[HN Gopher] I've asked Stable Diffusion to generate 250 pages of...
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I've asked Stable Diffusion to generate 250 pages of 1987
RadioShack catalog
Author : CharlesW
Score : 231 points
Date : 2022-12-01 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (tilde.zone)
| zwkrt wrote:
| Baudrillard's visison of the hyperreal is becoming overwhelmingly
| true and at an exponential rate. I envision that soon we won't
| even need historical documents because we can just auto-generate
| documents based on historical data. Which will then become the
| new historical documents, in a process that keeps folding in on
| itself until the bubble our immediate reality shrinks and shrinks
| until there is only the smallest part of the inner ear vaguely
| recalling that gravity is acting upon us, while the rest of our
| senses and thoughts are wrapped in the warm blanket of an auto-
| generated fugue.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I envision that soon we won't even need historical documents
| because we can just auto-generate documents based on historical
| data.
|
| A.K.A. forgeries.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| The term "historical documents" gives me strong Galaxy Quest
| vibes. Someday, maybe we can generate the TV show that it was
| based on.
| basch wrote:
| When I think about procedurally generated entertainment, that
| can be materialized on demand, I find my self thinking about
| the movie Strange Days.
|
| Will the future be one of societal fragmentation where 1)
| nobody ever rewatches anything, they just generate more new
| stuff 2) nobody watches each others work ("hey watch my feed I
| just generated, it was awesome" followed by "yeah sure,
| someday") and just watches more new custom stuff generated for
| them which just becomes 3) everybody is watching an endless
| feed of new procedurally generated levels like endless runner
| games and 4) there is no longer any shared experience between
| people that they can realistically use as a foundation to
| communicate or interact.
|
| OR will the future be MOSTLY the previous but with a
| counterculture market for vintage (and modern) "authentic
| experiences" some of which will be black market. And then as
| part of that counterculture demand, how much of the "authentic
| experience" content be counterfeit procedurally generated to
| look real. And then the act of consuming counterfeit "authentic
| experiences" en mass just becomes a role play archeology
| treasure hunting game.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| But at the moment, people watch new TV shows when they come
| out, rather than watching old shows which are just as good. I
| think it's because they enjoy watching the same thing as
| other people.
| unixhero wrote:
| I still do rewatch X-Files, Star Trek TNG, Seinfeld and
| Stargate SG-1.
|
| I uh, want to believe.
| basch wrote:
| Would you if there were endless new episodes? Or upon
| rewatch that they could change slightly?
|
| What about your kids kids? Would they look back on older
| generations who are watching non procedurally generated
| content that never changes as weirdos?
| layer8 wrote:
| That's true, but it's also because of marketing. At least
| streaming services also list "related" productions that are
| older.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Lots of Historical documents are, eh, less historical than
| might appear.
| dpflan wrote:
| "[A]uto-generated fugue" is a superb phrase for this situation.
| dejj wrote:
| Xerox did it in 2013, changing 6s into 8s in scanned documents:
| https://www.dkriesel.com/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_ar...
| JasonFruit wrote:
| We can also, you know, just decide we won't do that.
| replygirl wrote:
| as individuals we have enough trouble asserting will over
| impulse as it is--hard to imagine us collectively deciding on
| anything like this when institutions are even more vulnerable
| to reactivity
| dinkleberg wrote:
| But will we? Those of us who have been alive long enough to
| know what life was like before any of this may choose not to.
| But our youngest generation, and those to come, may grow up
| not knowing any different.
|
| Not suggesting it will happen, but it is an unappealing
| thought.
| dwringer wrote:
| If anything, I think technology like this has gradually
| empowered people to rise above the autogenerated fugue that
| has historically always been a part of everyday life
| (though historically the human mind did a pretty good job
| generating that on its own thanks to widespread ignorance,
| superstition, and fear). Speaking personally, I find AI
| chatbots and image generators _when I 'm using them myself_
| to be like a refreshing drink of cool fresh water compared
| with the sensation of being only drip fed or waterboarded
| by businesses wielding the technology to influence my
| behavior without my explicit input or full consent.
| idontpost wrote:
| gaterin wrote:
| That sounds like the view of an anti-progress luddite. Be
| careful where you make such statements.
