[HN Gopher] I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL*E 2 fo...
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I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL*E 2 for $45: here's
what I learned
Author : dsmmcken
Score : 161 points
Date : 2022-08-08 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deephaven.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (deephaven.io)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is very interesting, but why are all the images just showing
| up as blurred out pre-loads for me? Makes it a lot less
| communicative, since it's literally about the images!
|
| I mean, I'm guessing these aren't the intended images, since you
| don't need DALL-E to generate blurry splotches!
| sbf501 wrote:
| You should've invested in CloudFront first because your site
| isn't loading.
| lmarcos wrote:
| Would nginx (caching everything) work on a $5/month VPS?
| wyager wrote:
| Should work fine. I personally avoided using a reverse proxy
| like nginx or apache because they tend to have a _ton_ of
| vulnerabilities (check out the CVE database results for
| "nginx"), making them a security management headache.
| vient wrote:
| Any serious vulnerability in NGINX will be big news since
| it is so widespread. CVE database shows some entries by
| searching for "nginx" but I looked at all 2022 entries and
| the only ones affecting NGINX itself are in NJX plugin so
| actually not affecting NGINX core functionality.
|
| https://nginx.org/en/security_advisories.html shows one
| "medium severity" vulnerability in the last 4 years.
| wyager wrote:
| Huh, guess I haven't really checked on this since mid-
| early 2010s. Was a lot worse back then.
| [deleted]
| dsmmcken wrote:
| I know. I wasn't actually expecting to hit front-page. Trying
| to reinforce it best I can.
| brundolf wrote:
| Fwiw, in my experience you don't actually need a CDN just to
| survive HN. It may be enough to just make sure you're not
| hitting a DB on every request; ideally you'd be caching the
| HTML output wholesale (via static site generator or
| otherwise)
|
| For reference: with cached HTML, my single Node.js process
| running on Heroku's cheapest tier has weathered the front
| page multiple times without breaking a sweat
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Right. So a CDN?
| brundolf wrote:
| A CDN is its own thing- it's distributed across a
| provider; it can't just be served off a simple box. It
| requires having or gaining familiarity with a specific
| provider, as well as other constraints like you _have_ to
| statically export to the file system (can 't just cache
| responses in memory), and you can't have _any_ dynamic
| content without standing up a separate server, etc
|
| Makes sense for a lot of things, but it comes with
| downsides, especially for hobbyists! I've found I prefer
| sticking with a simple server for my website, and OP
| might find it's easier to do that too
| jedberg wrote:
| That's not at all true. A CDN is a content delivery
| network. There is nothing that says it isn't a network of
| a single host on the same machine as the original
| content.
|
| It's just a cache that returns content faster than the
| original content.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| At that point, why not just have a static blog hosted on an
| AWS bucket?
| brundolf wrote:
| For me: it's less to manage, it's less to learn (AWS is a
| nightmare from my perspective), and I enjoy other
| benefits like the fact that one codebase can generate and
| then serve up the site, and the fact that it's vendor-
| agnostic (just clone/npm install/run). Also allows easy
| customization of headers and redirects, allows for the
| odd dynamic route, and makes local dev/previewing super
| simple
|
| OP may or may not feel the same! Just wanted to
| communicate that a simple server can definitely do the
| job
| knicholes wrote:
| Right, like something like Varnish.
| brundolf wrote:
| Hadn't heard of Varnish, but yeah, it looks like a good
| solution the OP could probably layer over their current
| setup without too much trouble
| wyager wrote:
| I switched backends a bunch of times because everything I
| tried (Go stdlib HTTP, Tornado, etc.) kept getting taken
| out whenever I would hit the front page, either due to CPU
| overload or some sort of resource leak. I ended up using
| Warp+Wai+Servant (https://github.com/yesodweb/wai) and it
| has been smooth sailing since then off my $3/mo VPS. It can
| take thousands of req/sec without flinching (which is
| higher than what you see from top of HN - that maxes out at
| a few hundred req/s).
| mahathu wrote:
| What VPS are you using and can you recommend it?
| wyager wrote:
| Vultr. They have been totally solid for me. Nothing fancy
| - just a reliable cloud VM. Have had no reason to look
| for alternatives for web hosting.
| layer8 wrote:
| Did you use some software/service for load-testing the
| alternatives?
| wyager wrote:
| Yes, I first tested locally with httperf and some other
| tools. I took it as a good sign when the load testing
| tools crashed before my server did. Then, I found a few
| services by searching for something like "website load
| test" and using their free tier (which would typically
| generate something like a few hundred req/sec -
| sufficient to simulate HN).
| dsmmcken wrote:
| For reference, it's a fully static site on a low-end shared
| host. The post had quite a few images, which were pngs from
| DALL-E, but I've just now recompressed as smaller jpg.
| [deleted]
| mym1990 wrote:
| Just curious, is there any general number range for how much
| traffic a front page post might get? Less than 10k, 10-100,000,
| 100,000+, etc
| cube2222 wrote:
| Second place for a few hours and ~1k points resulted in
| around 50k unique visits.
|
| If your website is a collection of static files and you're
| hosting them on S3+CloudFront or something similar (GitHub
| pages works too), then it'll work without any issues and cost
| pennies for the whole thing.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| I front paged a couple times back in the day. In the
| neighborhood of thousands of pageloads and hundreds of
| concurrent users. Totally trivial for static HTML, but most
| people get into trouble with hand-rolled or poorly tuned blog
| frameworks that make multiple database calls on every
| visitor.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Hit the front page twice with two articles in the past.
|
| Total traffic both times was around 60k over the course of
| 2-3 days.
| Swizec wrote:
| I once frontpaged with a funny article that readers also
| shared with others. Back when people still did that instead
| of taking a screenshot.
|
| 1,000,000 uniques over 3 days in ~2011.
|
| I have been trying to re-create that high ever since, lol.
| Going viral is one hell of a drug.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I'll see on the order of 10k-25k hits (hard to say exactly,
| most of HN uses adblockers/tracker blockers and I use
| CloudFlare for caching) from an article on the HN frontpage.
| It's not that bad, and I could almost certainly serve it off
| my colo'd server without any trouble - bandwidth just isn't
| _that_ high.
|
| But as my blog is entirely static (except for the comment
| threads, hosted on my Discourse forum), I just let CloudFlare
| serve it. I had to do some tweaks to the configs to say, "No,
| _really,_ cache _everything!_ " (it doesn't do that by
| default for a range of very valid reasons, none of which
| apply to me), but once that change went in, I'll see 98.5% or
| higher "served out of cache" ratios when I'm seeing a lot of
| traffic from HN or somewhere.
|
| I'd originally designed it to be hosted out of a Google Cloud
| bucket with CloudFlare (egress traffic is cheaper that way
| than out to the internet), but I eventually decided to host
| on my server, as I could then do Tor and some other stuff
| more easily. I've got the server anyway...
|
| One of these days, I may play with dropping analytics
| entirely and just passing requests through to my server, let
| images remain cached as that's the bulk of my bandwidth. Then
| I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs for
| stats and referrers and such!
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > Then I can go even more oldskool and parse my server logs
| for stats and referrers and such!
|
| Expect to see a bunch of bots. I tried setting up server-
| side analytics for a WordPress-based website, but I had to
| get rid of it as the bot traffic made it essentially
| useless.
| wyager wrote:
| 10-100k iirc. Peak requests maybe 200-500req/sec (but not
| sustained). I had a few posts get >250k but those were on
| Reddit as well.
| gk1 wrote:
| I just hit #1 last week and frontpaged a bunch in the past.
| Peaked at around 250-300 concurrent visitors, totaling around
| 10k in a 24-hr period, which is on par with past experience.
| dsmmcken wrote:
| I can tell you it's more than a $5 dreamhost box can handle
| right now.
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| My $3/mo vultr box can handle HN loads easily when using a
| fast and well-designed (namely resource-leak-free) backend
| (I've settled on https://github.com/yesodweb/wai based apps
| - the only thing that has worked well for me so far).
| ezekg wrote:
| I've gotten on the front page more than a few times. In my
| experience, it usually peaks around 1.5k concurrents for a
| blog post. Peak was 50k total visits over a couple days, but
| has been much less too. Depends on the content and how
| interesting it is to the wider HN audience.
| [deleted]
| brundolf wrote:
| Archive.org:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220808212448/https://deephaven...
|
| Unfortunately the images are cached at a very low resolution
| superchroma wrote:
| When asked about what jobs the robots would come for first, I
| would have had to say that digital artist was pretty low on my
| ranking before now.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's coming for us, too.
|
| It won't be long before most software engineer positions are
| eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians"
| with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code.
| Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and
| some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to
| an extent.
|
| This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed
| to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even
| with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture
| capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the
| capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet.
|
| All we need is a significant market correction and the next
| generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs.
|
| The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E
| to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open
| and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD.
|
| Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of
| common problems in building software. AI can do it better
| because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying
| over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI
| won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable
| code because those things will no longer matter.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wouldn't millions of unemployed developers start creating
| software that would compete/overthrow existing software
| companies?
| xwdv wrote:
| It will never come for us. You think it will, but that's
| because you don't understand software.
|
| Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project.
| Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a
| larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without
| interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement
| tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will
| it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported
| by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix
| them? What about when multiple branches of feature
| development have to be merged, will it know how to do it
| correctly? Will it know how to write high performance
| software or just use shitty random algorithms?
|
| If it can't do these things AI is basically useless. Because
| this is basically 90% of software development.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Writing software is like writing novels: putting words
| together to make sentences is easy. Making the story make
| sense is difficult.
|
| One could think that much of art is just pretty form
| without sense and that is why DALL-E works.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > "This may seem far off..."
|
| After experimenting with GitHub Co-Pilot I can see that day
| being 50% - perhaps even just 25% - as far as it used to
| feel.
| [deleted]
| amildie wrote:
| I don't think we'll see this in our lifetimes.
|
| For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be
| developed first.
|
| A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring
| out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix.
| Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.
|
| Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs,
| non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation;
| these are the "common problems" in building software. Current
| AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these
| types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental
| breakthrough in the field is achieved.
|
| Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong
| or right, it just is.
|
| Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to
| live long enough to see it.
| amelius wrote:
| > A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is
| figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to
| build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.
|
| Yeah, but that part can be learned by anyone without a CS
| degree.
|
| Perhaps not everything in software can be automated, but I
| could see a team of 10 programmers be replaced by 1 person
| (programmer or not) handy enough to control a bunch of AI
| software tools.
| losteric wrote:
| "Physical" engineering fields will probably come first...
| think AI-generated architecture, with AI-generated structural
| engineering, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc... _with_
| human-guidance of the generative process, and human-review
| /accountability of final output. Amplification of humans, not
| obsolescence.
|
| In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code-
| generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for
| CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses...
| maybe even generating high-level architectures for new
| services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code
| for enterprise applications or foundational services. The
| differentiation being making changes within an existing
| complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new
| assets from nothing.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Most of the math for structural engineering is already done
| through software, we just don't call it AI. The difficult
| part and valuable part of being a good structural engineer
| is translating requirements and dealing with clients. The
| actual math and engineering work is often not much more
| difficult than what's done taught in their undergrad, and
| much of it is offloaded to designers anyway.
|
| Source: My family owns one of the largest civil engineering
| firms in my home province.
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| Imma be honest, working as an artist who has to come up with
| Dall-E prompts and as a programmer who has to maintain a
| codebase slapped together from GPT-5 output sounds equally
| horrifying. I think I'll stick to my grug brain engineering.
| skunkworker wrote:
| I am personally bearish on this assumption unless a few
| hurdles are reached. Being a software engineer involves a lot
| of translation of intent from a required feature into an
| efficient and maintainable implementation.
|
| In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate
| what needs to be built rather than actually building the end
| product.
|
| The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming
| up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs
| fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with
| a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving
| similar works to draw from.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier
| than reading code. This is generally not the case in other
| professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist.
|
| You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you
| can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end
| of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit
| the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the
| code the AI wrote.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The problem with that theory is that writing code is
| easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in
| other professions. It is definitely not the case for an
| artist.
|
| > You still need correct code, and the halting problem says
| you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At
| the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and
| fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to
| understand the code the AI wrote.
|
| This might have been your point, but chances are the "code
| the AI wrote" will be an unmaintainable mess, so "fixing
| it" means throwing it away and re-doing it.
| kache_ wrote:
| programming is going to get automated with language models in
| <5 years
|
| however, I find that my job (SWE) is about 1% programming and
| 99% strategizing, designing & communicating.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI
| to generate working code
|
| People keep trying to make simplified programming
| environments for significantly less-trained people and they
| keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it
| _easier_ to get a result that has no crippling bugs?
| numpad0 wrote:
| And how is it going to increase information in the output
| by having AI involved, if these AIs aren't actually
| thinking and pouring out of their own entropy source into
| outputs?
| lmm wrote:
| No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software
| businesses from shipping it anyway?
