gamifying it, which seems a great way to destroy a child’s natural curiosity.

I used to think like what you describe, but I've fallen on the side of "art is just more emotionally resonant human communication". And most of the time human communication with more effort and thought behind it. AI art falls short on both being human and, on average, having more effort or thought behind it than your general interaction at the supermarket.

I will say, it can be emotionally resonant though - but it's a borrowed property from the perception of human communication and effort that made the art the models were trained on.

Art is for the producer, and if they feel it’s necessary for them to produce it than it’s necessary for them, and what is necessary for the individual extends to the society they’re in.

The difference between "art in general" and this is scale and speed. Sure, I'll grant you that people are going to engage in deception with or without this but the barrier to entry with this is literally on the floor. Do you have a $5 prepaid VISA? You can generate whatever narrative you want in 30 seconds. Replace the $5 Prepaid VISA with the pocketbook of a three letter agency and it starts getting crazy.

If you want to say the complete destruction of truth is worth it because some people are having "fun" then idk.

I'm not convinced that "arguably useful" is sufficient to offset its much more heavily-used application as a casually-available disinformation engine.

I mean, the cat's out of the bag; but the cat stinks.

My workplace does this for EVERYTHING. And they are always immediately obviously AI slop, both because we all know they wouldn't ever pay an actual artist to create graphics, but also because the people creating the graphics have no sense of style and let it generate the most generic shit possible with zero creativity.

It's definitely not helpful. It's just annoying and disgusting and a waste of resources IMO. But hey at least Powerpoint presentations have AI slop instead of stuff taken from Google Images!?

Democratizing visual communication? Kim Jong Goon has taken away your pen and paper?

It's always felt like way overhyping to call something "democratization" when it's something I could do as a middle schooler in 2005. It takes some skill to do very well but it's not like basic diagram creation isn't something people already could do for basically free (I create figures for my job all the time now and chatGPT is more expensive than tools I use for design).

Commissioning high quality diagrams from a designer is expensive and I guess it's much cheaper now to essentially commission something but idk, "democratization" still feels weird for just undercutting humans on price.

Can these people not just create a diagram with their own hands? Literally a pencil and paper.

I am at the point where I would prefer a poorly human drawn diagram with terrible handwriting over AI slop.

No idea why you were down voted, I think that's exactly how this will get used.

I'm already imagining this is how the local live indie band night I sometimes go to will generate poster images each week for the bands that are playing, whether to put up at the venue or post to social media. And the bands might be using it to design images to put on their t-shirts and other merch. I already know some indie bands using this stuff for their album covers.

So the benefits are that something that was already being mass produced with no issue is slightly easier to mass produce?

It's not a particularly compelling argument.

How do these justify the costs to society?

Did the same for my front garden.

Not withstanding a few code violations, it generated some good ideas we were then able to tweak. The main thing was we had no idea of what we wanted to do, but seeing a lot of possibilities overlaid over the existing non-garden got us going. We were then able to extend the theme to other parts of the yard.

HN is absolutely not more critical of AI output than the norm.

It's been true for various technologies that HN (and tech audiences in general) have a more nuanced view, but AI flips the script on that entirely. It's the tech world who are amazed by this, producing and being delighted by endless blogposts and 7-second concept trailers.

I recently shoulder-surfed a family member scrolling away on their social media feed, and every single image was obvious AI slop. But it didn't matter. She loved every single one, watched videos all the way through, liked and commented on them... just total zombie-consumption mode and it was all 100% AI generated. I've tried in the past pointing out that it's all AI generated and nothing is real, and they simply don't care. People are just pac-man gobbling up "content". It's pretty sad/scary.

The connection with the artist, directly, or across space and time, is a critical part of any artwork. It is one human attempting to communicate some emotional experience to another human.

When I watch a Lynch film I feel some connection to the man David Lynch. When I see a AI artwork, there is nothing to connect with, no emotional experience is being communicated, it is just empty. It's highest aspiration is elevator music, just being something vaguely stimulating in the background.

Whether art is considered good is in practice highly contextual. One of those contexts is who (what) made it.

Provenance is part of the work. If a roomful of monkeys banged out something that looked like anything, I'd absolutely hang it on my wall. I would not say the same for 99% of AI generated art.

yeah I'm not sure I'm in agreement that we can hand-wave assets and ads as entire classes of valuable content

This is the key point. In my view it's just like anything else, if AI can help humans create better work, it's a good thing.

I think what we'll find is that visual design is no longer as much of a moat for expressing concepts, branding, etc. In a way, AI-generated design opens the door for more competition on merits, not just those who can afford the top tier design firm.

Are there any models that are specifically trained to produce diagrams as SVG? I'd much prefer that to diffusion-based raster image generation models for a few reasons:

- The usual advantages of vector graphics: resolution-independence, zoom without jagged edges, etc.

- As a consequence of the above, vector graphics (particularly SVG) can more easily be converted to useful tactile graphics for blind people.

- Vector graphics can more practically be edited.

There are already more games being released on Steam than anyone can keep up with, I'm not sure how adding another "wave" on top of it helps.

> Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites.

It’s really not. That's actually a pet peeve of mine as someone who used to spent a lot of time messing with pixel art in Aseprite.

Nobody takes the time to understand that the style of pixel art is not the same thing as actual pixel art. So you end up with these high-definition, high-resolution images that people try to pass off as pixel art, but if you zoom in even a tiny bit, you see all this terrible fringing and fraying.

That happens because the palette is way outside the bounds of what pixel art should use, where proper pixel art is generally limited to maybe 8 to 32 colors, usually.

There are plenty of ways to post-process generative images to make them look more like real pixel art (square grid alignment, palette reduction, etc.), but it does require a bit more manual finesse [1], and unfortunately most people just can’t be bothered.

[1] - https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

Are you kidding? I think I see more vitriol for AI in gaming communities than anywhere else. To the point where steam now requires you to disclose its usage

AI for textures for over a decade? What AI?

>You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted

Do you have any references for such cases? I have seen talk of such thing at risk, but I am unaware of any specific instances of it occuring

I don't care how many times you write "cute," having my vacation time programmed with that level of granularity and imposed obligation sounds like the definition of "dystopian."

If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself.

Edit: I'm not an outlier here. There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits, going back at least to the Brady Bunch.

You are kidding, right?

It's good that my friends don't make a coffee date feel like a board meeting (with an agenda shared by post 14 working days ahead of the meeting, form for proxy voting attached).

I'm not seeing how it takes more than 5 minutes to type up an itinerary. If you want to make it cute and silly, just change up the font and color and add some clip art.

If this is the best use case that exists for AI image generation, I'm only further convinced the tech is at best largely useless.

I think "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this argument. Better how?

Is an AI generated photo of your app/site going to be more accurate than a screenshot? Or is an AI generated image of your product going to convey the quality of it more than a photo would?

I think Sora also showed that the novelty of generating just "content" is pretty fleeting.

I would be interested to see if any of the next round of ChatGPT advertisements use AI generated images. Because if not, they don’t even believe in their own product.

"Artisanal art" as it were.

> Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

What? Those items are luxuries when made by humans because they are physical goods where every single item comes with a production and distribution cost.

The goal of art isn't to be perfect or as realistic as possible. The goal of art is to express, and enjoy that unique expression.

I'm probably in a weird subgroup that isn't representative of the general public, but I've found myself preferring "rough" art/logos/images/etc, basically because it signals a human put time into it. Or maybe not preferring, but at least noticing it more than the generally highly refined/polished AI artwork that I've been seeing.

Only novel art is interesting. AI can't really do novel. It's a prediction algorithm; it imitates. You can add noise, but that mostly just makes it worse. It can be used to facilitate original stuff though.

But so many people want to make art, and it's so cheap to distribute it, that art is already commoditized. If people prefer human-created art, satisfying that preference is practically free.

The issue being, it's not an expression of anything. Merely like a random sensation, maybe some readable intent, but generic in execution, which isn't about anything even corporate art should be about. Are we going to give up on art, altogether?

Edit: One of the possible outcomes may be living in a world like in "Them" with glasses on. Since no expression has any meaning anymore, the message is just there being a signal of some kind. (Generic "BUY" + associated brand name in small print, etc.)

Completely unrelated, but I am curious about your keyboard layout since you mistyped ö instead of - these two symbols are side by side in the Icelandic layout, and the ö is where - in the English (US) layout. As such this is a common type-o for people who regularly switch between the Icelandic and the English (US) layout (source: I am that person). I am curious whether more layouts where that could be common.

So we get a fresh new cheap way to spread propaganda and lies and erode trust all across society while cementing power and control for a few at the top, and in return get a few measly icons (as if there weren’t literally thousands of them freely available already) and silly images for momentaneous amusement?

What a rotten exchange.

Is that worth the cost of this technology? Both in terms of financial shenanigans and its environmental cost?

[dead]

Exactly how I feel. There is already more art, movies, music, books, video games and more made by human beings than I can experience in my lifetime. Why should I waste any time on content generated by the word guessing machine?

Nobody can be bothered to make my cat out of Lego and the size of mount Everest but if an AI did I'd sure love to see it.

Your quip is pithy but meaningless.

Because I'm not an artist and can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have? This idea that only experts are allowed to do things is just crazy to me. A band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love artisanal thing. Were you mad when people made band posters with MS word instead of hiring a fucking typesetter? I just don't get it.