| vjk800 wrote:
| There is no mechanism in existence to collectively decide
| anything. It's why things suck in general.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| There are many mechanisms to collectively decide things, so
| you aren't even close about that (Democracy, the market,
| representative government at every level, the United
| Nations, proxy votes for corporations, school boards,
| boards of governors, juries, HOAs, ballot initiatives and
| referendums, elections generally, zoning commissions,
| family meetings, 4 friends debating where to get dinner,
| really far too many to list here, if anything almost all
| decisions of any importance are made via some mechanism to
| collectively decide things).
|
| There isn't a way to collectively decide things with
| absolute authority, but that is why things don't suck
| _worse_ in general. If we make collective decisions we
| could force people to do some things which are more optimal
| to our goals. However, that assumes that we universally
| agree on what the goals are (not even close) and that the
| decisions won 't actually be worse for the chosen goals
| (sometimes they will be far worse) and that the decision
| making process will never be irreversibly hijacked by some
| group for their own benefit (it absolutely will be). So you
| are not just wrong about this, your premise is incorrect
| and your conclusion does not follow from that premise even
| if it were.
| hungrygs wrote:
| I worked at a Radio Shack in 1986-87, sort of a dream job for 18
| years old. Now I know what it would have looked like if I showed
| up for work one day on LSD!
| kle wrote:
| If you like this you will enjoy "an improbable future" on
| instagram: https://instagram.com/an_improbable_future
| shubhamverma wrote:
| I have been following this account and enjoying all their posts
| of amazing product designs - and I didn't even realise until I
| read this comment that it's AI -generated!
| pupppet wrote:
| I miss getting these catalogs! Someone should send out a weekly
| newsletter of random interesting gadgets linked to online stores
| where you can buy them, with a layout that perfectly mimics these
| old catalogs. I'd eat that up.
| bmitc wrote:
| Why is this stuff interesting to people?
|
| You could write an algorithm that does image recognition and cut
| and paste from a plethora of image resources and build a similar
| catalog of actual products from a given time period.
|
| This just looks like the typical machine learning throw up of
| dumping a bunch of statistically averaged and collaged images
| that's then been blurred as if someone ran their finger across
| the image and random text. It isn't clear to me where the
| intrigue is aside from a "hmph, I guess (?) that's cool".
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Why is this stuff interesting to people?
|
| Because by typing three words and clicking two buttons you get
| to claim you're an artist and your ticket for the future at the
| same time
|
| It's one more step in the general dumbing down of everything
| tech touches. You don't need skills, you don't need to devote
| time it, you don't even need to understand how it works, just
| go on a website, give them your money, write something and boom
| you're done
|
| I think being stuck in a content consumption cycle for a while
| made people slowly realise that creation is much more
| fulfilling than consumption, these things give them the
| illusion of creating things
| sideshowb wrote:
| > typical machine learning throw up of dumping a bunch of
| statistically averaged and collaged images
|
| On the scale of my lifetime, that's a fairly new phenomenon
| dwringer wrote:
| I think it's just a common sort of _ex nihilo_ first steps
| example of the technology that 's easy to show off to anyone,
| and it's a good example of how the results can be iterated and
| cherry-picked to filter out the most garbage-laden images to
| get stuff that's basically (what another commentor called)
| "visual lorem ipsum".
|
| There's a _lot_ more that stable diffusion can do when there is
| a feedback loop between the user and the computer, but I don 't
| think it's very easy to convey with pop articles or even long
| form ones - I hope one day everyone has a chance to approach
| models like this and learn from them in their own way, and I
| appreciate articles like this in their attempt to get a wider
| audience interested in the technology.
| bmitc wrote:
| That's a well balanced perspective. And I don't mean to be a
| Luddite or anything, but I just don't think I see what this
| will be useful for outside of the typical advertising and
| abusive use cases.
|
| One use case I can currently imagine, outside of advertising,
| is _maybe_ storyboarding, because you don't really care much
| about fidelity or even style there, and it's primarily a
| scaffolding tool. However, I'm not terribly sure of the
| feedback loop being anywhere near that of a director or
| cinematographer or writer sitting down with a storyboard
| artist. But maybe you don't have access to a storyboard
| artist.
|
| There is a valid position of asking "why do we need this?",
| and I don't think it gets asked enough in technology. One
| thing I am sure of is that this type of machine learning art
| will be abused.