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> People keep trying to make simplified programming
| environments for significantly less-trained people and
| they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to
| make it easier to get a result that has no crippling
| bugs?
|
| Yeah. I've even worked in one of those environments for a
| year (not my choice).
|
| I'm of the opinion those kind of environments won't ever
| work. They'll either be:
|
| 1. Extremely cookie-cutter (e.g. make a clone of our
| "standard app" with a insignificant little tweaks).
|
| 2. Require software engineers to get anything useful out
| of them, and those engineers will feel like they're
| working with one hand tied behind their backs (or banging
| their heads against a wall).
|
| IMHO, one of the main skills of a software engineer is
| translating user requirements into technical requirements
| that work and understanding when they work. I don't think
| skill is automatable without a fairy-tale AGI.
|
| > No, but when have crippling bugs ever stopped software
| businesses from shipping it anyway?
|
| A lot? Depends on your definition of "crippling." A
| software engineer will gripe and say, "I don't want to
| use this;" something that's awkward but the people who
| use it can still get their work done; or the system
| literally incapable of performing its function?
| sjducb wrote:
| I think when AI can do the full job of a programmer we'll
| have reached the singularity. Programmer will be the last job
| to go.
| sbmassey wrote:
| Judging by the current state of DALL-E, the generated
| software will look good at first impression, but have lots of
| weird bugs when examined closely. So yeah, not much different
| to current software dev.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Time for me to open up my "AI Code Refurbishing" shop and
| specialize in fixing all the disasters these "AI technicians"
| make.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| AI has been over promising and under delivering for 50 years.
|
| There's a reason why the general models aren't being
| released. The second you look under the hood and start poking
| the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything
| and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster.
| andybak wrote:
| There's a weird tension between people who say saying "AI
| is overblown" and people who say "this is the most magical
| thing I've seen in my lifetime".
|
| I lean towards the latter but with a healthy dose of "it's
| deeply weird and hard to get anything useful from". But
| that doesn't make it any less _magical_.
|
| And no - it's not "intelligent" in any human sense.
|
| But I can't relate to people who pooh-pooh it as if there's
| nothing exciting happening. Either they are deliberately
| cultivating a dismissive air, or they are deeply jaded and
| weary.
|
| EDIT - There's a 3rd option. People are making a rhetorical
| point because they perceive a need to correct an imbalance
| in the general mood. This is actually the most likely
| explanation and is often under-appreciated as motivator in
| public statements. I've noticed it in myself frequently.
| substation13 wrote:
| Programming requires far more breadth and precision than 2D
| art.
|
| I think that in the very long run programming work will be
| automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity
| or reconstituted in computation substrate.
| echelon wrote:
| You say that with such confidence.
|
| I'm looking for ways to hedge my reliance on my skills.
| substation13 wrote:
| I'm confident that society would be so radically
| different that trying to predict and prepare is a fools
| game.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >This time will be different.
|
| The 20th time you hear that is when you stop caring.
| samatman wrote:
| I don't think it will be like that, for two reasons.
|
| One, coming up with a correct description of a program is
| what computer programming actually is. Implementation is
| something we're always looking to do faster, so we can
| describe more behaviors to the computer.
|
| Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production
| which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code
| for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there
| would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its
| level, but the result would be ten times as much code per
| year, not five times and 50% unemployment.
|
| Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie
| and write it out in a particular format, with some extra
| attention to getting the formatting 'nice'. This took me
| about three hours.
|
| It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot
| could have gotten this down to, _maybe_ , a half hour for
| results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality.
|
| Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at
| this kind of task.
|
| This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more
| junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think
| the main result will be more software gets written, the same
| way using a structured programming language got people
| further in a day than writing in assembler did.
| pphysch wrote:
| AI is great for recommendation systems and art because they
| are fuzzy. "Good enough" results are relatively easy to
| achieve. There is lots of tolerance for errors, because human
| preferences are flexible and fuzzy themselves.
|
| Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the
| code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers,
| because you need to be really sure that your black box
| algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be
| doing.
| gitgud wrote:
| The reason it's focused so much is that art has incredibly low
| stakes... and people don't want AI making any seemingly
| important decisions...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Maybe, but this is replacing fifty cents of stock photo, not
| digital artists.
