site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3170 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

which I now see cropping up everywhere

I haven't noticed it -- do you have an example?

"Simple, not complex, no extra characters, restrained, not saturated"

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?

I haven't noticed it -- do you have an example?

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.

While I like (and sometimes exploit!) this trait, a lot of settings on both generation and upscaling (especially with latent upscalers) will result in visual clutter that a normal artist would not use.

This is most noticable and obvious on the PMC brutalist logo: the scattered white pixels around the 'shoulder' and well outside of the logo's boundaries are just not what you'd expect to see. Maybe as some sort of deep-fried jpg artifact, were the rest of the image busier? But they're not actually those things, or even human interpretations of those things.

The wave-face image is the one where clear errors are most human-like -- anatomy and cloth flow mistakes, overpronounced foreshortening, slightly jank perspective are all totally things even good artists do, sometimes intentionally! -- but separately it's also got some weird distractions. Why are there blue highlights on his abs? If the flow of the image is supposed to be toward his face, why are so many lines going to his shoulders?

The ARMA one is the closest to human-like (there's a few physics/layout errors, but they're absolutely ones humans would make), though the genre it's coming from tends to be cluttered and intentionally disorienting to start with.

You can work around and stop these sort of issues, but you have to really heavily ride and push it toward specific low-clutter styles, and even then it takes some futzing with SD parameters to avoid the image coming out overdone or undercooked.

/images/17023968095808215.webp is prompted by meta at the FurryDiffusion discord, but outside of the hands/paws (and... subject matter), it's as close to human-created art as you'll get.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats