Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum!
I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their purpose.
This analysis is just noise. Yawn.
Ironically, even an LLM with its fake reasoning capabilities can point out the issue with the prompts if you ask it to critique this article.
Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location
This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt)
It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration
I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp
NBP (and the new ChatGPT generator) are integrated with LLMs to various degrees, so seems like the obvious starting point is a reverse approach: ask them to describe the old images which has the esthetics that Fernando Borretti likes, and start generating from those prompts. If you can recover the old images, then it was just a prompting issue. ("Sampling can show the presence of knowledge but not the absence.") If you can't even with their own 'native' descriptions, then that points to mode-collapse (especially all of the 'esthetic tuning' like DPO everyone does now) as being the biggest problem.
The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
> A painting sold at Sotheby's
and
> A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's
convey very different meaning (to me).
> It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
> "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."
Here is an image from NBP with an adapted prompt for Italian futurism: https://imgur.com/a/4pN0I0R
and for Kowloon:
Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.
If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.
[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
It has happened each and every time, it just haven't affected you personally. Starting of course with the original luddites - they didn't complain out of some philosophical opposition to automation.
Each time in changes like this a huge number of people lost their jobs and took big hits in their quality of life. The "new jobs", when they arrive, arrive for others.
This includes the post 1990s switch to service and digital economies and outsourcing, which obliterated countless factory towns in the US - and those people didn't magically turn to coders and creatives. At best they took unemployment, big decreases in job prospects, shitty "gig" economy jobs, or, well, worse, including alcohol and opiods.
With AI it's even worse, since it has the capacity to replace jobs without adding new ones, or a tiny handful at a hugely smaller rate.
And not everyone gets new jobs, because usually the new job is fundamentally different and might not be compatible with the person or their original desire out of their employment.
Whether or not it comes to fruition, it's making large portions of society feel uneasy, and not just programmers, or artists, or teachers.
Like, you know... creating art.
It has happened every single time.
As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
A large part of the magic of art is the human choices that go into it.
This is more akin to going to a supermarket and buying peanut butter (prompt: peanut butter, filter by brand/price/taste). The product may be tasty and enjoyable but I am not impressed by that.
There aren't many pictures of it, but my mind jumped to that right away. I think I've seen a documentary where it looks a lot more similar.
In particular that hallway in the middle, where I remember that there was a statue kind of as a worship place. And on the right side of that dark halway there is what appears to be a statue.
Sadly all I was able to find were these:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
Given these and that it changed over its history I think it's kind of a stretch to just say "it looks nothing like the Kowloon Walled City".
The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.
Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?
If so, then why lambast the lesser folk over their ignorance of the secret knowledge?
It is also not inventive. It's rehashing and regurgitating. That point is a bit muddy, because many humans do that too. But ask a generative "AI" to make something better than what it has learned from and new, and you will probably be disappointed.
I am not an art buff, but I can sort of see, why one wouldn't consider it proper art.
Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.
This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool.
If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for.
The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.
And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.
Were those “feelings” not authentic?
Art that provokes emotion in a cheap or manipulative way is often, if not always, bad art.
It feels like AI art is often just a version of: "I take all the things and mix them! You can't tell which original work that tree is taken from! Tiihiiihi!"
Where "tree" stands for any aspect of arbitrary size. The relationship is not that direct, of course, because all the works gen AI learns from kind of gets mixed in the weights of edges in the ANN. Nevertheless, the output is still some kind of mix of the stuff it learned from, even if it is not necessarily recognizable as such any longer. It is in the nature of how these things work.
Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.
They asked the machine to produce a picture from a dystopian place and somehow expected the machine to know they like it to be colorful? Just tell the machine it needs to be colorful if that is what you want.