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| Who do you think created that 50-cent stock art?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Probably not a digital artist. Is there a big fraction of
| that on stock photo sites?
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Is DALL-E 2 generating the images on every page request? ;)
| [deleted]
| akamaka wrote:
| Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures
| really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you
| look closely.
|
| I mean, it's an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate
| images at this level, but I don't want them shown to me on a
| daily basis while I'm reading blogs.
| lxe wrote:
| For maximum coherency, you have to make batches of 50 - 100 and
| pick the best one. Which can be time consuming and expensive.
| ebjaas_2022 wrote:
| I agree. They're pretty in the same way as fractals are pretty,
| but still boring and bland.
|
| I would not have any of the ones that I've seen this far on my
| wall, or as my blog icons.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I'm with you. I would hate to see these images all over the
| place -many are just unpleasant to see.
|
| The cover image generated for the cosmopolitan cover is
| stunning at first but after seeing it a few times it begins to
| feel uncomfortable to look at. The uncanny valley is alive and
| well in many of these images.
| amelius wrote:
| The pictures are certainly deep down in the uncanny valley, but
| I think they would be great for nightmarish games. In fact,
| game developers (and especially game artists) might be the next
| profession on the line, to be automated by AI.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| It's not about being perfect, it's about having something that
| doesn't take time to produce. like the article says, searching
| google and stock image sites looking for a picture that very
| few people are going to ingest is a huge waste of time.
| Kranar wrote:
| I find the images to be incredible, but it's very unsettling
| when you focus on certain details like hands, feet, and eyes.
| The hands and feet that it draws are almost always mangled, and
| while it does a good job of drawing an individual eye, it
| doesn't seem to draw two eyes in a well coordinated manner,
| either one eye is bigger than the other, or there is something
| weirdly unsymmetrical about the eyes that makes the image look
| creepy.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I have a great example of this:
|
| "Jesus takes a selfie" - https://imgur.com/a/togE2ko
|
| I'm pretty sure this snap was three days after the
| resurrection.
| Jiro wrote:
| Online DALL-E generators often are deliberately prevented
| from producing good faces, because of the potential for
| abuse.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| FYI, "ARC: FACE RESTORATION" is an AI that fixes distorted
| faces. It won't do miracles but it does a pretty good job
| when the face is just off a bit.
|
| I suspect that overtime there will be many AIs that will
| target very specialized functions similar to ARC.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures
| really bad?
|
| Bad compared with what? They certainly convey a lot more
| information than a randomly generated gravatar.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures
| really bad?
|
| Well they're bad at not looking like AI generated art. It's
| impressive, but I've yet to come across an example that doesn't
| look like AI generated art. A few seconds of surface level
| inspection and you can see the weird AI psychodelic circling
| effect (no idea what the technical name is - eye-ball-
| ification?)
| upupandup wrote:
| They are good enough for most people and over time those
| details will get better until we have no need for illustrators.
|
| Already I see website agencies and bloggers using DALL-E. What
| I do see is that it is easy to pick out DALL-E generated
| images, in that its too fantastic. Way over the top to a fault.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Way over the top to a fault.
|
| way over the type _as a style_
|
| it's like the uber-modern modern art. the next level of those
| goofy over-the-top meme images that make the rounds in
| socials
|
| while you may not like it, you just know that this will be a
| thing on how to create AI-like images without AI. I used to
| refer to that as grade school ;P
| ajqreh wrote:
| The article isn't loading for me, so I can't really comment on
| the images it contains, but I've found telling the ai to apply
| an impressionistic filter does wonders for removing the
| unsettling aspect. Obviously that limits you to a specific
| style of image, but I imagine there are other stylistic filters
| you might apply that achieve the same goal.
|
| I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist
| cats" and similar queries.
| petercooper wrote:
| I'm over 1000 credits into Dalle so far (I know, I know..)
| and you're on the money. You can go a lot further than
| impressionism, though. Specifying the names of famous
| illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media
| used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting. The right
| combinations can yield some incredibly realistic looking
| things, even faces, and then for the rest of it, there's
| Photoshop, Gigapixel, and other tools to patch things up.
| (I've had more luck creating 'elements' with Dalle and then
| montaging them the old fashioned way.)
|
| The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but
| stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how
| difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you
| still need to think like an art director and establish a way
| to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle
| alone can't do that.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Dall-E is very "first generation" in its design and
| interactivity with the users.
