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Notes -
AI-generated images are here - and they're awful.
Dall-E 3 seems to have crossed the line into "good-enough" territory that many smaller websites are now using AI-generated images. It seems, unfortunately, that Dall-E 3 has a style. And that style is awful. The scenes are always far too busy, everything is cartoony, and the colors are oversaturated.
It's the new Corporate Memphis.
It also makes me feel super racist that I have to constantly tell it to draw white people since it has an even looser grip on historical accuracy then Bridgerton.
So you're using them enough that you have to "constantly" correct historical ethnic choices, but also calling them "awful?" If an artist was awful, I would stop asking them for new art and go to someone else. Is your job forcing you to use Dall-e 3 specifically or something? What kind of image/material are you using it for?
I don't have a subscription to GPT 4, so am unable to test this, but the previous iteration allowed users to mention styles that they want it to emulate, and there isn't necessarily an advantage to just leaving it at its default style. If it's oversaturated, you can probably request a limited palette? I tried asking Dall e 2 for a painting with a zorn palette, and it used too much blue (zorn replaces blue with black as a primary), but maybe GPT could help interpret that kind of thing (or I could try spelling out what I mean more clearly?).
I had heard that people have been making add-ons for Stable Diffusion that point it toward specific styles, so that might be worth looking into as well.
Can't beat the cost and convenience for a good-enough image!
I'm sure we'll get to a spot in 2 or 3 years where this gets a lot better. I do have Stable Diffusion but it's slow and hard to wrestle with. I do use Dall-E 3 for work but it's not a large part of what I do. Let's say I generate 2-3 images a day.
My whine here is specifically about the stylistical awfulness of Dall-E 3 images which I now see cropping up everywhere. Prompt-hacking doesn't work. I try stuff like this: "Simple, not complex, no extra characters, restrained, not saturated", but it doesn't seem to really give me what I want.
I haven't noticed it -- do you have an example?
Maybe it has trouble with negatives? I wonder if it would respond to directions about specific color palettes (yellow ochre, Paynes grey, cadmium red?), where to place the focal point, or name dropping Rembrandt?
Sure. Here are a some examples from a blog that was posted to the slatestarcodex subreddit.
1, 2, 3
Once you recognize the "style" you see it everywhere. The main thing is that they are just way too busy.
I invite you to show me anything that makes all these images I've generated samey.
You're prompting it wrong.
/images/17020575509717166.webp
/images/17020575514449952.webp
/images/1702057552012355.webp
Common link is they are all have far too many unnecessary elements that detract from the image. I will grant that only image #2 looks like a 100% match for the Dall-E 3 archetype.
What do you mean by "unnecessary things"?
They're precisely what I asked for, within the limits of my prompting and the model. Without knowing the prompts, I have no idea what you think they're missing.
At the very least the last one is a minimal brutalist logo for a PMC, I can hardly imagine what could be less so.
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