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A lot of people here aren't going to like it, but the only reasonable way out I can see is to eventually socialise ownership and control of AI.

I don't see an alternative that isn't really bad.

I don't understand why everyone is all up and arms about Images / Art being generated by AI, but when it comes to code... well who cares? The people who made all the code training data are also getting nothing!

Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves, whereas artists had nothing to do with AI.

People who provided training material for AI images, received payment in likes and shares

If you put stuff on the internet, people (and machines) can see it. How do you think human artists learn? By looking at other people's artwork. AI can do exactly the same thing.

As for code: All of my code is open source. I don't care if people (or machines) learn from it. In fact, as a teacher, I sincerely hope that they do!

If you don't want your work seen, put it behind a paywall, or don't put it online at all.

That's fine for me. As someone who can't draw or design for shit, I am getting effectively millions of dollars worth of artist time for $20/month.

The solution is to socialize AI, not ban it.

Prompts like this feel like it's using the wrong abstraction. The "obvious" thing to do with something like this would be to generate some code that generates the image and then run that code.

Inspired by this, I tried something much simpler. I asked it to draw 12 concentric circles. With three tries it always drew 10 instead. https://chatgpt.com/share/69e87d08-5a14-83eb-9a3b-3a8eb14692...

This is an amazing test and it's kinda' funny how terrible gpt-2-image is. I'd take "plagiarized" images (e.g. Google search & copy-paste) any day over how awful the OpenAI result is. Doesn't even seem like they have a sanity checker/post-processing "did I follow the instructions correctly?" step, because the digit-style constraint violation should be easily caught. It's also expensive as shit to just get an image that's essentially unusable.

For what it's worth, NBP made some mistakes too.

Artistic oddities aside (why are the 8-bit sprites 16-bit, why do the charcoal drawings have colour, why does the art of specifically the Gen 1 Pokemon look so off.), 271 is Lombre, not Lotad.

I do not think this is a good prompt or useful benchmark, but nonetheless, it seems to work better for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/69e88a94-ded8-8395-b5dc-abceb2f44d...

banana Pro gets the logic and punts on the art; gpt-2-image gets the art and punts on the logic. Feels like instruction-following and creativity sit on opposite ends of the same slider.

Just try a 23-sided plane convex polygon.

Why would you consider this a good prompt?

Neither of them drew them in an 8-bit style either. It's way too many colors.

Even a few months ago, ChatGPT/Sora's image generation performed better than Gemini/Nano Banana for certain weird prompts:

Try things like: "A white capybara with black spots, on a tricycle, with 7 tentacles instead of legs, each tentacle is a different color of the rainbow" (paraphrased, not the literal exact prompt I used)

Gemini just globbed a whole mass of tentacles without any regards to the count

Prob a very unscientific way to test an image model. This would me likely because they have the reasoning turned down and let its instant output takeover

No this is what life looks like on the other side of the uncanny valley. The images don't look creepy because they look artificial or wrong. They're a reminder of a creepy new reality where our eyes can no longer tell us what's real.

I just got a much better version using this command instead, which uses the maximum image size according to https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/main/examples...

  OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \
    uv run 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/python/openai_image.py' \
    -m gpt-image-2 \
    "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" \
    --quality high --size 3840x2160

I think that image cost 40 cents.

> though the problem with Where's Waldo tests is that I don't have the patience to solve them for sure

I see an opportunity for a new AI test!

Like... this has things that AI will seemingly always be terrible at?

At some point the level of detail is utter garbo and always will be. An artist who was thoughtful could have some mistakes but someone who put that much time into a drawing wouldn't have:

- Nightmarish screaming faces on most people

- A sign that points seemingly both directions, or the incorrect one for a lake and a first AID tent that doesn't exist

- A dog in bottom left and near lake which looks like some sort of fuzzy monstrosity...

It looks SO impressive before you try to take in any detail. The hand selected images for the preview have the same shit. The view of musculature has a sternocleidomastoid with no clavicle attachment. The periodic table seems good until you take a look at the metals...

We're reconfiguring all of our RAM & GPUs and wasting so much water and electricity for crappier where's Waldos??

Really hard to look at these images given how not human like the humans are. A few are ok, but a lot are disfigured or missing parts and its hard to find a raccoon in here.

Thanks for the image, I will see their faces in my nightmares.

The second 4K image definitely has a raccoon on the left there! Nice.

