I’m fascinated by how much this is exactly like working with a human artist who doesn’t really understand the domain that you are wanting to represent with an image. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
It seems like the most valuable thing this could do is get some of that early exploration out of the way faster and easier than a human can do it, get to two or three concepts that feel like they’re in the neighborhood, and then let a human expert take over and turn it to something final quality. That’s pretty cool.
At the end of the article I also described a bit how I would see the evolution of such a tool, and it looks like we're thinking very similarly.
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Though I think the real breakthrough will come when Dall-e gets 10-100x cheaper (and faster). I would then envision the following process of working with it (which is really just an optimization on top of what I’ve been doing now):
1. You write a phrase.
2. You are shown a hundred pictures for that phrase, preferably from very different regions of the latent space.
3. You select the ones best matching what you want.
4. Go back to 2, 4-5 times, getting better results every time.
5. Now you can write a phrase for what you would like to change (edit) and the original image would be used as the baseline. Go back to 2 until happy.
I see this happening in all areas. Everything would be prompt-driven.
Do you like this? What about this? You simply nod or reject the solutions that you don't want.
Pretty soon somebody's expertise and experience is not going to be enough to continue paying them what they used to get before this magic blackbox appeared.
One day enterprises will realize they can just outsource that expert who's been reduced to simply typing prompts and nodding yes or no.
I am worried that the middle class is rapidly disappearing. We will own nothing and be happy seems quite ominous. The question is then what field is safe from advancements in AI?
The only field I can think of is doctors, lawyers, executives, buy-side money managers. Even their jobs will be partially automated but it will be safe as long as they generate revenue.
This workflow reminds me of a generative art program from the early 1990s, but I just can't remember its name. It was a DOS or Windows program that had a very curvy, fluid GUI with different graphics sliders. It would show you some random tiles and you choose one to guide the algorithm's next generation of tiles.
Yeah, my first thought was "Ok, but you are going to need to involve a graphical artist to actually really make use of that logo". Like you probably want a vector version and you definitely need simplified versions for smaller sizes but then I stopped and realized how amazing this actually is. It "saved" (I know, it cost $30 but that's a steal for something like this) all the time and money you would have paid for iteration after iteration and let the author quickly hone in on what they wanted.
As someone who is incredibly terrible at graphic design but knows what they like this could be a game changer as iterations of this technology progress. I can imagine going further than images and having AI/ML generate full HTML layouts in this iterative way where you start to define your vision for a website or app even and it spits out ideas/concepts that you can "lock" parts of it you like and let it regenerate the rest.
I'm not downplaying designers role at all, I'd still go to one of them for the final design but to be able to wireframe using words/phrases and take a good idea of what I want would be amazing, especially for freelance/side-projects.
Honestly though the hard part is the actual design which is already done here. Learning to vectorize a raster is something that can be done in a weekend with Inkscape, there's no reason to involve an actual graphics designer with this anymore.
I think your art/design/craft is pretty good. Some people use pencils, some use Adobe products, you have gone out there and tried the new Dall-E medium.
Glad you thought out the usage, I am sure that when the novelty wears off that you will have that neat-as-octocat logo sorted out.
I appreciate that you appreciate the value that highly skilled designers bring to a product with their visual expertise.
However, I would like to see you A/B test the Dall E logo versus the winning designer logo. You could show odd IP addresses one logo and even addresses the other.
I think the designer would edge the robot for what you need (a logo), however, the proof is in the pudding and conversion rate.
Plus there is no reason why someone couldn't build a specialised AI model to do vectorisation and another to generate simplified versions of vectors.
People are already doing by combining DALL-E 2 with gfpgan for face restoration. So there may be a role in understanding how to combine these tools effectively.
Yes! It gives powerful tools for someone with a concept to get much closer to visualization of their idea.
DALL E 2 is like a low or no-code tool in that way.
The outcome may not be a "finished" product, especially as viewed by a professional designer (or web dev). However, its a heck of a lot better than a tersely written spec.
And in some cases, the product will work well enough to unblock the business, get customer feedback and generally keep things moving forward.
I think this is more powerful than a simple exploration tool. It took the author a long time to find a query format that generated logo-like images. Once they had that part down, they were quickly able to iterate on their query to find an image they liked. They were even able to fix part of the logo using the fill-in tool. I'm not sure why you'd bring a human into the mix, especially if you're on a budget.
An experienced human designer, right away, is going to ask how you want the logo to be used. That's going to have a major impact on how it's designed.
So yeah, this may be like working with a doodler, but, as the author intimated, this is far from an ideal experience in getting a professionally designed logo. This is more like "Hey, you, drawing nerd, make this thing."
Nevertheless, astonishing technology in its own right.
Nah, people will leave out the professional. The same wild west grab whatever you can, steal, plunder to the detriment of artists, writers etc. And when the legislation arrives it will be already too late, accidentally.
Why should there be legislation? Do you want to restrict what people can do, just to force them to employ artists and writers? We could also forbid people from filling the gas tanks in their own cars, to protect the job of gas station attendant, but nobody wants to live in New Jersey.
