Can you talk a little about team size, work process, funding and revenue stream? I think the effort required for such an undertaking is vastly underestimated by readers.
> I think the effort required for such an undertaking is vastly underestimated by readers.
Haha for sure. Hosting a real-time ML model for people to do sub 1-second inferences at HN-load scale is definitely nontrivial.
I can't help but to feel that this would be a better fit for the fad of NFTs as well, as opposed to ugly monkeys or other asset flips that were pretty obvious cash grabs.
Either way, good luck!
The question is, would people buy, since there are near endless, and a huge difference is that these don't have a story attached to them...
Oh, not even that, since while some data ends up on the blockchain, i find the whole ownership concept a bit nebulous at best, much like how people mock the whole "oh, just right click the image to save it" thing.
What i was actually referring to was more along the lines of the collector economy idea itself - people willing to exchange their monetary resources for something that they enjoy. Having it be out of a sense of endearment and aesthetic enjoyment (waifus and husbandos) rather than the desire to flip those things (possibly a number of other NFTs or collectibles) seems to be less morally questionable to me!
While i'm not really familiar with the whole NFT space, to me it seems that projects like CryptoKitties are more agreeable and thus viable in this space, as would AI generated images of cute characters! Actually, that seems like a really good fit to me, regardless of how the actual "uniqueness" or "ownership" aspect would play out.
I too like to collect things, my latest obsession was lingerie. But I always have the image of extreme hoarders in the back of my mind, which quite often scares me out of collecting to much.
I'm not scared of having too much stuff, I'm scared of not being able to notice it myself.
NFTs could ease that problem. But sadly I'm one of those people that prefer analog radio over digital. Wired over wireless.
Not, uh, that NFTs for images like this aren’t silly and largely pointless,
but at least for some of them, the “there’s a server hosting the image” isn’t that much of an issue (at least provided that the person who “owns it” keeps the file locally and backed up)
Now that's a fun business idea (ethically questionable gambling related aspects aside, guess it's about how one markets that and how honest they are).
same here. what's naive about it?
not to badmouth the undertaking, but wtf is this doing on HN?
i sincerely applaud the creativity of establishing such a business
My question is, how do you figure out how to parameterize "Same character, different pose" / "Same character, different eyes" / "Same character, different gender" / etc?
My (super limited) understanding of GANs is that they slowly discover these features over time simply from observation in the data set, and not from any labels.
So how could you make e.x. a slider for head position, style, pose, etc? How do you look at the resulting model and figure out "these are the inputs we have to fiddle with to make it use a certain pose"?
You mention it a bit in this section, but I didn't fully understand: "By isolating the vectors that control certain features, we can create results like different pose, same character"
And I assume the same step needs to be done every time the model is retrained or fine-tuned, because possibly the vectors have shifted within the model since they are not fixed by design?
You can think of it like coordinates on a many-dimensional vector grid.
We craft the functions the functions that will illuminate sets of those points based on a combination of observation, what we know about our model architecture, and how our data is arranged.
And yes, when the model is retrained, we have to discover them again!
A couple questions:
1) I didn't really understand how you went about identifying what vectors of the latent space stand for various things, like pose or color. Did you train one of the AIs to that effect, or did you manually inspect a bunch of vectors, twiddling through them one by one, did to the outcome?
2) If one were to train an AI to the same level using commodity cloud services, what's the order of magnitude cost that you would pay for the training? More like $100, $1,000, $10,000 or $100,000?
2) Depends on the quality you are seeking. If you only want one run of a similar, off-the-shelf model, around the 1000s is enough. But at the number of iterations you have to run to build your own and improve results, you probably need about 100k.
To tackle this problem, we built our own supercomputer off of parts we bought off of ebay, though I can't say I recommend that route, because it now lives in our living room.
Server processors gets you more bang for the buck... iff you're planning to run the hardware flat out for literally years. You save on power, but the up-front cost takes up most of that, so for a system that's mostly idle you wouldn't use them. On the other hand, any CPU with fewer PCIe lanes than a TR won't be able to run multiple GPUs optimally, and TRs are relatively cheap enough to make the reduction in PSUs/chassises worth it.
Not to mention that there are some approaches to training you can only use if you have multiple GPUs on the same motherboard, aka. sharding a single model across GPUs without communications overhead killing any benefit of that.
But the tldr; is a lot of scavenged EPYCs and nvidia GPUs all in a large sound-proof rack.
Does this mean two weeks of development, or two weeks to generate the images we're seeing? Or maybe did you train the model for two weeks? That point just wasn't exactly clear for me.
Development took on-and-off roughly 2 years to achieve the quality you see today.