That is a devilishly difficult prompt for current diffusion tasks. Kudos.

haha took me a while to notice that one of the buildings is labelled 'Ham radio'

Damn. There’s a fun game app to make here ^^

I see the raccoon

5.4 thinking says "Just right of center, immediately to the right of the HAM RADIO shack. Look on the dirt path there: the raccoon is the small gray figure partly hidden behind the woman in the red-and-yellow shirt, a little above the man in the green hat. Roughly 57% from the left, 48% from the top."

(I don't think it's right).

I mean, your prompt is basically this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg ("The Expert" 7 red lines: all strictly perpendicular, some with green ink some with transparent ink)

I couldn't imagine the image you were describing. I've listed some of the red lines with green ink I've noticed in your prompt:

Macro Close Up - Sharp throughout

Focus on tiny gear - But also on tweezers, old watchmakers hand, water drop?

Work on the mechanism of the watch (on the back of the watch) - but show the curved glass of the watch face which is on the front

This is the biggest. Even if the mechanism is accessible from the front, you'd have to remove the glass to get to it. It just doesn't make sense and that reflects in the images you get generated. There's all the elements, but they will never make sense because the prompt doesn't make sense.

Why would you consider this a good prompt?

Looks like your image host has rate limited viewing the shared images, wanted to give you a heads up

Links are broken.

> but eventually we should start flagging images with no source attribution as dangerous the way we flag non-https.

Yes, lets make all images proprietary and locked behind big tech signatures. No more open source image editors or open hardware.

> Bad actors can strip sources out

I think the issue is that it's not just bad actors. It's every social platform that strips out metadata. If I post an image on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else, they're going to strip the metadata for my privacy. Sometimes the exif data has geo coordinates. Other times it's less private data like the file name, file create/access/modification times, and the kind of device it was taken on (like iPhone 16 Pro Max).

Usually, they strip out everything and that's likely to include C2PA unless they start whitelisting that to be kept or even using it to flag images on their site as AI.

But for now, it's not just bad actors stripping out metadata. It's most sites that images are posted on.

Yeah, OpenAI has been attaching C2PA manifests to all their generated images from the very beginning. Also, based on a small evaluation that I ran, modern ML based AI generated image detectors like OmniAID[1] seem to do quite well at detecting GPT-Image-2 generated images. I use both in an on-device AI generated image detector that I built.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08423

What a dystopian, pro-tyranny ask. Horrifying.

Yeah, it's funny. I would expect to see more enthusiasm versus just basic run-of-the-mill, "oh, there it is". Leave it to the HN crowd. This is incredible. I don't even like OpenAI.

When NB 2 came out I actually had to increase the difficulty of the piano test - reversing the colors of all the accidentals and the naturals, and it still managed it perfectly.

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-pro-2-tests

> A 3 * 3 cube made out of small cubes, with a small 2 * 2 cube removed from it - https://chatgpt.com/share/69e85df6-5840-83e8-b0e9-3701e92332...

It is a little ambiguous (what exactly is a "3x3 cube") but I tried a bunch of variations and I simply could not get any Gemini models to produce the right output.

this is apples to oranges, the flash version version a full version

this thing is like 5x better than flash at fine grain detail

Is this even better than Chinese models? I suppose they focus much more on that aspect, simply because their training data might include many more examples of Chinese text.

Well that was probably the most important general skill even before this.

In other words, communication is an important skill.

> I am starting to think that expressing thoughts in words clearly is probably the most important and general skill of the future.

Without question.

AI will be indistinguishable from having a team. Communicating clearly has always and will always mattered.

This, however, is even stronger. Because you can program and use logic in your communications.

We're going to collectively develop absolutely wild command over instruction as a society. That's the skill to have.

Image editing program -> different versions of the image, each with some but not all of the elements you want, on each layer -> mask out the parts you don't need/apply mask, fill with black, soft brush with white the parts you want back in. Copy flattened/merged, drop it back into the image model, keep asking for the changes. As long as each generation adds in an element you want, you can build a collage of your final image.

It's the first thing I tried, because Nano Banana 2 deteriorates the output with each turn, becoming unusable with just a few edits.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 made it unusable at the first turn. At least in the ChatGPT app editing a reference image absolutely destroyed the image quality. It perfectly extracted an illustration from the background, but in the process basically turned it from a crisp digital illustration into a blurry, low quality mess.

There was an Edit button in one of the images in the livestream

How does it determine they are well known and not just similar looking?

Are you using Google Gemini directly? I've found the Vertex API seems to be significantly less strict.

You can click the images too, to see the prompt that got them gen'ed.

