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Comment by smokedetector1 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, as someone who has thought of making an "AI wrapper" app myself - why would I use this rather than go to Gemini/ChatGPT/StableDiffusion/etc and prompting it myself?

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I'd say it's definitely a personal preference.

Using a wrapper gives you a few benefits. - It lets you shortcut the time to having a refined prompt that gives you a somewhat reliable output

- Flux (like some models) don't have readily available interfaces as the model is usually required to be self-hosted. For TattooPRO I'm use Together.ai as they host Flux and I can then use their API instead of hosting it myself. The outcome is that users can then get a nice user interface to generate Tattoos with Flux and have some additional features like history and favorites to keep track of their generations.

I've also tried to make the experience as mobile-friendly as possible.

Hope the answers your question

Its not that theres no benefit at all, it's more like does it give me enough upside compared to something that is easy and free, doesnt require me trusting an app Ive never heard of, taking out my credit card, worrying about getting ripped off, etc.

But I could well be wrong, I wish you success.

Hehe, the non answer you got is spot on what I expected.

Here's the deal: AI tattoo generator, what could possibly go wrong? Liability. That is also why people want to pay, even if the dev cannot or tries not to be held accountable and even if it is for some Electron frontend for a customized prompt. Paying gives them [the (potential) customer] the feeling they get a worthy result. A lot of services work like this, btw, and it helps if the service is actually not cheap. Because why spend very little money on a tattoo design. You're worth it, right?

My take is simple. If you want a tattoo and CBA to do your own research (via a search engine, a professional tattoo artist, some kind of curated database, or gasp CAD it yourself like you'd do your 3D print) then ML-based search could be a viable, modern alternative but I would not want to get burned by '6 fingers' in hindsight. AI output needs to be qualified by a qualified human being, and you [random person who wants tattoo] are probably not said qualified human being. But could it aid a qualified human being? Absolutely, just a smaller customer base. So if you want to go for volume, you pretend to serve a customer base you cannot reasonably serve well.

Eh, I think it's a neat idea. No one's forced to use or buy this - as is the case with any offered service. Also, the 'qualified human being' in the end is still the tattoo artist who's actually doing the tattoo in this use case. I assume most people who would use this won't just get a 1:1 copy tattoo of an AI generated result, the artist can still reiterate and use the designs as a draft or inspiration.

I think it can make sense when you have some secret-sauce mixed in for whatever the application is. A custom fine-tuned model, text embedding, LoRAs, etc. It's certainly less convincing to me when someone offers just a plain wrapper around free/cheap/easily-accessible models.

But I can see the appeal of making it a bit easier for non-technical people when you add in surrounding features (favorites, history, etc.).

At this point even the fine tuning isn’t a big differentiator. It costs a few bucks to make one in Replicate and you don’t even have to caption the photos because it can use another model to do that (I usually download and improve them for the second run). You just upload a zip file of images and give it a keyword.

There’s an art to fine tuning but plenty of laypeople have done it, it just takes time to experiment and some cash for the cloud providers.

I think your definition of laypeople and my definition of laypeople are different. If I talked to anyone not in my IT department about fine-tuning, their eyes would glaze over in 2 seconds.

These types of services are, in my opinion, targeted at the people who live their entire computer lives in Chrome & Excel. Not people who know what fine-tuning is or can recognize what "Replicate" is without Google.

I don’t mean it’s common knowledge among laypeople, just that someone determined enough to spend a weekend reading image gen documentation and the StableDiffusion subreddit can probably figure it out. It’s not like they need to take a months long bootcamp to learn to code first. Once they sign up for replicate (and I guess github for SSO first), all they have to do is find the page for the fine tuning and upload a zipfile of images.

Its not that it has no appeal, its that I expect it to be a tough sell to get people to actually take out their credit card for this when its free and good enough to go to chat.com or gemini. But I may be wrong.

Yeah I have the same issue with these types of projects as well. Could be interesting to map it on a 3D body part or scan so you could see how it looks on your body or next to your other tattoos.

I like this, will look into adding these features as it sounds fun to build

I’d recommend looking at how Photoshop does it. Those asset marketplaces sell template images that contain a layer that maps the user’s image onto the template surface, like for t-shirts and other printing product mockups.

https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/mock-up-a-t...

Will have a look, thanks!

You're not the target user. Average users have no idea what you're talking about.

I think the target user is capable of going to chatgpt and saying "give me tattoo ideas"

By that logic, no one should build a startup that generates tattoos then?

Speak to average, non-technical users. You'd be surprised how many people have a very vague idea what ChatGPT is capable of. They aren't using it everyday like you and I. Relating this back to original comment, expecting them to know about effective prompting techniques, Stable Diffusion etc is unrealistic.

One of the reasons OpenAI offers APIs, is so you can build startups on top of their tech for average non-technical users.

> By that logic, no one should build a startup that generates tattoos then?

Is this like a law of the universe I'm not aware of, that you must be able to create a profitable startup that generates tattoo ideas?

> One of the reasons OpenAI offers APIs, is so you can build startups on top of their tech for average non-technical users.

A profitable product will make use of APIs to do something that a user couldn't do almost just as well by just prompting ChatGPT themselves.

It's funny that we went from "ChatGPT is going to unlock AGI and displace millions of workers" to "the only thing that came out of ChatGPT is a million of API wrappers that do nothing worthwhile at all" in like two years.

I mean it's basically the same thing as NFT/crypto grifters, just on a different tech stack. It's not about actually solving problems, it's about speculation to them.

Time to make a markov chain as a service startup...

> "the only thing that came out of ChatGPT is a million of API wrappers that do nothing worthwhile at all"

It’s because the base service does so much that people feel the wrappers aren’t needed, not because there are no real use cases for LLMs.

> Is this like a law of the universe I'm not aware of, that you must be able to create a profitable startup that generates tattoo ideas?

That's not what I said. Your question/argument was why build a wrapper when someone can go to ChatGPT and generate a tattoo. You can make that argument for any startup that wraps AI image models. If everyone followed that argument, there would be no startups in this space.

> A profitable product will make use of APIs to do something that a user couldn't do almost just as well by just prompting ChatGPT themselves

Exactly, average users won't know how to steer ChatGPT to generate high quality tattoos. In fact, OP is not even using an OpenAI model, they are using Flux which has no direct consumer interface (from the creators of Flux) and much higher quality image generation.

I wish OP success on his project.

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