I'm not entirely sure how much legal weight a ToS on the website would have on what the users do with the output. As I understand it, you could e.g. forbid explicitly using the service/generator for commercial purposes (e.g. during game development), but if someone generates a cool character playing around with no particular commercial objective and then decides post facto to build a media megafranchise out of that character, absent any copyright claim over the image, I don't think there's anything stopping them. They wouldn't even need to trace over it, though if they want new artwork in different poses, they couldn't keep using the AI for that with explicit commercial intent; they'd have to get humans to re-draw it.
Alternatively, a pessimistic view of the interaction between copyright and AI would be that the model is a derivative work of all the training input, and its output also is, and then good luck building a non copyright infringing AI.
IANAL and all that, but it would definitely be legally risky to assume that as the provider of an AI generator you have any control over what users do with the output.
We're currently working on the data migration from V1! As long as you are using the same email as you did in 2019, you'll be able to see the image again!
As for a V2 generation, sorry, because the models are different, you'll have to discover a similar image again, if you want a V2 version!
There was such popular demand for these "horror" images that we made them part of the generation in V2! If you refresh enough on the webpage, you can find some horrors!
https://i.imgur.com/1V1wPMC.jpg
I rolled around 40 times on the first stage and chose a horror. I skipped the second stage and didn't roll on the third stage, just chose one of the presented details. I skipped the fourth stage because I rolled maybe ~200 times and only saw around 1-2 comparable horrors.
https://i.imgur.com/1vBeg1j.jpg
I rolled around 100 times on the first stage and saw about 3-4 horrors before choosing a horror. I rolled about 70 times on the second stage, didn't find anything interesting, just chose a normal color palette. I rolled maybe 80 times on the third stage and chose a horror, though the results were pretty consistently horrors. I rolled around 60 times on the fourth stage and saw about 1-2 other horrors before choosing a horror. Also, here's what it looked like after the third stage and before finishing the fourth stage:
https://i.imgur.com/ditm8nF.jpg
It's possible the third and fourth stages can produce horrors from normal faces, I didn't check.
I've seen a number of mobile games that just get flooded with characters; this tool looks like it could be used to automate that process. It could be combined with AI-generated character profiles as well, creating an 'infinite' character roster in video games.
In humans, things like the pupil can be the give away.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2289815-ai-can-detect-a...
Like this one by fast.ai!
Is there an email to reach out to you or someone in the team? ($HNusername @ gmail)
I think I could use this for a project.
>> It is interesting to note that from this process, the AI is not merely learning to copy the works it has seen, but forming high-level (shapes) and low-level (texture) features for constructing original pictures in its own mental representation.
Can you explain what you mean by "mental" representation? Does your system have a mind?
Also, why are you calling it "an AI"? Is it because you think it is an artificial intelligence, say like the robots in science fiction movies? Is it capable of anything else than generating images?
On each step, high-level parameters are combined with predefined weights to produce a more low-level output.
Seems, a similar transformation is going on here, except that the weights and the structure are somehow learned on its own.
https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2020
Though now we have made our own :)
People were discussing having a "no machine learning clause" back when Copilot was being heavily scrutinized. I wouldn't be surprised if some artists allow republishing but not machine learning use. Plenty of artists already have a clause that prohibits any kind of republishing, and Danbooru is known to rehost some of those artists' content anyway until the artist notices and requests that it be taken down, if ever (for a time, they even allowed paid rewards from Patreon and other subscription services to be republished).
The original dataset from Danbooru probably contained some percentage of content that would not have been there if the original artist had noticed in time.
Why would it, if there are no copyright issues? No one is obligated to accept a license unless they require permission to do something which copyright would restrict. Of course redistributing the original image as part of a public dataset may be problematic, but simply using it to train an AI model—essentially the equivalent of studying it while teaching yourself to draw—is arguably not among the things covered by copyright, so you don't need a license for that and any clauses in such a license would be irrelevant.
This is also basically educational in nature, even if it's a machine rather than a human being "educated", and educational use is often exempt from copyright in some degree or another to begin with. If the dataset is restricted to non-commercial research and educational use in the right jurisdictions then even redistribution may not be an issue.
An AI could do the same.
I hope you all enjoy playing with the new and improved generator! We've been hard at work improving the model quality since the last time the site was posted[1]
As both a professional fantasy illustrator & software engineer, I find the concept of AI creativity so fascinating. On one hand, I know that mathematically AI only can hallucinate images that fit within the distribution of things that it's seen. But from the artist perspective, the model's ability to blend two existing styles into something so distinctly new is so incredible (and not to mention also commercially useful!)
Anyways, happy to answer any question, thoughts, or concerns!
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459]