|
| There is an unfortunate inevitability though with humans and
| technology.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I don't understand the motivation of the person who sees 60
| hours of video uploaded to YouTube per second, 30+ new
| video games released on Steam per day, 100,000 songs
| uploaded to Spotify every day and 6,000 Tweets being made
| per second, and decides "You know what the World needs? A
| way of enabling more people to make more content faster."
| simonw wrote:
| > You could write an algorithm that does image recognition and
| cut and paste from a plethora of image resources and build a
| similar catalog of actual products from a given time period.
|
| And if you did that I would think it was super interesting and
| cool too.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| You must be fun at parties
| dang wrote:
| " _Edit out swipes._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Corollary: If editing out swipes results in an empty comment,
| the comment should probably not be posted.
| ploum wrote:
| Side note : it's nice to see that Mastodon reached the point
| where you could point at it for stuff completely unrelated to
| Mastodon. Good job HN!
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's funny though, one consequence of the federation is that
| the domain name on the link gives you no clue you're going to
| see Mastodon when you click it. (Unlike centralized services
| like Twitter or Facebook.)
|
| If you wanted to see all the Mastodon links posted to HN, you'd
| have to either start with a list of all known Mastodon server
| domains and search those, or scrape all the links and pick out
| the ones that land on a Mastodon instance.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Stable Diffusion trying to sell me batteries.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| It's sort of neat, but for me, the longer you look at this images
| are they really different from visual lorem ipsum?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| OK but... what's happening here is SD is capturing textures and
| some of their relationships. It clearly has no understanding of
| the objects it's generating.
|
| So the output is a kind of Dali-esque mushed up melted version of
| the original content.
|
| It's entertaining because it's simultaneously referential and
| heavily distorted in unexpected ways.
|
| You could use this a manual art technique, and it would be
| interesting-ish.
|
| I'm curious if it's capable of getting to the next stage, of
| understanding and distorting the actual design relationships in
| these objects to the point where it could deepfake catalog pages
| and they'd be indistinguishable from the real thing.
|
| I suspect there's quite a gap between that stage and this one.
| notahacker wrote:
| Feels like you'd make more progress with discrete models
| working together. At the very simple level, Stable Diffusion is
| pretty terrible at words and fonts but a reasonable model of
| where [patterns of pixels that look like] text might fit, and
| how big should it be. Add a second step which recognises
| Stable-Diffusion generated pseudotext blocks and replaces them
| with GPT-generated text to the same prompt set in an actual
| font scaled to match StableDiffusion's attempted font and
| you'll more likely get something that passes the "zoom in and
| try to read it" test. Though there may not be very much
| correspondence between the images and text.
|
| A more complex arrangement adds in a model which chooses which
| does high level structure to fit a prompt (subprompts on
| suitable topics for images and text for each page), a 'house
| style' model to pick fonts and copy/paste stuff like the
| RadioShack logo direct from its source material, plain old
| StableDiffusion to draw lots of individual pictures "cassette
| player deluxe RadioShack 1970" and plain old GPT to write the
| text which is typeset to the 'house style' model's
| specification, and probably an "observer" model that forces new
| iterations of really bad pages.
|
| Great thing about this magazine creation process is it also
| tends to work better for humans than having one person do
| everything!
| uoaei wrote:
| The analogy in my mind is the heyday of x86 ubiquity vs the
| coming revolution of many SoCs in one device.
|
| Huge, all-purpose, massive-capacity NNs are the norm for the
| current advances in SOTA. This is probably because of a
| certain limit on development complexity: designing a complex
| system of richly interacting parts is hard, so as long as
| development of these sorts of tools is manual, it will be
| much easier just to shove more compute at the problem with
| singular, massive models. Compare this to the all-
| encompassing architecture hegemony of x86. This makes it
| relatively easy to write software that people will be able to
| use on devices they already own, and this reduction in
| developer effort and complexity is enormous for enabling
| rapid growth in the number of possible software programs that
| can be created per unit time.