Maybe I'm stupid and naive but I just don't really see how any of this is _fundamentally_ different from Photoshop. Trusting the images you're looking at on the internet has been impossible for a long time. That's why we have institutions and social relations we place trust in instead.

> If we had a functioning congress, I wonder if we might end up with legislation that these things need to be watermarked or otherwise made identifiable as AI generated..

Not a lawyer, but that reads as compelled speech to me. Materially misrepresenting an image would be libel, today, right?

Trying to watermark or otherwise label them as AI generated is a lost fight, we should assume every image and video we see online may be AI generated.

You might be onto something. I find every image unsettling. they're very good no doubt, but maybe it disturbs me because all of it is a complete copy of what someone else created. I know, I know, there is no pure invention. That's not what i mean. Humans borrow from other humans all the time. There's a humanity in that! A machine fully repurposing a human contribution as some kind of new creation, iono i'm old, it's weird and i don't like it.

Maybe i'm just bloviating also.

>If we had a functioning congress, I wonder if we might end up with legislation that these things need to be watermarked or otherwise made identifiable as AI generated..

Can you name any countries that you think are functioning, and what their laws are on watermarked AI images?

Yes, I think they have been for years. C2PA Content Credentials are supported in cameras and some phones already today.

Signed images don’t get you much. You can just hardwire the image sensor to a computer and sign raw pixels.

Ultimately even with that tech, you can still take a photo of an AI generated scene. Maybe coupled with geolocation data in the signature or something it might work.

Something, something democratization. Because having a skill is inherently oppressive nowadays.

It appears so!

yes

Here in Japan every fucking food truck uses them for pictures of their menu, which really pisses me off because it's not representative of their food at all.

Look around? It's everywhere. Try talking to a graphic designer looking for a job theses days. Companies didn't wait for these tools to be good to start using them.

MAGA to show how terrible Europe is ;)

point delta (from 2nd) not total

That has to be the wrong stock image included or something, bloody hell.

     magick image-l.webp image-r.jpg -compose difference -composite -auto-level -threshold 30% diff.png

This is hilarious. Seems like kind of a random image for a model to memorize, but it could be.

There is definitely enough empirical validation that shows image models retain lots of original copies in their weights, despite how much AI boosters think otherwise. That said, it is often images that end up in the training set many times, and I would think it strange for this image to do that.

Regardless, great find.

Given the recency of that image, it is unlikely it is in the training data and therefore I would go with oversight.

I was just wondering about that. Did they embrace it as a “signature look”? it cant be accidental, right?

It almost nailed it for me (two squares have both white and black color). All pieces and the position look correct.

What move? Who's turn is it? Declined or accepted? Garbage in, garbage out.

That was my reaction as well. Either they have decided than LLMs have this "house style" for stylized 2D art and we should deal with it, or no amount of prompting can get rid of it.

Previous gpt image models could (when generating, not editing) but gpt-image-2 can't.

Noticed it earlier while updating my playground to support it

https://github.com/alasano/gpt-image-playground

OpenAI’s API docs are frustratingly unclear on this. From my experience, you can definitely generate true transparent PNG files through the ChatGPT interface, including with the new GPT-Image-2 model, but I haven’t found any definitive way to do the same thing via the API.

so yeah a smart move of openai would be to sponsor artists - provokant ones, junior ones, with nothing to lose - but that cell in the spreadsheet will be too small to register and will prop. never happen

You can by changing the view before the gallery

I created this little demo of an animated sprite sheet using generative AI. It's not great, but it is passable.

https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation/

I had exactly the same thought! I've got a game I've been wanting to build for over a decade that I recently started working on. The art is going to be very challenging however, because I lack a lot of those skills. I am really hoping the AI tools can help with that.

Is anyone doing this already who can share information on what the best models are?

It's still bad.

They’re too busy counting cash. Most of them are what? 30 something to 50? By the time democracy is dismantled they’ll be living in their protected mansions.

> I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for?

I feel like this is something people in the industry should be thinking about a lot, all the time. Too many social ills today are downstream of the 2000s culture of mainstream absolute technoöptimism.

Vide. Kranzberg's first law--“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

I can’t design wallpapers/stickers/icons/…, but I can describe what I want to an image generation model verbally or with a source photo, and the new ones yield pretty good results.

For icons in particular, this opens up a completely new way of customizing my home screen and shortcuts.

Not necessary for the survival of society, maybe, but I enjoy this new capability.

This is where I’m at. If you can’t be bothered to write/make it, why would I be bothered to read or review it?

