Maybe a little mode collapse away from pale ugliness, not quite getting to the hints of unnatural and corpse-like features of a vampire - interesting what the limitations are. You'd probably have to spend quite a lot of time zeroing in, but Google's image models are supposed to have allowed smooth traversal of those feature spaces generally.

I see where you are coming from...

Which is not to say don’t be creative, I applaud all creativity, but also to be very critical of what you are doing.

It's pretty easy to get something decent. It's really hard to get something good. I share my creations with some close friends and some are like "that's hot!" but are too fixated on breasts to realize that the lighting or shadow is off. Other friends do call out the bad lighting.

You may be like "it's just porn, why care about consistent lighting?" and the answer for me is that I'm doing all this to learn how everything works. How to fine tune weights, prompts, using IP Adapter, etc. Once I have a firm understanding of this stuff, then I will probably be able to make stuff that's actually useful to society. Unlike that coke commercial.

But what I understood from parent comment is that they just do it for fun, not necessarily to be a boon to society. And then if it comes with new skills that actually can benefit society, then that's a win.

Granted, the commenter COULD play around with SFW stuff but if they're just doing it for fun then that's still not benefiting society either, so either way it's a wash. We all have fun in our own ways.

But it's impressive that this billion dollar company didn't have one single person say "hey it's shitty, make it better."

AI is shitty in its own new unique ways. And people don't like new. They want they old, polished shittiness they are used to.

It's only a matter of time before we get experienced AI filmmakers. I think we already have them, actually. It's clear that Coke does not employ them though.

Also, since it's new media, nobody knows how to budget time or money to fix the flaws. It could be infinitely expensive.

That's my entire point. Artists were fine with everybody making "art" as long as everybody except them (with their hard fought skill and dedication) achieved toddler level of output quality. As soon as everybody could truly get even close to the level of actual art, not toddler art, suddenly there's a horrible problem with all the amateur artists using the tools that are available to them to make their "toddler" art.

Folks in tech generally have very limited exposure to the art world — fan art communities online, Reddit subs, YouTubers, etc. It’s more representative of internet culture than the art world— no more representative of artists than X politics is representative of voters. People have real grievances here and you are not a victim of the world’s artists. Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.

I will be if they manage to slow down development of AI even by a smidgen.

> Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.

Fully agree. They care about whether there's going to be anyone willing to buy their stuff from them. And not-toddler art is a real competition for them. So they are super against everybody making it.

You got it the other way around. Many edgelords became AI art boosters. Some became AI art dissers. It's a good topic for edgelords to edge about.

> finding ways to poison models that try to rip artists off sure is amusing

Yes. It is, but for other reasons. It looks like trying to turn a river with a stick. Little bit of water in one spot for a moment goes backwards and that one specific niche of people cheer. You made your song unfindable with Shazam. Good for you! Now I can't find you if I hear your music accidentally, because even if I catch some lyrics they are also heavily copyrighted. Step 2: ?, Step 3: Profit! Let me encounter your output the classic way, by being heavily marketed to for inordinate amounts of advertiser money. The way God intended!

> The real joke is on the people in software that think they’re so special that their skills will be worth anything at all

I fully expect to be completely replaced within few years. The same way my other skills were replaced by mobile diggers and powertools before I even acquired them.

Some IT people don't believe they will not get replaced and I think they have fairly strong argument. Software breeds more software. Coding breeds more need for coding. Even if only 5% of coding will be done by humans it still might be more than 100% from few years ago. Juniors are screwed though until we decide to extend college age to 35.

> There are too many developers in the existing market as it is

Junior developers. If you could magically turn them all into AI senior researchers they would all have a job in a month.

> believe that this will do anything but transfer wealth out of the paychecks of regular people, straight into the pockets of existing centibillionaires

This is progressing for 50 years. Sure, it's a flimsy hope that it can be changed, but there are no other hopeful things to look forward to. Next best thing is a WWIII because the previous one turned out to be great societal equalizer.

There’s no point in letting good be the enemy of perfect.

Imagine if you gave everyone a free guitar and people just started posting their electric guitar noodlings on social media after playing for 5 minutes.

It is not a judgement on the guitar. If anything it is a judgement on social media and the stupidity of the social media user who get worked up about someone creating "slop" after playing guitar for 5 minutes.

What did you expect them to sound like, Steve Vai?

It's intentionally hostile and inconsiderate.

But it would be _much_ better if when you hit reply, it gave you a message that you're "posting too fast" before you spend the time to write it up.

Bounding boxes: I actually send an image with a red box around where the requested change is needed. And 8 out of 10 times it works well. But if it doesn't work, I use Claude to make the prompt more refined. The Claude API call that I make, can see the image + the prompt, as well understanding the layering system. This is one of the 3 ways I edit, there is another one where I just sent the prompt to Claude without it looking at the image. Right now this all feels like dial-up. With a minimum of 0.035$ per image generation (0.0001$ if I just use a LoRa though) and a minimum of 12-14 seconds wait on each edit/generation.