|
| As ML design becomes more automated and functional, new
| possibilities open up regarding breaking out sub-tasks to
| individual, hyper-specialized tools and combining them into a
| resilient and capable whole that is more than the sum of its
| parts. That is the true power of automatic differentiation
| frameworks: when your system can be end-to-end differentiable
| throughout many devices and specialized functions, and you
| can train parts as easily as you can train the whole, you
| begin to observe the creation -- the growth, really -- of a
| new kind of digital cognition machine.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| if only you knew how good things really weren't
| dpflan wrote:
| This is what I'm talking about, amazing work! Generative AI can
| unleash infinite un-realities -- shared reality it at drastic
| risk of being lost even more.
| wolpoli wrote:
| I like how Stable Diffusion generated a SanDisk looking logo - a
| company that was found, according to Wikipedia, in 1988.
| bmitc wrote:
| I mean, surely the SanDisk logo was in the data set. It didn't
| generate it as much as it convoluted the original logo.
| givinguflac wrote:
| I use stable diffusion almost daily and this is a really creative
| use! I have leaned into the weird text that comes with these
| types of prompts and I love it.
| imranq wrote:
| Its so interesting seeing how these txt2img models represent
| text. Its sort of like how someone who doesn't know how to read
| might represent language, as shapes instead of characters and
| words.
|
| That said, it would be a fun experiment to try an img2txt model
| on these individual catalog items to find out what they actually
| do (or image search)
| beefman wrote:
| So this is why I can't read in my dreams...
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Abstract amalgamation of machines. I think one reason these are
| so magical is it feels like they're doing something our brains do
| when they dream.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| General mastodon question here, I click login but I can login
| with my credentials because I'm on mastodon.social. How do I
| login from this interface to comment in this thread or is this
| not possible?
| rjmunro wrote:
| Paste the URL into the search box on your mastodon instance.
| It's a bit ugly, but it works.
| dougmwne wrote:
| If the computer was a bicycle for the mind then Stable Diffusion
| is LSD for the computer.
|
| Who cares how theoretically soulless it is under the matrix
| transforms, the fact is that this spits out the weird, and us
| humans chew it up and spit it right back.
|
| I think this is the first new era in Art since postmodernism.
| basch wrote:
| How long until what is currently photography is either full
| length video or 3d navigable worlds?
|
| These Star Wars galleries are just phenomenal. I can't imagine
| it is long until you can apply these as filters to movies, for
| example taking Rogue One and applying a Fritz Lang or Stanley
| Kubrick filter.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_perma...
|
| https://www.facebook.com/groups/395755276049376/?multi_perma...
|
| If I took that galleries above and used it as the input photos,
| and then used a tool like this, which takes about 5 seconds a
| frame .. https://gizmodo.com/disney-ai-art-vfx-visual-effects-
| de-age-...
|
| Or akin to Cars being a remake of Doc Hollywood with
| anthropomorphized Cars, being able to say something like "I
| want to see a remake of the 2013 movie Rush, in the world of
| Zootopia, with 15% styling from Speed Racker, set in the 70's,
| with flying animals, and the main two rival protagonists being
| flying squirrels, one of which has a birth defect and a
| prosthetic wing."
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Kubrick's version was better than the studio release.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > for example taking Rogue One and applying a Fritz Lang or
| Stanley Kubrick filter.
|
| I mean, what's to stop someone from doing that using a basic
| ass LUT?
| basch wrote:
| Do you mean just color, or redrawing the costumes and sets
| and special effects to match aesthetics? In 3D space, and
| consistently from scene to scene?
| bhaney wrote:
| So using Stable Diffusion is like giving LSD to your bicycle?
| dpflan wrote:
| Seems like a good prompt to try...
| donkeyd wrote:
| I tried, the results were pretty much what you'd expect:
| https://imgur.com/a/5F4AS2D
| Yahivin wrote:
| Yes.
| alex_young wrote:
| So, bicycle day? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_l
| ysergic_acid_die...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The think that I find the most LSD-like, both in the visuals it
| generate and in principle is Google DeepDream.
|
| It works by using an image classifier in reverse. So for
| example, you have a neural network that identifies bicycles,
| feed it an image, get the results, and feed them back to the
| image, boosting the bicycle-like characteristics of the image,
| repeat the process a number of times. In the end, you get
| something that looks like the original image, but made of
| bicycle parts. It is commonly done with faces, it can also be
| done on intermediate layers, amplifying more abstract details
| like geometric shapes.
|
| Originally intended as a way to reveal the inner workings of a
| neural network (for research, debugging, etc...), it has also
| been used by artists for really trippy visuals.
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