The issue is that the signalling makes sense when human generated work is better than AI generated. Soon AI generated work will be better across the board with the rare exception of stuff the top X% of humans put a lot of bespoke highly personalized effort into. Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

Here’s one example:

I just recently used for image generation to design my balcony.

It was a great way to see design ideas imagined in place and decide what to do.

There are many cases people would hire an artist to illustrate an idea or early prototype. AI generated images make that something you can do by yourself or 10x faster than a few years ago.

100%. A picture is worth a thousand words only when it conveys something. I love to see the pictures from my family even when they are taken with no care to quality or composition but I would look at someone else’s (as in gallery/exhibitions) only when they are stunning and captured beautifully. The medium is only a channel to communicate.

Also, this can’t be real. How many publications did they train this stuff on and why are there no acknowledgment even if to say - we partnered with xyz manga house to make our model smarter at manga? Like what’s wrong with this company?

We need to flip the script. AI is trying to do marketing: add “illegal usage will lead to X” is a gateway to spark curiosity. There is this saying that censoring games for young adults makes sure that they will buy it like crazy by circumventing the restrictions because danger is cool.

There is nothing that cannot harm. Knives, cars, alcohol, drugs. A society needs to balance risks and benefits. Word can be used to do harm, email, anything - it depends on intention and its type.

I see your point but reconsider: we will and need to see. Time will tell and this is simply economics: useful? Yes, no.

I started being totally indifferent after thinking about my spending habits to check for unnecessary stuff after watching world championships for niche sports. For some this is a calling for others waste. It is a numbers game then.

>and even if we cannot tell if an image is AI-generated, we can know if companies are using AI to generate images in general, so the appealing is decreasing

Is that true? Don't think I'd get tired of images that are as good as human made ones just because I know/suspect there may have been AI involved

The technically (in both senses) astonishing and amazing output is not far off from some of the qualities of real advertising: Staged, attention grabbing, artificially created, superficially demanded, commercially attractive qualities. These align, and lots of similarities in the functions and outcomes of these two spheres come to mind.

I think there's real value to be had in using this for diagrams.

Visual explanations are useful, but most people don't have the talent and/or the time to produce them.

This new model (and Nano Banana Pro before it) has tipped across the quality boundary where it actually can produce a visual explanation that moves beyond space-filling slop and helps people understand a concept.

I've never used an AI-generated image in a presentation or document before, but I'm teetering on the edge of considering it now provided it genuinely elevates the material and helps explain a concept that otherwise wouldn't be clear.

I tend to share your same view. But is there really a line like you describe? Maybe AI just needs to get a few iterations better and we'll all love what it generates. And how's it really any different than any Photoshop computer output from the past?

> What else?

I used to have an assistant make little index-card sized agendas for gettogethers when folks were in town or I was organising a holiday or offsite. They used to be physical; now it's a cute thing I can text around so everyone knows when they should be up by (and by when, if they've slept in, they can go back to bed). AI has been good at making these. They don't need to be works of art, just cute and silly and maybe embedded with an inside joke.

I'm working on an edutech game. Before I would've had much less of a product because I don't have the budget to hire an artist and it would've been much less interactive but because of this I'm able to build a much more engaging experience so that's one thing. For what it's worth.

While I agree with you, hacker news audience is not in the middle of the bell curve.

I get this sounds elitist - but tremendous percentage of population is happily and eagerly engaging with fake religious images, funny AI videos, horrible AI memes, etc. Trying to mention that this video of puppy is completely AI generated results in vicious defense and mansplaining of why this video is totally real (I love it when video has e.g. Sora watermarks... This does not stop the defenders).

I agree with you that human connection and artist intent is what I'm looking for in art, music, video games, etc... But gawd, lowest common denominator is and always has been SO much lower than we want to admit to ourselves.

Very few people want thoughtful analysis that contradicts their world view, very few people care about privacy or rights or future or using the right tool, very few people are interested in moral frameworks or ethical philosophy, and very few people care about real and verifiable human connection in their "content" :-/

> Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans)

If a work of art is good, then it's good. It doesn't matter if it came from a human, a neanderthal, AI, or monkeys randomly typing.

Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites. If that means a wave of pixel-art games I count it as a net win.

I dont think gamers hate AI, it is just a vocal miniority imo. What most people dislike is sloppy work, as they should, but that can happen with or without AI. The industry has been using AI for textures, voices and more for over a decade.

The Human Renaissance is something I've been thinking of too and I hope it comes to pass. Of course, I feel like societally, things are gonna get worse for a lot of folks. You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted.

