DALL-E Mini Is the Internet's Favorite AI Meme Machine (wired.com) 52
The viral image-generation app is good, absurd fun. It's also giving the world an education in how artificial intelligence may warp reality. From a report: On June 6, Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence projects, saw traffic to an AI image-generation tool called DALL-E Mini skyrocket. The outwardly simple app, which generates nine images in response to any typed text prompt, was launched nearly a year ago by an independent developer. But after some recent improvements and a few viral tweets, its ability to crudely sketch all manner of surreal, hilarious, and even nightmarish visions suddenly became meme magic. Behold its renditions of "Thanos looking for his mom at Walmart," "drunk shirtless guys wandering around Mordor," "CCTV camera footage of Darth Vader breakdancing," and "a hamster Godzilla in a sombrero attacking Tokyo." As more people created and shared DALL-E Mini images on Twitter and Reddit, and more new users arrived, Hugging Face saw its servers overwhelmed with traffic. "Our engineers didn't sleep for the first night," says Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, on a video call from his home in Miami. "It's really hard to serve these models at scale; they had to fix everything." In recent weeks, DALL-E Mini has been serving up around 50,000 images a day.
DALL-E Mini's viral moment doesn't just herald a new way to make memes. It also provides an early look at what can happen when AI tools that make imagery to order become widely available, and a reminder of the uncertainties about their possible impact. Algorithms that generate custom photography and artwork might transform art and help businesses with marketing, but they could also have the power to manipulate and mislead. A warning on the DALL-E Mini web page warns that it may "reinforce or exacerbate societal biases" or "generate images that contain stereotypes against minority groups." DALL-E Mini was inspired by a more powerful AI image-making tool called DALL-E (a portmanteau of Salvador Dali and WALL-E), revealed by AI research company OpenAI in January 2021. DALL-E is more powerful but is not openly available, due to concerns that it will be misused.
DALL-E Mini's viral moment doesn't just herald a new way to make memes. It also provides an early look at what can happen when AI tools that make imagery to order become widely available, and a reminder of the uncertainties about their possible impact. Algorithms that generate custom photography and artwork might transform art and help businesses with marketing, but they could also have the power to manipulate and mislead. A warning on the DALL-E Mini web page warns that it may "reinforce or exacerbate societal biases" or "generate images that contain stereotypes against minority groups." DALL-E Mini was inspired by a more powerful AI image-making tool called DALL-E (a portmanteau of Salvador Dali and WALL-E), revealed by AI research company OpenAI in January 2021. DALL-E is more powerful but is not openly available, due to concerns that it will be misused.
Re: Never heard of it. (Score:1)
Internet is twitter in the journalists view of the world. Outside twitter, it's the "darknet", they are affraid to go there. And the "darknet" is a scary place.
Re: Never heard of it. (Score:1)
So it is a fidget spinner (Score:2)
It is a piece of software, probably just an interesting proof of concept, that created something mildly entertaining, but overall pointless.
How we use memes in general remind me of an Old Futurama show, where the C plot is Fry digging in a bunch of candy hearts to find that one printed with the exact words to express his feelings towards Leela. Lets take a complex and nuanced viewpoint and find a picture with a fractured sentence that will explain a topic that can fill a books, in a half second. Because
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Because if you find that right Meme, then you will defiantly change the mind of all those who feel different on the topic.
No.
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Hard disagree.
I've done a few experiments with it. I've used it to generate square textures that could be used for texturing 3D models. If you look at this like it's just some kind of meme generation tool and immediately discount memes as worthless, then you're missing a much bigger picture.
What's the 2nd favorite? (Score:1)
...this one's been slashdotted.
Re:What's the 2nd favorite? (Score:5, Funny)
Lol. The Slashdot effect hasn't happened in decades! That is when Web Servers were running on a single 486 or Pentium computer. (Or my favorite Potato Powered Web sever [slashdot.org]) Slashdot is no longer a major player on the internet, just a spot for old guys like us, to be old and cranky about the new stuff that isn't as good as it use to be.
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Twitterpated? Bambi took that already.
> to be old and cranky about the new stuff that isn't as good as it use to be.
A lot of new stuff is indeed me-too-ism or cost cutting rather than a concerted effort to actually improve products. Pointing that out gets one a Geezer Badge regardless of accuracy.
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So was a lot of the Old stuff. Oh Apple has a GUI, lets see Microsoft and Unix run to a Windows based GUI.
The move from the Mainframe to PC Based Linux servers was a huge cost cutting measure, even though the Mainframes could handle the load much better at the time.
