Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how the author could be so blind to the simple fact that computer generated articles and images are not useful. I mean if you want to replicate low quality blog spam and poorly written local news blurbs, maybe you could con a few companies into using your service. Or if you want to destroy the stock image market or the album art market (maybe that kind of "disruption" is somehow beneficial to you?) I guess more power to you. But beyond those very narrow and largely meaningless endeavors, I think computational statistics (what the author calls "artificial intelligence") has yet to prove itself in literally all of the use cases the author brings up.

View on HN

OpenAI published an article about some of the things people are using DALL-E for:

https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-2-extending-creativity/

I thought this quote was particularly insightful:

> “Conceptualizing one’s ideas is one of the most gatekept processes in the modern world,” Kamp says. “Everyone has ideas — not everyone has access to training or encouragement enough to confidently render them. I feel empowered by the ability to creatively iterate on a feeling or idea, and I deeply believe that all people deserve that sense of empowerment.”

Images of astronauts on horses may have questionable commercial use or artistic merit, but DALL-E excels at concept art. The true value here isn’t using those images directly, it’s using them to brainstorm and test out creative ideas that can later be turned into something real (a product, a movie, art, etc.) by a human.

I don't follow any of that. If I have an idea about a new type of toaster...how does DALL-E help me by giving me a bunch of computer generated toaster images? If I want to make a painting of a solar system floating in front of a nebula, I could ask DALL-E to do it, and maybe I'll get some ideas on composition/style, but is that really such a "gatekept" process? And does it even matter? Is my art better or more meaningful after DALL-E gives me some random references?

Toasters are probably not a great example, but concept art is a big deal in most product development / creative industries. Tech, cars, Hollywood, fashion, anime, etc.

The process usually involves finding and hiring an artist and working with them as they create lots and lots of designs until you find one you like, and then more sketches until the design is refined. So you either need to have a significant amount of money to hire artists for an extended project, or the artistic ability to do it yourself.

Using DALL-E instead, you get 4 high quality images in 20 seconds. If you don't like what it comes up with, you adjust your prompt, add more detailed instructions, and keep experimenting. And anyone can do this, regardless of artistic ability, and it's free (at least for now).

That's not how DALL-E works. It doesn't understand specifics enough to give you something useable in any of those fields. A car company is not going to use a DALL-E image as a car. It might have a professional designer, who themselves use DALL-E to look for something interesting, but that is not "disrupting" the car concept drawing market like the author claims. DALL-E isn't capable of that. Same with tech, Hollywood, etc. For fashion, I suppose you could just create whatever weird thing DALL-E throws up, but again this isn't any kind of disruption, it's just a novelty thing.

I am not sure how you can be so derogatory yet apparently so ignorant. Have you even seen what DALLE-2 (or imagen) can generate? DALLE-2 does not have to 'prove itself' it is clearly on-par with human designers in terms of quality and price. There even is a product on the market right now called Midjourney that is worse in quality than DALLE-2 yet is growing incredibly fast and already breaks even economically.

If NLP tasks make a similar jump in quality as DALLE-2 did when compared to DALLE then they too might disrupt the writer industry.

DALLE-2 is not in any way "on par" with human designers, unless they are designers of the things I already mentioned like album art or stock photos. Even with the latter it's not particularly good unless the subject involves something that doesn't require fine detail to look decent. Midjourney is not breaking even because it creates useful, high quality art. It is breaking even because of the novelty of DALL-E and I don't think it will last particularly long in the spotlight.

Midjourney != DALLE2

One has a much smaller customer base than the other and effectively amounts to, as you suggest, a hype club that finetunes open works and monetizes by giving early access to members.

The other is backed by Microsoft and currently scales to 100,000 users.

To answer your question - not everyone spent their time learning to master art and design. The idea that this is stuff is trivial and devoid of value for a beginner is non-sense. It is useful anytime a coder is in need of custom assets matching an English description. Will it offend some artistic sensibilities? Probably, but have you looked around lately? Nobody cares about that anyway, unfortunately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com