- makeai.art (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28070149)
Looks like they're both new apps, so they've done well to get everything up and running so quickly! I already had a lot of the groundwork laid for NightCafe Creator, so it was much easier for me to get this done. There's a lot involved, especially if you're going to charge for use (which is a must if you expect to have any sort of volume in the long run).
I almost gave up on NightCafe when I was trying to make money from selling prints to people. Then, one user generated 3,000 creations in a week, which cost him nothing and me $300. I decided to spend the weekend implementing a credit system to prevent abuse, and was surprised to find that more people were willing to pay for credits than I expected.
It's still not much and I've had to spend a lot of effort on reducing costs in various ways just to be able to break even. But I love working on this app and have high hopes that _one day_ it will become profitable enough for me to work on it full time.
existential dread simulator: https://nightcafe-studio.imgix.net/jobs/GFM872ChxPF4Xeb2jTiC...
graffiti sunset: https://nightcafe-studio.imgix.net/jobs/MJfXTM5rFdNqHcR5xBRG...
I won't claim to have a good knowledge of the inner workings, but basically CLIP will give a score for how well the image matches your prompt, and that's used as a loss function for the GAN.
On the Colab notebooks you can specify multiple prompts with different weights, in which case I assume it has multiple loss functions that it's trying to optimise for.
I'm more of a web app guy than a deep tech guy. Some of what I wrote can probably be corrected by someone with a better knowledge of the ML.
E.g. instead of "graffiti sunset" you might get better results with "a sunset painted in the style of graffiti" or similar.
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/70lx2Il45nK1rmcE1D...
I've been playing around with AI art generators for a while now and they are always great fun. Though it weirdly motivates to do some painting or creating of my own as if I need to compete with it. I think AI generators as inspiration tools is a very interesting use-case that I'd like to see more of!
As a side note, have any people bought any of the prints?
Most of my regular users are artists who either use it for inspiration or use it to mix into their digital art. (NightCafe has been around for a while as a style transfer app).
It's rare that people buy prints. Most money comes from people buying credits.
I'm somewhat involved in similar apps and I know the computation required, even for just inference, can be quite expensive.
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/JxN2V4LL2mTozEoPLV...
Prompt:
a large robot is fighting another large robot with a scenic background over the water 8k resolution
My best tips for good results - use a phrase describing objects you'd commonly see in pictures and art, like "House on a hill" or "Futuristic city", add some modifiers, then start with the smallest resolution and runtime. Try a few variations of phrase and modifiers, and see what looks promising. Then pick the best one(s) and use the "Evolve" button to run them for longer and increase the resolution.
it is getting significantly better though! The first AI art generators were just dreams now we're getting decent stuff as long as you stick to nature concepts.
Here's one I got for:
"a starry, dark night sky over vast plains of desert"
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/70lx2Il45nK1rmcE1D...
it's definitely getting there!
However, adding keywords like "watercolour painting", "van gogh painting" etc goes a long way to getting more precise results.
One big difference between style transfer and GAN art is that style transfer never changes the shape of things. E.g. you can't put in a woman's face and a cubist painting and get out a rearranged version of the face (as cubists do). It will have all the hallmarks of cubism, but it's still recognisable as the original photo.
With GAN art though, you can put that photo in as a start image, say "Cubist painting of a woman's face", and the GAN will actually rearrange the face like a cubist would.
Do you use Shopify for the order processing?
Do you have to integrate your own payment or do they handle it all for you? Do they collect the money from users and then send it to you once per month? Do they handle the tricky parts like dealing with VAT per country?
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/EqWtT6LUB3WwVd3T56...
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/iH0oqPjpo4oEHvxwlB...
Does it support the pipes and weights I saw mentioned in a few notebooks, eg. "motorbike:75 | bicycle:25 | car:0"?
I will build an interface for it rather than a prompt syntax. My target audience is a bit less technical than the average Google Colab user.
Advantages over using Google Colab:
- It's >2x faster (runs on NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPUs). E.g. 800 iterations at 600x600px in 8 mins vs 19 mins on Colab.
- Can do higher resolution (894x894px > 700x700px).
- Run multiple jobs in parallel.
- Works from any device.
- Obviously it's much easier to use for anyone non-technical.
- It's easy to "evolve" creations. I.e. tweak the prompt, increase the resolution, and/or just run them for longer.
- You don't need to keep the tab open to see the result.
It's free for basic use, but does cost money for extended use. Unfortunately I don't have the same access to GPUs as Google does.
Try it out. Would love to get the thoughts of the HN community!
