Comment by adamhowell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamhowell | Hacker News Reader

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I'm currently working fulltime on AI-powered design suite Accomplice (https://accomplice.ai) and if you ask me on a good day I would tell you I do think there's already huge commercial potential. On a bad day, though ;)

My current approach is a "model marketplace" (https://accomplice.ai/models) where the most popular open source text-to-image models (VQGAN+CLIP, Disco Diffusion, DALL-E Mega coming soon…), sit alongside the most popular open source style transfer models, and then finally I have the ability for a user to finetune their own models using a simple drag-and-drop tool (https://accomplice.ai/no-code-model-training).

Using this approach a user has enough models to try or train that they can have a higher hit rate. For example, Accomplice currently has finetuned models for photo realistic people (https://accomplice.ai/models/f58bfa91-bb18-406f-a0e1-db00fcf...), watercolor backgrounds (https://accomplice.ai/models/91b8a080-faca-4ff4-8b11-64b0789...), etc…

So theoretically if there were a searchable marketplace of 100s of different finetuned models people could choose from, they would use it much like an iStockPhoto and be able to create the kind of images they want instead of just downloading them.

But it's of course a constant work in progress. Slowly growing though and lots of promising stuff ahead!

I meant commercialization potential for companies like Google, where anything less than a hundred million is probably a failure :) Hopefully for the non-Googles of the world (i.e. you), there's a good pathway forward!

I wanted to try your site, but after clicking on the link in the email, it tries to send me through some redirectingat.com link which is blocked by my ad blocker.

What does that link do?

Update: Ah, found the "Tracking" setting in Sendgrid that I thought I had already turned off. Off for sure now. Thanks again for the heads up!

The confirmation link should only be going to accomplice.ai unless Sendgrid is doing some link tracking that I've just forgotten about. Could you forward that email to adam at accomplice dot ai if you get a chance. Thanks for letting me know!

That will get turned back on automatically in an "update".

Same thing happened to me multiple times across multiple platforms: SendGrid, Mandrill, MailJet, MailGun. I always turn off the tracking (enabled by default on all of them), but magically its back on a few weeks/months later. I've given up finding a solution and just revisit my settings every few months to check on it.

Your headshots model's outputs look creepy. The eyes are off; e.g. the young african girl. You may want to tune your loss functions to fix that.

Most of the blue eyed ones have the Eyes of Ibad from Dune. (And several of the ones that aren't blue eyed also have weird things going on in the sclerae.)

The two “african american” ones look south or maybe southeast asian (and the one of those that is a “young...girl” looks like a, maybe young, adult.)

All the ones without a racial/ethnic prompt are white, and disproportionately blue eyed (again, including sclerae.)

(It indicate “diverse”, and yet all of the examples read white or Asian, though the unlabeled darker-skinned male figure in the group of six at the top is ambiguous enough to be plausibly be something else.)

The “beautiful woman with curly red hair” has rather radical facial asymmetry, and straight to slightly wavy hair.

Cool project! Will follow along

*throws money at his screen*

Why would people do this when aspiring artists are practically giving their real photos and paintings for free on places like deviant art? Why further commoditize something that's already been commoditize to practically free?

Well, I'm focusing on business use cases – stock images and how Accomplice could be useful for marketing and content creation.

i.e. The ability to easily take your logo and stylize it: https://accomplice.ai/@adam/iterations/2bcc90ad-3237-486a-8d...

Create a photorealistic avatar whenever you need it: https://accomplice.ai/@adam/iterations/988b7d54-dc39-43b1-b5...

Easily remove the background of a photo: https://accomplice.ai/models/97746c4b-c6f0-49cb-ae1b-859716b...

Upscale a photo: https://accomplice.ai/models/bd4619ee-8202-4cf0-a04e-291820f...

Etc etc. AI can make all this stuff easier. And you have a sense of ownership over what you create. All in one place where you can collaborate on all of it with your team. I feel like that's valuable. It's certainly a tool I've always wanted.

But, also, as a bit of an aside – if the Googles and OpenAIs of the world are just going to bite every artist's style anyway with a mostly black box service and training set… it feels like the option for an artist to train/finetune their own model, promote it and possibly make money off of that is worth trying.

I'm an artist, and I'd absolutely love to use something like this to inspire me or to give me something to continue working with on my own.

In one sense it's kind of like a much "smarter" photoshop filter, where it can make your own art/photos look more like what you want (ex: Van Gogh, Dali, Picasso, or combinations of those, or something completely weird/new/different).

You could also train the models on your own work and have it generate art in your own style that could inspire you or could be useful to you either as a base to work from or that you could take interesting elements from to create new art.

Similar things can be done in music, by the way, and that would be really useful to musicians too.

Poets could use something like this to create poetry, novel writers to write novels, etc..

This is really an improvement on the collaboration potential between humans and computers -- which is probably why it's called "Accomplice".

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