Who has thought that we reach this uncharted territory with so many opportunities for pioneering and innovation? Back in 2019 it felt like nothing was new under the sun, today it feels like there is a whole new world under the sun, for us to explore!

> i was to bring awareness to the dangers of dressing up like a seal while surfboarding (ie. wearing black wetsuites, arms hanging over the board). Create a scene from the perspective of a shark looking up from the bottom of the ocean into a clear blue sky with silhouettes of a seal and a surfer and fishing boat with line dangling in the water and show how the shark contemplates attacking all these objects because they look so similiar.

I havnt found a model yet that can process that description, or any varition, into a scene that usable and makes sense visually to anyone older the a 1st grader. They will never place the seal, surfer, shark or boat in the correct location to make sense visually. Typically everyone is under water, sizing of everything is wrong. You tell them to the image is wrong, to place the person ontop of the water, and they cant. Please can someone link to a model that is capable or tell me what i am doing wrong? How can you claim to process words into images in a repeatable way when these systems cant deal with multiple contraints at once?

https://lmarena.ai/c/019a84ec-db09-7f53-89b1-3b901d4dc6be

https://gemini.google.com/share/da93030f131b

Obviously neither are good but it is better.

I think image models could be producing a lot more editable outputs if eg they output multi-layer PSDs.

Are you talking about Automatic1111 / ComfyUI inpainting masks? Because Nano doesn't accept bounding boxes as part of its API unless you just stuffed the literal X/Y coordinates into the raw prompt.

You could do something where you draw a bounding box and when you get the response back from Nano, you could mask that section back back over the original image - using a decent upscaler as necessary in the event that Nano had to reduce the size of the original image down to ~1MP.

I also had similar mixed results wrt Nano-banana especially around asking it to “fix/restore” things (a character’s hand was an anatomical mess for example)

It also works well if you draw a bb on the original image, then ask Claude for a meta-prompt to deconstruct the changes into a much more detailed prompt, and then send the original image without the bbs for changes. It really depends on the changes you need, and how long you're willing to wait.

- normal image editing response: 12-14s

- image editing response with Claude meta-prompting: 20-25s

- image editing response with Claude meta-prompting as well as image deconstructing and re-constructing the prompt: 40-60s

(I use Replicate though, so the actual API may be much faster).

This way you can also go into new views of a scene by zooming in and out the image on the same aspect-ratio canvas, and asking it to generatively fill the white borders around. So you can go from an tight inside shot, to viewing the same scene from outside of an house window. Or from inside the car, to outside the car.

I also have a custom pipeline/software that takes in a given prompt, rewrites it using an LLM into multiple variations, sends it to multiple GenAI models, and then uses a VLM to evaluate them for accuracy. It runs in an automated REPL style, so I can be relatively hands-off, though I do have a "max loop limiter" since I'd rather not spend the equivalent of a small country's GDP.

I keep hearing advocates of AI video generation talking at length about how easy the tools are to use and how great the results are, but I've yet to see anyone produce something meaningful that's coherent, consistent, and doesn't look like total slop.

There's a real legal fight that needs to go on right now about these companies stealing style, voices, likeness, etc. But it's really beginning to feel like there's a generation of artists that are hampering their career by saying they are above it instead of using the tools to enhance their art to create things they otherwise couldn't.

I see kids in high school using the tools like how I used Photoshop when I was younger. I see unemployed/under employed designers lamenting what the tools have done.

If at some point I also get very good at it; and the tech, models and tools mature, this will turn into a real avenue; who are they to tell us not to pursue it?

You need talented people to make good stuff, but at this time most of them still fear the new tools.

> Bots in the Hall

* voices don't match the mouth movements * mouth movements are poorly animated * hand/body movements are "fuzzy" with weird artifacts * characters stare in the wrong direction when talking * characters never move * no scenes over 3 seconds in length between cuts

> Neural Viz

* animations and backgrounds are dull * mouth movements are uncanny * "dead eyes" when showing any emotions * text and icons are poorly rendered

> The Meat Dept video for Igorrr's ADHD

This one I can excuse a bit since it's a music video, and for the sake of "artistic interpretation", but:

* continuation issues between shots * inconsistent visual style across shots * no shots longer then 4 seconds between cuts * rendered text is illegible/nonsensical * movement artifacts

Entire narrative driven AI stores that are driven by AI stories and AI characters in AI generated universes... they are here already, but I can only count those who do it well on two hands (last year, there where 1-2). This is going to accelerate, and if you think its "slop" now, it just takes a few iterations of artists who you personally resonate with to jump onto this, before you stop seeing it as slop. I am jumping on this, because I can see very clearly where this will all lead. You don't have to like it, but it will arrive regardless.

My intention was solely to support the parent in the face of prevalent general critique of what he dabbles in.