|
| It's just a matter of time until setting a "consistent art
| style" becomes a feature of these things.
|
| Similarly, asking the AI to produce multiple views/poses of
| the same thing will likely become a common feature.
| boredemployee wrote:
| I tried it a lot and I think it works _ok_ for simple, mundane,
| trivial prompts, but when you start to ask for sophisticated
| stuff it gets weird.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| These are good enough for 99% of blogs out there.
|
| Just like AI generated articles are good enough for 99% of
| content farms out there.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Maybe it was because this was my first attempt, but with 100
| more posts to go, I hoped I could get better with practice. It
| would be super cool to just feed DALL-E a whole blog post and
| have something great pop out, but even with some GPT-3 magic we
| probably aren't there yet.
|
| I see a business opportunity here. Feed text into GPT-3 and have
| it generate DALL-E prompts to make appropriate images.
|
| Then you have it do the same thing for a children's book.
| gbrindisi wrote:
| Already done: https://medium.com/@glan1k/dall-e-
| gpt-3-d1aaaff38639
| glofish wrote:
| Visit their main blog page to see a subset of the resulting
| images all at once
|
| https://deephaven.io/blog/
|
| https://deephaven.io/blog/page/2/
|
| etc
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| I find the images fairly distracting and they take all the
| focus on the above page. The artwork also isn't very consistent
| which makes it feel like a jumbled mess. When you click a post
| the image takes the entire screen and pushes all the content
| below the fold. It's more like browsing a community art
| portfolio instead of a tech blog.
|
| I'd prefer smaller thumbnails or icons that give more context
| to the actual post. This way they could add some benefit, such
| as helping to visually categorize the content. As of now,
| they're just a bunch of random illustrations taking up valuable
| screen real estate.
|
| That being said, thanks for sharing, it's interesting to see an
| example of someone integrating DALL*E 2 into their workflow.
| Halan wrote:
| Suggestion for the next blog entry: How my blog post going viral
| on Hacker News pushed me to finally use a CDN
| l00sed wrote:
| I wrote that one, but haven't gotten enough traffic again to
| see if it works... https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/hug-of-death
| motoboi wrote:
| How I generated static html for my static site and it got
| served and cached.
| [deleted]
| amsterdorn wrote:
| this. I couldn't even load the page.
| brundolf wrote:
| Honestly, this is an awesome use of DALL-E and I'll probably
| start doing the same for my blog
|
| It's perfect because:
|
| - The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to
| be perfect
|
| - It's a low-value enough use of images that you'd probably never
| commission a human artist to do them; instead you'd either use
| stock photos, or skip having images completely
|
| - The nature of header images for a tech blog tends toward the
| abstract/surreal, which means it's either hard to find the right
| stock images, or the ones you do find will be _super_ abstract to
| the point of being boring
|
| All of these make it a great use of the technology
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| Archived link: https://archive.ph/uNfeK
| robocat wrote:
| That is missing the images.
| jwaterhouse wrote:
| I take your point about images and increased engagement but I'm
| so over useless imagery in blog/article content. I think I first
| really noticed it with Medium. So many pointless header images
| that very rarely have anything to do with the article. Just
| visual noise.
|
| My prediction is that a lot of blogs will do what you've done
| too, and then they'll all look/feel the same. New models will
| come out I guess, but then they'll proliferate too and everything
| will look the same again. And then maybe to differentiate, those
| few that value it/can afford it will make the effort to find
| actually relevant images or commission artwork.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| What service did they use for $45? Is this legal to include in
| published works too like a book?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| From the Dall-E terms of use:
|
| > Use of Images. Subject to your compliance with these terms
| and our Content Policy, you may use Generations for any legal
| purpose, including for commercial use. This means you may sell
| your rights to the Generations you create, incorporate them
| into works such as books, websites, and presentations, and
| otherwise commercialize them.
| markdown wrote:
| They must be well-funded if they're leaving money on the
| table like this. I'd pay a few a dollars for commercial use.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| > Our approach so far has been to spend 10 minutes scrolling
| through tangentially related but ultimately ill-fitting images
| from stock photo sites, download something not terrible,
|
| This just seems... Not interesting, well done you've recreated
| images that clearly even before AI everyone ignored.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| >"While the role of the artist isn't going away soon, the role of
| stock image sites might disappear. "
|
| Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time
| consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock
| images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the
| price for the specialized high end images will hold their value
| or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will
| continue to be valuable.