You'd think these kickbacks leaders of these towns are getting for allowing data centers to be built would go towards improving infrastructure but hah, that's unrealistic.

WTF is that unrealistic? SMH

>Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans)

I dunno how long this is going to hold up. In 50 years, when OpenAI has long become a memory, post-bubble burst, and a half-century of bitrot has claimed much of what was generated in this era, how valuable do you think an AI image file from 2023 - with provenance - might be, as an emblem and artifact of our current cultural moment, of those first few years when a human could tell a computer, "Hey, make this," and it did? And many of the early tools are gone; you can't use them anymore.

Consider: there will never be another DallE-2 image generation. Ever.

My only actual use of image or video AI tools is self-entertainment. I like to give it prompts and see the results it gives me.

That's it. I can't think of a single actual use case outside of this that isn't deliberately manipulative and harmful.

>In general, I think people are starting to realize that things generated without effort are not worth spending time with

Agreed mostly, BUT

I'm building tools for myself. The end goal isn't the intermediate tool, they're enabling other things. I have a suspicion that I could sell the tools, I don't particularly want to. There's a gap between "does everything I want it to" and "polished enough to justify sale", and that gap doesn't excite me.

They're definitely not generated without effort... but they are generated with 1% of the human effort they would require.

I feel very much empowered by AI to do the things I've always wanted to do. (when I mention this there's always someone who comes out effectively calling me delusional for being satisfied with something built with LLMs)

Porn and memes. Obviously. This is all that Stable Diffusion has been used for since it was released.

I completely disagree, this replaces art as a job. Why does human art need monetary feedback to be shared? If people require a paycheck to make art then it was never anything different than what Ai generated images are.

As for advertising being depressing - its a little late to get up on the high horse of anti-Ads for tech after 2 decades of ad based technology dominating everything. Go outside, see all those bright shiny glittery lights, those aren't society created images to embolden the spirit and dazzle the senses, those are ads.

North Korea looks weird and depressing because the don't have ads. Welcome to the west.

AI loopidity rearing it's head. Just send the bullet points that we all want anyway, right?! Stop sending globs of text and other generated content!

Having 60% of the world’s population might do that.

Yeah same. At first I thought they're using it to conceal quality, but pausing it they do actually look really good, so strange choice.

Maybe it's meant to convey pace & hype

I told my mom not to believe anything unless she trusts the source. The way people always did with text.

IMO you're fighting the wrong battle: there'll always be a new model.

But the broader concept of fake news and the manufactured nature of media and rhetoric is much more relevant - e.g. whether or not something's AI is almost immaterial to the fact that any filmed segment does not have to be real or attributed to the correct context.

Its an old internet classic just to grab an image and put a different caption on it, relying on the fact no one can discern context or has time to fact check.

I wake up everyday, read the tech news, and usually see some step change in AI or whatever. It's wild to think I'm living through such a massive transformation in my lifetime. The future of tech is going to be so different from when I was born (1980), I guess this is how people born in 1900 felt when they got to see man land on the moon?

> Wow, the difference between AI and non-AI images collapses. I hate the future where I won't be able to tell the difference.

Image generation is now pretty much "solved". Video will be next. Perhaps things will turn out the same as chess: in that even though chess was "solved" by IBM's Deep Blue, we still value humans playing chess. We value "hand made" items (clothes, furniture) over the factory made stuff. We appreciate & value human effort more than machines. Do you prefer a hand-written birthday card or an email?

Well, for some of these images for the first time I can't tell that they are AI generated

Thanks, all displayed images look horrible and artificial. This will fail like Sora.

Thursday

> for video game assets this is massive.

Storefronts like Steam require disclosing use of AI assets for art. In most indie dev spaces, devs are scolded for using AI art in their games. I wonder if this perspective will change in a few years.

> but in general though - will people believe in anything photographic ?

Hopefully film makes a come back.

That's a trained skill, and they presumably have focused on other skills.

I liked it that way, felt more authentic to see the noobs

I think its endearing

didn't think that sam guy was that bad

(We eventually merged the threads hither)

(We've since merged the threads and moved the livestream link to the toptext)

or "How we make money with your images 2.0".

Who's 'we'? Speak for yourself!

Because we are all seeing the harm these tools are being used for.

It's just another step into hell.

If only there was a social network with solely AI generated videos, I would pay literal money for it...

Yes, I’ve always thought of AI companies as sentimental. They will definitely do this :-/