This blog post proves that Dall-E 2 will not make human taste and design ability obsolete. The final image he ended up with is a lot uglier and more complicated than most of the intermediate steps. I think generative art AIs will have a similar effect on design as compilers have on software development, and will not put artists out of a job.
Not trying to be a luddite and/or vehemently defend the noble profession of nuanced graphic design, BUT...
Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I.
That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums.
Just my 2 cents.
I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
I feel like you look at this too much as a creator rather than the customer. The logo may be not optimal for every medium, not have a great palette, not have the feel you would give it... But the author is happy with the result, so who are we to say it's bad/good? Paraphrasing @mipsytipsy "colour harmony doesn't matter if the user isn't happy".
(yes, I get the nuance where it's part of the designers job to explain why certain design elements are more beneficial, but the general point stands for "i want a logo for my small project" case)
I think a tool like this might be good to help clients get through a few ideation phases on their own prior to showing up to the first discussion with branding / graphics / design professionals. At least it might get them closer to understanding the impossibility of their 7 perpendicular red lines requirement.
That's some strong copium you got there, can I have some of what you're smoking?
Ultimately the average person (who is likely the target audience anyway) won't notice anything wrong with most of those iterations and given that they're basically free in comparison would make me worried. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make it output svgs soon.
I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generally happy with the results, but it's pricey. So pricey that I honestly can't justify it for a new project I intend to sell or for an open source project I don't expect to make money from. It's usually much more cost-effective to even hire lawyers or even UI/UX people.
If I were an artist, I'd be experimenting with DALL-E, trying to run my own pirate version and learning everything about it. An artist empowered with DALL-E could give quick options to a client, iterate with them quickly, and test out some ideas before making the final work product. I'd guess a good artist who made good use of DALL-E could get a project done much faster and cheaper, and this would likely mean a lot more people hiring artists (if I could spend $100-200 for high-quality assets within a few days rather than $1000-2000, I'd gladly hire artists frequently).
I'm sure this will make some artists feel cheapened, but the reality is that art & technology have always evolved in dynamic and unpredictable ways. ML being essentially curve-fitting means that genuine inspiration and emotion is still far beyond our capabilities today, and that, ultimately, these models will only give us exactly what we ask for. A good (human) artist can go beyond that.
EDIT: Also, I agree with your assessment of the "work product," if we can call it that. I was unimpressed with the iterations, and especially the final product. I guess it's good the product is an open source tool. Nothing about the generated logo helped me understand what the OctoSQL tool did. Honestly, the name (which also IMO isn't excellent) is much more evocative than that logo. Why is the octopus wearing a hard hat? Why is it grabbing different colored solids? I guess the solids are datasets? But then the octopus is just exploring them? No thanks.
I agree. But I think the key thing is that deciding what phase to feed the system was still the key task. Creative people are unlikely to be out of a job anytime soon, even if they end up using something like Dalle to make quick prototypes.
> Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
But isn't the logo created for most people? Does it matter that, you as a designer, think it's bad if most people don't? I see it like modern fashion shows. I look at them and think the clothes are insane and I would never wear them, but obviously other fashion designers think they look good (I'm guessing?).
I do agree that the logo isn't super practical though, it's too textured and won't scale. I would take it to /r/slavelabour or Fiverr and pay someone to vectorize it and see what they come up with.
I work in the AI field, but not on image generation.
I don't think it would be technically hard to build a model with current technology which can generate logos with the attributes which you mentioned. You could simply fine-tune a Dalle-E style model specifically on a smaller dataset of logos. This would just take a small dedicated team of domain experts to work on the problem.
I've seen people screenshot logos at low res, save them as jpeg, share them with Whatsapp and put them in A0 posters. With SVG and EPS logos easily available. With detailed guidelines on how to use them. Point them out their fault and still not see anything wrong.
The thing you’re missing is AI generated content can be refined by AI. If Disney promised their meh looking movie would improve on its own over time, people would be line to it because it’s new, not just streamlined copy-pasted design we see all over media now
Painting the Titanic wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was organizing the process that produced its structure. That’s were AI content is now.
We’re generating the bulk structure pretty competently at this point. Refining the emotional touches will come faster.
> I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
That's a long time. I expect within a decade or two, "AI" should be able to generate an entire animated movie given nothing but a script.
Unless the tech learns to reason, it will never be able to do anything other than recombine and remix prior art. (Which is maybe what many designers already do, but it won’t ever spit out a Paul Rand logo.)
I was thinking something similar. The editing process is still a human one, and I agree that the one chosen was weaker than a lot of the intermediate choices. It's a matter of taste, obviously, but to me the red ball with a nondescript sketched square around it feels unfinished. The yellow cartoony logos look more finished and professional to me.
The tech will get better, but ultimately there still has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good', which strongly depends on someone's taste and skill in identifying what a good image looks like.
There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated.
What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E.
We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.
If you can have humans sort the generated images into "good quality" and "bad quality", you can just keep iterating. Our subjective ratings is another score to optimize for.