|
| It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise
| where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It
| might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will
| generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize
| it for use.
| andreyk wrote:
| Agreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and
| having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for
| blog posts with specific subjects), I would say the former
| takes more work/time than the latter. With stock images I can
| just do a quick search on Shutterstock and find a lot of high
| quality options (usually), whereas with DALL-E 2 I need to
| figure out the exact prompt I want and iterate on it for a
| while. Stock images are not that expensive -- if you buy many
| it's as low as $2 per image, or on the high end (if you pay to
| just download a few per month) it's more like $10 per image. It
| does cost more, but time is money, so...
| paulcole wrote:
| Time is only money if you someone will pay you for your time.
| If that's not true, then it's just a good excuse to spend
| your money when you could (in some cases should) be spending
| your time.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| Would that be similar to a "prompt engineer" role?
| [deleted]
| sfink wrote:
| Ugh, this immediately drives home the realization that
| representative images are soon going to be devalued and useless,
| to the point that we'll all be ignoring them soon. Possibly even
| stripping them with ad blockers or similar tools.
|
| I actually think it's really awesome to be able to do this with a
| series of blog posts, and even if you look past the stylistic
| inconsistencies and oddities, this particular usage is good and
| adds value.
|
| Which is kind of the problem. Relatively low cost, currently high
| benefit? It's going to be driven into the ground.
|
| We've seen this over and over again. Some reliable form of
| signal, or of value, becomes inexpensive enough to produce that
| it gets commoditized, monetized, and weaponized against us all.
|
| Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction
| way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in
| spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random
| unsolicited messages--if they even make it pass the automated
| filters. Same for text messages. Bold images and lettering used
| to be good for highlighting and accentuating important
| information. Now we don't see them, even if they make it past our
| ad blockers, because the neural networks living in our skulls
| know to filter them out as negative-value advertisements.
|
| The same thing will happen here. Nearly all blogs will soon be
| sprouting cutesy images to go along with the posts. Initially,
| many of them will be useful and add value, suggesting a metaphor
| or analogy or simply providing a visual anchor to make the
| content more memorable.
|
| But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have
| the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have _some_ image
| because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it 's
| too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added
| for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the _absence_
| of an image is a good signal for content quality, we 're at -1%!
|
| (If you put work into the prompt and curate carefully, it will
| still be a net positive to your content. But it won't matter for
| long in terms of traffic/engagement, because everyone will be
| mentally ignoring it.)
| iroh2727 wrote:
| Yep. My analogy for this kind of effect is McDonald's (and
| other fast or prepackaged food). Fast food never eclipsed good
| food because, well, it's not that good. But it spreads. It's
| just the result of unfettered capitalism (tech is no different
| in this regard to any other industry).
|
| But it's also a culture thing...like people trying to convince
| us that mediocre stuff is good or cool. I mean in this case
| it's _new_ because a machine is doing it, but what are OpenAI's
| real economic motivations behind all their press releases I
| wonder...?
| jedberg wrote:
| > But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll
| have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some
| image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops
| it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just
| added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the
| absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're
| at -1%!
|
| Too late. It already started happening a while ago. Tons of
| blogs with annoying animated gifs and now browsers have the
| ability to block them.
| lupire wrote:
| [deleted]
| thorum wrote:
| How is this different from the current status quo with most
| websites using stock photos? If anything, I would expect AI-
| generated images to be more closely related to the content than
| whatever random image you get by searching "business" on
| Shutterstock.
| cowmix wrote:
| I'll wait to read it when it actually comes up but until then I
| have to say when I finally got access to the DallE2 beta, I was
| underwhelmed. The mini-Dalle, while not as good in the image
| fidelity department, is much more fun.
| wyager wrote:
| An important lesson: >99% of your blog readers will visit during
| <1% of the time.
|
| If your goal is to allow people to read the stuff you write, you
| _must_ be capable of serving your content to >1000 people per
| second.
|
| Use a good backend (I recommend Servant+Warp or Snap - the only
| two I've tried that could handle it, out of probably 15 popular
| options tested) or a good caching reverse proxy (insofar as such
| a thing can be said to exist) and/or a CDN.
| motoboi wrote:
| Static html, from a cloud bucket.
| [deleted]
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