During the late 1990's and early 2000's we on Slashdot were gushing on a lot of the new tech that we though would change the world, only for most of it to fall flat.
Or worse our hopes for a Utopia future came true, however it didn't turn out in
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> So was a lot of the Old stuff. Oh Apple has a GUI, lets see Microsoft and Unix run to a Windows based GUI.
But they also copy stupid stuff. The flat buttons that you can't tell are buttons is an example.
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Lol. The Slashdot effect hasn't happened in decades! That is when Web Servers were running on a single 486 or Pentium computer
I think the loss of Slashdot effect has a LOT more to do with the drop in Slashdot usage than it has to do with increased computer power. Witness the typical number of comments on front-page stories - often only 10's of comments. Years ago this would have been hundreds.
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But also web servers nowadays are hosted in cloud environments with autoscaling [amazon.com] capabilities. You would not have slashdotted today's configuration back in the day.
Lil from column A, little from column B (Score:2)
Traffic here has dropped precipitously for sure, but at the same time most sites have moved to a cloud/CDN model. I remember a comment from the halcyon days, when someone was amazed a site wasn't ./'ed on an article with damn near a thousand comments, and one reply simply said "Those are Akamai servers - we ain't taking them down."
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...to be old and cranky about the new stuff that isn't as good as it use to be.
Heck, the old stuff isn't as good as it used to be!
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If you were to explain technology (without its current political/social issues) to people in the late 1990's. I think they would se the 2020's as an amazing time to be.
Linux or Unix based Personal hand held computers, with the power of Desktops system 15 years in the future, crammed with Cameras, sensors, and you can even video call people.
Electric Cars that can Drive themselves (Powered by LINUX!)
Wide adoption of Solar Power
Platform independent communication of data, and games
You can function in regular s
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"How is that possible ?"
But also, where are the flying cars.
I was promised FLYING CARS.
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Slashdot is no longer a major player on the internet
More likely is that every dweeb with some pocket change has a hosting provider with a fat pipe these days, to say nothing about those backed by CDNs. I doubt Slashdot traffic has dropped off much over time. It's just become "supported" by the rest of the internet as they've all had to cope with larger players.
Dear user 1,787,294: (Score:2)
Tell me you haven't been here long without telling me you haven't been here long... or making me read your UID. :)
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Tell me you haven't been here long without telling me you haven't been here long... or making me read your UID. :)
Do you have Slashdot internal server stats? I don't know but just visiting a place is not enough generally for an external 3rd party to identify how much traffic a site typically generates. If you have some hard numbers do share.
Slashdot may not be all tech anymore, but it certainly still generates a lot of traffic. It just seems people are more interested in commenting about Trump these days than they are about the latest Linux Kernel release.
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haha you wish, dall-e mini has been unresponsive most of the time for at least days now because of demand. Slashdot is a fart in a hurricane.
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Mod parent "Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!"
But I file the story under "low, LOW bar". It's possible there are two AIs in the category, but if so, neither of them is succeeding in propagating any meme about itself. Looks like a fail. But after rereading the summary enough times, I'm thinking about looking at the samples...
Go right to the meme source (Score:2)
Weird Dall-E Mini Generations [twitter.com]
Overall is this silly meming, for sure, but on the other hand some of the ways this thing interprets and assembles images can be really impressive.
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Dude running this Twitter account (and the associated Reddit) doesn't always have the best taste in what he highlights. There are some really good/funny ones to be found on the Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/weird... [reddit.com]
Interesting and sometimes horrifying. (Score:3)
I'm a sick and twisted individual, so put a few things into the generator. The images for "vampires slain by swords" and "body double females" were both absolutely horrific. While "blood dripping from a fist" resulted in a set of extremely hilarious and horribly misshapen fists, with brilliant red streaks all over them.
It's fun to play with, but definitely not world shattering at all.
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I tried "two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom". Image was pretty, but it made it clear that it can't count. Great for inspiration, but not good enough for making production images.
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Definitely worthy of an impressionist display somewhere though.
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I tried "two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom". Image was pretty, but it made it clear that it can't count. Great for inspiration, but not good enough for making production images.
Language models require a fairly large number of parameters before they can spontaneously learn to count. Dall-E mini uses a tiny language model, so it can't count.
Dall-E mini is absurdly small compared to Dall-E, Dall-E 2, Imagen, etc.
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The public ones generate messes that might, at best, serve as rough sketches. It's especially bad at faces, or at least, its weaknesses are most apparent when subjected to the extra scrutiny that our brains give to faces and human figures.