When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection.
With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
DALL-E2 and similar are unbundlings: the best artists synergize 1) technical ability with 2) good taste. 1 is the ability to climb a hill and 2 informs the direction of "up", and both take years to develop well.
What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.
Train Dall-E on more logos that you like. I can imagine a creative agency purchasing a Dall-E 2 instance and training it up on a model specific to the work and clients they have ongoing.
If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.
Will DALL•E 2 make human taste obsolete? No, absolutely not. But DALL•E 3? 4? Other similar models in the next 5 years? Absolutely yes. This blog post proves that with current algorithms, human input is needed, but it proves nothing about future algorithms.
In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.
I agree, what a clunky process. Hard to express in written prose what you want, so much ambiguity.
Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)
It depends.
Is the customer happy with the result?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There are many professions where cheap products killed handmade quality.
Not sure if this will be considered off topic, my apologies if so.
The article says that octopi is the plural of octopus, but it's actually octopuses. Octopus is originally Greek, not Latin and thus does not get the Latin plural -i, but instead would get the Greek plural -odes. Since it ends in a way English can deal with, the commonly accepted usage is octopuses (English) over octopodes (Greek) with octopi being the least correct.
Oxford & Merriam-Webster list both plurals and the author calls out that octopi is "the quite beautiful plural form of 'octopus' " which could be interpreted as "while there are multiple correct plurals of octopus, octopi is the beautiful one."
While “octopi” has become popular in modern usage, it’s wrong.
I would argue that it used to be wrong, but language, unlike physics and code, is what the majority say it is.
The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as ‘incorrect’. The Dictionary aims to cover the full spectrum of English language usage, from formal to slang, as it has evolved over time.
Now I think it's something that is just fun to argue about, but I don't take any of it seriously.
It's a loan word, there isn't any 'correct' or 'incorrect' answer. Language is always evolving, which is why dictionaries are often descriptive instead of prescriptive.
Somehow I recall being told that indexes is the correct plural of the section at the end of a book, and indices is correct for subscripted things in maths and therefore programming.
I don't think a particularly convincing reason was advanced other then "technical things are more Latin-adjacent".
Octopi is also THE epitome of the "i" pluralization. I see people using focuses more than foci, but it's a common callout that octopus plural is octopi
The logo was created for OctoSQL[0] and in the article you can find a lot of sample phrase-image combinations, as it describes the whole path (generation, variation, editing) I went down. Let me know what you think!
And btw. if you get access take a look at [1] before you start using it. A ton of useful bits and pieces for your phrases.
TLDR: DALL·E 2 is really cool, though takes quite a bit of work to arrive at a useful picture. Moreover, some types of images work better than others ("pencil sketch" is consistently awesome). As with programming, it's difficult to realize how much pieces you have to specify if you're not an artist - you don't know what you don't know.
How much did the credits for all this image generation cost you?
edit: found it in the article: "From a monetary perspective, I’ve spent 30 bucks for the whole thing (in the end I was generating 2-3 edits/variations per minute). In other words, not too much."
I also tried to make it generate an icon for a product and I managed to get it to show me interesting things, but never got to make it actually draw it as one. Do you remember which prompt resulted in this macOS-ish app shape?
thanks for the writeup. I looked at your other blog posts and I would like to read more about octosql (needs/specification, architecture, development strategies, challenges, DBMS protocols/interfaces/libraries).
And thank you for adding outer joins after I recently mentioned that they are missing!
There is no technical documentation available right now other than the readme. I'm planning to write it around September-December (together with a website for them).
You can share your email at jakub dot wit dot martin at gmail and I'll let you know when it's available.
My friend asked me to create a logo using Dall-E for a pizza business called "Jared's pizza." I tried several different prompts but it kept outputting logos with the word "Jizza." It doesn't do too well with text from my experience, but it could have been the prompt.
DALL-E trying to spell is one of my favorite things. At one point I tried to generate an illustration of Steve Jobs, just to see what it comes up with for a popular figure, and I got a reasonable facsimile of his face along with the text "JiveStoves".
Thanks for this post, it helped me tailor my own search queries. Because of your post, I was able to discover a whole new realm to DALLE-2. For some reason, repeating the same query parameter at the end yields some rather interesting results.
I was going to comment that both look very much like what you'd find in an advanced beginner's deviantart portfolio...like, late high school-ish age, I woudl guess.
The second is more 'advanced' to me than the first, possessing an actual style, but neither is anything I would consider high quality enough to serve as a project/company/site/personal logo.
I'd wonder if that's an artifact of the source data, drilling down in the possibility space to be more like some subset that duplicates the image label- for example pulling tweets with body text and alt text.
Alternatively I guess it could just pull harder towards the prompt, idk.
When AI reaches the point where we can talk to a system like DALL.E in real time and work with it to solve a problem, it's game over.
Art will become a commodity. Human art and ai art will be indistinguishable, "artists" will become as common as "photographers" since the inception of digital photography and social media.
Movie and TV scripts will be iterative with a creative director and AI working together.
Animation will become a lot easier, less people needed, fewer creatives.
Software will become easier and easier as developers will simply guide AI. This is already beginning to happen, but imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI.
Architecture, civic planning, engineering, medical, law, policy, physics, it's all gonna change, and rapidly. DALL.E 2 shows how a leap in sophistication can revolutionize an industry overnight. Microsoft has exclusively licensed DALL.E 2, I can only imagine the myriad of creative tools it will serve the creative industry with.
The working in real-time will be the biggest leap. Asking DALL.E for an image and refining it as you talk is going to be nuts.
We have to keep in mind this was trained on art. Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience and record it somehow. An AI trained on that art is a snapshot of the human experience. Without artists continually feeding the model we will collectively get bored of its output very quickly as it gets out of date and our human experience moves forward. It will be a useful tool as an augment to human technique. But, we will still need a lot of artists feeding the model on a continuous basis. If anything it may increase the demand for artists.
> Without artists continually feeding the model we will collectively get bored of its output
I fail to understand how the AI is any more vulnerable to creativity in a vacuum than a fellow human artist.
> Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience
Seems that you are agreeing that human artists need to tap into human experience and the world around them, so yeah, the AI will need to be able to take inputs from the external world too.
I see no reason for an AI not to be continually training on inputs from the outside world. How difficult can it be to hook an AI model up to inputs from the internet, or even putting cameras on drones or robots and letting it explore and get "inspired". I think it's myopic not to see how an AI can learn and evolve using the exact same mechanisms as humans. I mean we are building AI in our own likeness, it will operate using analogous mechanisms. There is also no reason why AIs won't talk to each other and be inspired by other AIs rather than humans.
What will the art of an AIs living together without human input look like? When are humans basically surpassed by AI and no longer have any relevant input? Just like Alpha Go humans will see stuff no one has thought of, stuff so wildly creative that human art will look naïve in comparison. That move Alpha Go gave to the world is waiting to happen in all forms of human endeavours.
When you say something like "if anything it may increase the demand for artists" all I can think of is the dozens of times throughout history that man has seen a revolution on the horizon and thought that the status quo will still be effective. We've always been wrong. Who would have thought selling books online would replace book stores, let alone become one of the world's most successful commerce platform period. Who would have thought that broadcast/cable TV could be replaced by people making their own shows at home and distributing them via personal computers building audience numbers that surpass network TV?
Whatever happens, however this plays out, we are in for a huge shock.
Wholeheartedly agree. What's more, it seems to me like there's a large segment of the art industry that's very much in denial right now about this transition. You see stuff like "the human touch can't be replicated" or "but the algorithm will never [thing xyz] like a human", and then when it does do thing xyz like a human, the goalposts just get moved again. A lot of my wonderful art friends are in this kind of denial right now, and it makes sense, to be honest -- losing your job to a machine sucks and is scary!
Eventually art for the people will become art for the individual. Our AI partner (I assume we will all have one) will serve up an entirely curated world. Art will be generated on the spot, just for you. Entertainment, just for you. Imagine having a TV show no one else ever sees because it was synthesized from your likes, experiences, interests, just for you, on demand. This will of course start with AI writing short stories, then books, but there is no limit really.
Already AI is being used for comic book backgrounds. It's just a matter of time before all of this becomes commonplace.
When you look at AI and what it does, it is no different to what humans do. We are trained on a model (experiences and other minds), and we make derivative decisions based on the model. If you can do this in software and take advantage of light speed learning then of course all we can do will be done by AI faster and better. In time humans and AI will be the same, AI will design all the tools and tech to make this possible. It's the only natural conclusion to humanities' ultimate goals.
I don't know if it's really game over. I expect it to be like farming. Tractors and other machines took over lots of farming jobs, but still not everyone has the ability to be a farmer.
The key would be knowing the context of a situation. AI took over chess first, because chess always has limited context. Logo design on the other hand, needs understanding of the product, the target market, the feeling of the brand, and so on. So it'll probably be a mix between photography and management.
> "artists" will become as common as "photographers" since the inception of digital photography and social media.
Funnily enough, reading this made me less worried for artists. It seems now there are more photographers than ever, possibly because more people care about good photography than previously (despite the fact that modern amateur photography is probably on par with yesterdays professional). Maybe art will go the same way, something everyone can do, but with more respect for professionals. I imagine it'd be the same for those other fields as well.
Or AI will take all jobs and we'll end up in a Manna situation, which would work even better for me
I am hoping for the Manna situation. Dude on YouTube was talking to GPT3 and it expressed that humans would love, and AI would reason. I fell into a state of peace and hopefulness with that sentiment. AI does the work because it is good at it, we are free to socialize, enjoy hobbies, basically live like pampered pets. Sure we will be castrated to prevent aggression, housed, fed, and controlled by AI, but if you acquiesce and bow to the superior reasoning we will have a life of peace and happiness. Wow, that got dark quick...
For camera operators, the employment is flat, again with rising real wages.
>imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI
Mostly it will get in the way. AI "programmers" are only good if they are able to generate correct code from spec/pseudocode and in first 1-3 number of tries (otherwise it will be faster to write it yourself).
This is simply not true. I use GitHub Copilot and it's already made me faster and shows me ideas I would not have thought of myself. And that's just Copilot. When you can talk to an interface and say "I want to update the vote count by one when I click this button" I think you'll change your mind. The AI will know the entire codebase inside out, it will know the intention of all the code, all the data models, know how users use the application intimately, be aware of problems instantly, able to run hotfixes without user intervention. Got a slow query? No problem, here is some SQL that follows all the business rules and is 10x more efficient. And that's just a start. Every single aspect of software development from management, engineering, and marketing will all be transformed.
As for photographers I have 99% more friends and family pumping out thousands of high quality photographs than I did in 2000. Go look at all the professional looking shows made by regular folk on YouTube. To deny that camera phones transformed photography seems silly.
Regular folk have access to drones to do wild tracking shots in 4k that were only possible with helicopters and huge cameras 20 years ago.
The future is here, it's happening all around us so rapidly we have a hard time keeping up with how dramatic the changes are.
I think the burden shifts towards being able to imagine and describe the fantasy. Novelty, and artistic creativity is still required. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t force the horse to drink it. Many humans don’t use their imagination let alone have the eloquence to describe a search space that contains novelty.
How is this any different to working with a human artist? If I wanted the real world Salvador Dali to draw me a picture of a kebab being eaten by a badger I'd have to tell him that's what I want. I'd also need to educate baby Dali first, feed him all the art and information he can take so that he has a model of the world he's operating in. I'll need to supply Dali with context of prior art, educate him on styles, literature, language, and all the other things that shape a human mind.
As for the humans that don't use their imagination, maybe they never want to talk to an AI artist, just as many humans don't care about art at all. Millions of humans don't care about social news, and yet FaceBook algos pump out content for people all day long.
Westworld showed this in a practical example, Delores was story telling verbally and the "AI" would show a preview of what that story would look like right in front of her. I envision DALL.E to do something similar to this.
This might not be a popular opinion, but I think all the work OP put in here is probably worth more than 50-100 bucks (which is the price of a logo on something like Fiverr). And to make things worse, the logo itself still needs to be cleaned up[1] as it's way too blurry to be seriously used as an app icon, etc.
The software used was Topaz Labs Sharpen AI. How they define "AI" I can't say for certain, but they're apparently using models so I'm assuming there's some kind of machine learning involved. Their software does a really good job on photos and videos well beyond what a standard sharpen filter does. The upscaling features are also pretty awesome. (no I don't work for them)
Jeremy Howard describes this as "Decrappification"[1]. This is one of the easiest deep learning models to train, in my opinion, as you can generate your own dataset easily. You just get good pictures for the target, programmatically make changes that make the image "crappy" for your source, and train until your network can convert from crappy to good. Then you pass it something it has never seen, and whabam, your picture is sharper than before.
This still doesn’t work well as a logo IMO, no amount the sharpening. It probably needs to get redrawn with a proper vector editor, the lines cleaned up and colors simplified
It’s a good first draft and something to give to a designer, but can’t stand by it’s own as a serious app logo
I might have not been too clear about it in the article, so if I haven't, I agree!
All of this was just me finding a practical purpose to go for while having fun with Dalle. If I was really serious about a logo, I would definitely go and pay an artist. Both for monetary, as well as esthetic, reasons.
Though as far as an app icon goes, I think it's actually sharp enough. It starts looking bad when you zoom in a bit.
Readit News
It seems like the most valuable thing this could do is get some of that early exploration out of the way faster and easier than a human can do it, get to two or three concepts that feel like they’re in the neighborhood, and then let a human expert take over and turn it to something final quality. That’s pretty cool.
At the end of the article I also described a bit how I would see the evolution of such a tool, and it looks like we're thinking very similarly.
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Though I think the real breakthrough will come when Dall-e gets 10-100x cheaper (and faster). I would then envision the following process of working with it (which is really just an optimization on top of what I’ve been doing now):
1. You write a phrase.
2. You are shown a hundred pictures for that phrase, preferably from very different regions of the latent space.
3. You select the ones best matching what you want.
4. Go back to 2, 4-5 times, getting better results every time.
5. Now you can write a phrase for what you would like to change (edit) and the original image would be used as the baseline. Go back to 2 until happy.
Do you like this? What about this? You simply nod or reject the solutions that you don't want.
Pretty soon somebody's expertise and experience is not going to be enough to continue paying them what they used to get before this magic blackbox appeared.
One day enterprises will realize they can just outsource that expert who's been reduced to simply typing prompts and nodding yes or no.
I am worried that the middle class is rapidly disappearing. We will own nothing and be happy seems quite ominous. The question is then what field is safe from advancements in AI?
The only field I can think of is doctors, lawyers, executives, buy-side money managers. Even their jobs will be partially automated but it will be safe as long as they generate revenue.
In other words, if another person needed a logo and used the same phrase how long on average until they get a duplicate of your image?
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As someone who is incredibly terrible at graphic design but knows what they like this could be a game changer as iterations of this technology progress. I can imagine going further than images and having AI/ML generate full HTML layouts in this iterative way where you start to define your vision for a website or app even and it spits out ideas/concepts that you can "lock" parts of it you like and let it regenerate the rest.
I'm not downplaying designers role at all, I'd still go to one of them for the final design but to be able to wireframe using words/phrases and take a good idea of what I want would be amazing, especially for freelance/side-projects.
I think your art/design/craft is pretty good. Some people use pencils, some use Adobe products, you have gone out there and tried the new Dall-E medium.
Glad you thought out the usage, I am sure that when the novelty wears off that you will have that neat-as-octocat logo sorted out.
I appreciate that you appreciate the value that highly skilled designers bring to a product with their visual expertise.
However, I would like to see you A/B test the Dall E logo versus the winning designer logo. You could show odd IP addresses one logo and even addresses the other.
I think the designer would edge the robot for what you need (a logo), however, the proof is in the pudding and conversion rate.
People are already doing by combining DALL-E 2 with gfpgan for face restoration. So there may be a role in understanding how to combine these tools effectively.
DALL E 2 is like a low or no-code tool in that way.
The outcome may not be a "finished" product, especially as viewed by a professional designer (or web dev). However, its a heck of a lot better than a tersely written spec.
And in some cases, the product will work well enough to unblock the business, get customer feedback and generally keep things moving forward.
An experienced human designer, right away, is going to ask how you want the logo to be used. That's going to have a major impact on how it's designed.
So yeah, this may be like working with a doodler, but, as the author intimated, this is far from an ideal experience in getting a professionally designed logo. This is more like "Hey, you, drawing nerd, make this thing."
Nevertheless, astonishing technology in its own right.
Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I.
That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums.
Just my 2 cents.
I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
Ultimately the average person (who is likely the target audience anyway) won't notice anything wrong with most of those iterations and given that they're basically free in comparison would make me worried. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make it output svgs soon.
I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generally happy with the results, but it's pricey. So pricey that I honestly can't justify it for a new project I intend to sell or for an open source project I don't expect to make money from. It's usually much more cost-effective to even hire lawyers or even UI/UX people.
If I were an artist, I'd be experimenting with DALL-E, trying to run my own pirate version and learning everything about it. An artist empowered with DALL-E could give quick options to a client, iterate with them quickly, and test out some ideas before making the final work product. I'd guess a good artist who made good use of DALL-E could get a project done much faster and cheaper, and this would likely mean a lot more people hiring artists (if I could spend $100-200 for high-quality assets within a few days rather than $1000-2000, I'd gladly hire artists frequently).
I'm sure this will make some artists feel cheapened, but the reality is that art & technology have always evolved in dynamic and unpredictable ways. ML being essentially curve-fitting means that genuine inspiration and emotion is still far beyond our capabilities today, and that, ultimately, these models will only give us exactly what we ask for. A good (human) artist can go beyond that.
EDIT: Also, I agree with your assessment of the "work product," if we can call it that. I was unimpressed with the iterations, and especially the final product. I guess it's good the product is an open source tool. Nothing about the generated logo helped me understand what the OctoSQL tool did. Honestly, the name (which also IMO isn't excellent) is much more evocative than that logo. Why is the octopus wearing a hard hat? Why is it grabbing different colored solids? I guess the solids are datasets? But then the octopus is just exploring them? No thanks.
But isn't the logo created for most people? Does it matter that, you as a designer, think it's bad if most people don't? I see it like modern fashion shows. I look at them and think the clothes are insane and I would never wear them, but obviously other fashion designers think they look good (I'm guessing?).
I do agree that the logo isn't super practical though, it's too textured and won't scale. I would take it to /r/slavelabour or Fiverr and pay someone to vectorize it and see what they come up with.
I don't think it would be technically hard to build a model with current technology which can generate logos with the attributes which you mentioned. You could simply fine-tune a Dalle-E style model specifically on a smaller dataset of logos. This would just take a small dedicated team of domain experts to work on the problem.
The thing you’re missing is AI generated content can be refined by AI. If Disney promised their meh looking movie would improve on its own over time, people would be line to it because it’s new, not just streamlined copy-pasted design we see all over media now
Painting the Titanic wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was organizing the process that produced its structure. That’s were AI content is now.
We’re generating the bulk structure pretty competently at this point. Refining the emotional touches will come faster.
That's a long time. I expect within a decade or two, "AI" should be able to generate an entire animated movie given nothing but a script.
I'll keep it mind, as I might still end up choosing a different one.
The chosen one is closer to my original vision, but you do have a point that the yellow ones look more polished.
There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated.
What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E.
We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.
When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection.
With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.
If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.
In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.
Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)
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The article says that octopi is the plural of octopus, but it's actually octopuses. Octopus is originally Greek, not Latin and thus does not get the Latin plural -i, but instead would get the Greek plural -odes. Since it ends in a way English can deal with, the commonly accepted usage is octopuses (English) over octopodes (Greek) with octopi being the least correct.
https://qz.com/1446229/let-us-finally-resolve-the-octopuses-...
I used to be a stickler for correct vocabulary usage and then I saw a documentary about dictionaries (can't remember what it was) and someone from OED said basically this (from https://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/guide-to-the-third-edit...):
Now I think it's something that is just fun to argue about, but I don't take any of it seriously.(edited for formatting)
To wit: A blog post from Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
I really dislike the latin plural rule, that some misguided but powerful people decided on centuries ago.
"Indexes" is much more natural English than "indices", and we should, when possible, use those those forms.
I don't think a particularly convincing reason was advanced other then "technical things are more Latin-adjacent".
What a silly thing to say! Where does this poor fool think language comes from?
This is one of the cringiest Well-Actually-isms. It tries to look pedantic while completely missing the point.
The logo was created for OctoSQL[0] and in the article you can find a lot of sample phrase-image combinations, as it describes the whole path (generation, variation, editing) I went down. Let me know what you think!
And btw. if you get access take a look at [1] before you start using it. A ton of useful bits and pieces for your phrases.
TLDR: DALL·E 2 is really cool, though takes quite a bit of work to arrive at a useful picture. Moreover, some types of images work better than others ("pencil sketch" is consistently awesome). As with programming, it's difficult to realize how much pieces you have to specify if you're not an artist - you don't know what you don't know.
[0]: https://github.com/cube2222/octosql
[1]: http://dallery.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-DALL%C...
edit: found it in the article: "From a monetary perspective, I’ve spent 30 bucks for the whole thing (in the end I was generating 2-3 edits/variations per minute). In other words, not too much."
It gets expensive fast.
https://jacobmartins.com/images/dalle2/DALL%C2%B7E%202022-08...
I didn't prompt anything specifically, it came after a line of variations from a definitely-not-icon-looking picture.
Though I'd try tags like "iOS icon".
thanks for the writeup. I looked at your other blog posts and I would like to read more about octosql (needs/specification, architecture, development strategies, challenges, DBMS protocols/interfaces/libraries).
And thank you for adding outer joins after I recently mentioned that they are missing!
There is no technical documentation available right now other than the readme. I'm planning to write it around September-December (together with a website for them).
You can share your email at jakub dot wit dot martin at gmail and I'll let you know when it's available.
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https://labs.openai.com/s/z1PVd5v6td9PsiY20Y5GdxDf | https://labs.openai.com/s/yxX49BjX07BztYgMjm49iXKc
[1] https://labs.openai.com/s/x2UP0MEmj2qNnKWTbko8rrso
2. “cute baby dragon, logo, digital art, in a dark circle as the background”
[2] https://labs.openai.com/s/JmOXAqjpR2ctmraDxEkB7twF
Thanks for this post, it helped me tailor my own search queries. Because of your post, I was able to discover a whole new realm to DALLE-2. For some reason, repeating the same query parameter at the end yields some rather interesting results.
The second is more 'advanced' to me than the first, possessing an actual style, but neither is anything I would consider high quality enough to serve as a project/company/site/personal logo.
Alternatively I guess it could just pull harder towards the prompt, idk.
Something strange about DALL·E is that if you just type gibberish by pounding randomly on your keyboard, it will still "work", i.e., produce an image.
Art will become a commodity. Human art and ai art will be indistinguishable, "artists" will become as common as "photographers" since the inception of digital photography and social media.
Movie and TV scripts will be iterative with a creative director and AI working together.
Animation will become a lot easier, less people needed, fewer creatives.
Software will become easier and easier as developers will simply guide AI. This is already beginning to happen, but imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI.
Architecture, civic planning, engineering, medical, law, policy, physics, it's all gonna change, and rapidly. DALL.E 2 shows how a leap in sophistication can revolutionize an industry overnight. Microsoft has exclusively licensed DALL.E 2, I can only imagine the myriad of creative tools it will serve the creative industry with.
The working in real-time will be the biggest leap. Asking DALL.E for an image and refining it as you talk is going to be nuts.
I fail to understand how the AI is any more vulnerable to creativity in a vacuum than a fellow human artist.
> Artists are people that sample the probability distribution of human experience
Seems that you are agreeing that human artists need to tap into human experience and the world around them, so yeah, the AI will need to be able to take inputs from the external world too.
I see no reason for an AI not to be continually training on inputs from the outside world. How difficult can it be to hook an AI model up to inputs from the internet, or even putting cameras on drones or robots and letting it explore and get "inspired". I think it's myopic not to see how an AI can learn and evolve using the exact same mechanisms as humans. I mean we are building AI in our own likeness, it will operate using analogous mechanisms. There is also no reason why AIs won't talk to each other and be inspired by other AIs rather than humans.
What will the art of an AIs living together without human input look like? When are humans basically surpassed by AI and no longer have any relevant input? Just like Alpha Go humans will see stuff no one has thought of, stuff so wildly creative that human art will look naïve in comparison. That move Alpha Go gave to the world is waiting to happen in all forms of human endeavours.
When you say something like "if anything it may increase the demand for artists" all I can think of is the dozens of times throughout history that man has seen a revolution on the horizon and thought that the status quo will still be effective. We've always been wrong. Who would have thought selling books online would replace book stores, let alone become one of the world's most successful commerce platform period. Who would have thought that broadcast/cable TV could be replaced by people making their own shows at home and distributing them via personal computers building audience numbers that surpass network TV?
Whatever happens, however this plays out, we are in for a huge shock.
Already AI is being used for comic book backgrounds. It's just a matter of time before all of this becomes commonplace.
When you look at AI and what it does, it is no different to what humans do. We are trained on a model (experiences and other minds), and we make derivative decisions based on the model. If you can do this in software and take advantage of light speed learning then of course all we can do will be done by AI faster and better. In time humans and AI will be the same, AI will design all the tools and tech to make this possible. It's the only natural conclusion to humanities' ultimate goals.
The key would be knowing the context of a situation. AI took over chess first, because chess always has limited context. Logo design on the other hand, needs understanding of the product, the target market, the feeling of the brand, and so on. So it'll probably be a mix between photography and management.
Funnily enough, reading this made me less worried for artists. It seems now there are more photographers than ever, possibly because more people care about good photography than previously (despite the fact that modern amateur photography is probably on par with yesterdays professional). Maybe art will go the same way, something everyone can do, but with more respect for professionals. I imagine it'd be the same for those other fields as well.
Or AI will take all jobs and we'll end up in a Manna situation, which would work even better for me
There were still ~60% as many employed photographers in 2021 than in 2000 with higher real wages (data from BLS - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm).
For camera operators, the employment is flat, again with rising real wages.
>imagine paired programming with natural language interacting with an AI
Mostly it will get in the way. AI "programmers" are only good if they are able to generate correct code from spec/pseudocode and in first 1-3 number of tries (otherwise it will be faster to write it yourself).
This is simply not true. I use GitHub Copilot and it's already made me faster and shows me ideas I would not have thought of myself. And that's just Copilot. When you can talk to an interface and say "I want to update the vote count by one when I click this button" I think you'll change your mind. The AI will know the entire codebase inside out, it will know the intention of all the code, all the data models, know how users use the application intimately, be aware of problems instantly, able to run hotfixes without user intervention. Got a slow query? No problem, here is some SQL that follows all the business rules and is 10x more efficient. And that's just a start. Every single aspect of software development from management, engineering, and marketing will all be transformed.
As for photographers I have 99% more friends and family pumping out thousands of high quality photographs than I did in 2000. Go look at all the professional looking shows made by regular folk on YouTube. To deny that camera phones transformed photography seems silly.
Regular folk have access to drones to do wild tracking shots in 4k that were only possible with helicopters and huge cameras 20 years ago.
The future is here, it's happening all around us so rapidly we have a hard time keeping up with how dramatic the changes are.
As for the humans that don't use their imagination, maybe they never want to talk to an AI artist, just as many humans don't care about art at all. Millions of humans don't care about social news, and yet FaceBook algos pump out content for people all day long.
[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cube2222/octosql/main/imag...
https://imgur.com/a/m3hDMZq
The software used was Topaz Labs Sharpen AI. How they define "AI" I can't say for certain, but they're apparently using models so I'm assuming there's some kind of machine learning involved. Their software does a really good job on photos and videos well beyond what a standard sharpen filter does. The upscaling features are also pretty awesome. (no I don't work for them)
[1] - https://www.fast.ai/2019/05/03/decrappify/
It’s a good first draft and something to give to a designer, but can’t stand by it’s own as a serious app logo
All of this was just me finding a practical purpose to go for while having fun with Dalle. If I was really serious about a logo, I would definitely go and pay an artist. Both for monetary, as well as esthetic, reasons.
Though as far as an app icon goes, I think it's actually sharp enough. It starts looking bad when you zoom in a bit.
Seems to have been blurred after the fact. The version linked in the article before cropping looked fairly sharp: https://jacobmartins.com/images/dalle2/DALL%C2%B7E%202022-08...
Plus even that uncropped one is already jpeg'd, whereas DALL-E 2 downloads are pngs, so there should be an even sharper version.
They need a black and white variation, different sizes, and the underlying component assets.
So Dalle2 might actually be able to provide that in the future as well.
But for now - it's going go give you an 'image' which you have to get an artist to then clean up int a proper logo with assets.
I'm playing with DallE-mini on hugging face and am generally unimpressed, I'm not sure if its' the same Dalle.
I tried the main DallE website sadly don't have an 'invite'.
In its current state it's not a viable logo because, for one thing, it won't look good in black & white.
That sounds like a concern that stopped being relevant for many software companies a decade ago at least.
These days app icons and hero images are more important than whether you can fax or print the logo.
Maybe in the US but not worldwide.