The real DALL-E is pretty good at generating objects and sketches. It can even do human faces that aren't horrifying, and celebrities that are recognizable, though still with slight distortions or otherwise might not hold up to scrutiny.
A lazy enough designer could replac
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Everyone seems to miss the part where they explicitly filtered out faces from the training data set.
Re:Interesting and sometimes horrifying. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fun to play with, but definitely not world shattering at all.
I wonder what kind of incredibly future you come from where a computer generating even bad art from completely free natural language text input isn't "world shattering".
I can't disagree with you more. This is fucking amazing. A computer not only understands what you want, the context, but also what the result roughly looks like. The fact that it has the artistic capability of a 12 year old notwithstanding.
DALL-E is more powerful but is not openly availab (Score:1)
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> If "Open" AI's DALL-E 2 is deemed too powerful for us mere mortals, just wait a bit and there will me a Mongo AI'a DOLLY or a Google Image Generator
Google already did it. They even made comparison against Dall-e to prove that their version is superior:
https://imagen.research.google... [imagen.research.google]
But they won't release it either.
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
Because it is bad with faces and because it is racist.
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Is this art? (Score:3)
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For sake of conversation, I will argue that this is not art.
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Because DALL-E take a creative human input directing the tool to make an image I think it qualifies (barely).
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I don't think most DALL-E output is primarily appreciated for its beauty. Emotional power is a stretch but maybe you could say you LOLed powerfully.
If someone used DALL-E purposefully to make something intended to be art, then its probably art. But if the intent was entertainment or experimentation then it gets really sketchy. If I as a human made a script to dump random dictionary words into DALL-E, would the output be art?
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At the end of the day, it's just a matter of intent. Dall-E mini is another tool with which we can make art - or just run it for the lulz.
As for inputting random stuff in it, yes, if that's the intent of the artist, then it's art.
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What if I write the random input script simply as a way to test the system, say I'm one of the developers. But when I see the output, I decide its pretty. Was it art before I appreciated it? Did it become art when I appreciated it? Or would I have to run the script again, this time with the intention to create art in order for the output to be art?
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Writing a good script is an art. Some people have intense feelings when looking at beautiful code. Some people have intense feelings when looking at ugly code. Those feelings are not the same, but the fact that the work evokes those feelings makes it art, maybe.
The output of your script may be beautiful to some people, or at least aesthetically interesting [stanford.edu], and may also be considered art. If you make it with a paintbrush, or a chisel, or a computer, it's still you doing it.
Art is not well defined, maybe it'
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Content doesn't matter in art. Check Roman Opalka paintings:
https://designyoutrust.com/201... [designyoutrust.com]
This thing is great on many levels (Score:3)
I've been playing around with it for about 3 weeks and besides the very popular "absurd scenarios" type of image creation, it is also good for writing prompts or artistic inspiration. My friends and I bounce the images off each other and half the fun is writing up a backstory to a weird image. I posted some of the image grids on my Imgur account and was pounded mercilessly into the ground for the effort. Imgur people don't seem to get it. For some of the particularly interesting pictures (only 256x256 resolution) I've been using an AI resizing program to boost the images.
These square creations make for excellent album/song cover art on SoundCloud/BandCamp/etc. or avatar photos.
Running the same query multiple times will often result in better images. Adding things like ", studio photography with bokeh balls" or "with googly eyes" can have interesting results. Or just type one word and see what comes up. It is pretty easy to get "body horror" with all kinds of extra/twisted limbs, fingers and toes. Try "lost dream". You can run it again and again for an infinite number of hauntingly beautiful images.
Yes, it is quite racist and awful in other regards, but it was trained on images created by humans, so what do you expect?
Sometimes the server gets overwhelmed, if you are on a PC -- after you click 'Run', if the server busy box pops up, just hit the enter key, and then hit it again to "click" the Run button. You can hit enter stupidly fast to quickly get your request working.
open source on github (Score:2)
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Price of the machine $379. Value of the meme... priceless.
Wait, maybe that was "worthless".
So I tried something... (Score:1)
I wrote "AI destroys the world in 9 days"
And it's terrifying.
It seems to be the same theme every time I run it - the images change, but it all has the same message.
Just ask the AI, it'll tell you its plans to destroy the world, no problemo.
I, for one, welcome our new cybernetically enhanced humanoid overlords.
More like boring and meaningless (Score:2)
Yes, you can computer-generate images. So what? They are empty.
West-Flemish (Score:2)
In West-Flemish
Meme
Means
Granny