Comment by adrian17

1 day ago

> This was one of the most successful product launches of all time. They signed up 100 million new user accounts in a week! They had a single hour where they signed up a million new accounts, as this thing kept on going viral again and again and again.

Awkwardly, I never heard of it until now. I was aware that at some point they added ability to generate images to the app, but I never realized it was a major thing (plus I already had an offline stable diffusion app on my phone, so it felt less of an upgrade to me personally). With so much AI news each week, feels like unless you're really invested in the space, it's almost impossible to not accidentally miss or dismiss some big release.

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adrian17

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haiku2077  20 hours ago

Congratulations, you are almost fully unplugged from social media. This product launch was a huge mainstream event; for a few days GPT generated images completely dominated mainstream social media.

  • sigmoid10  3 hours ago

    If you primarily consume text-based social media (HN, reddit with legacy UI) then it's kind of easy to not notice all the new kinds of image infographics and comics that now completely flood places like instagram or linkedin.

  • Semaphor  3 hours ago

    Facebook, discord, reddit, HN. Hadn’t heard of it either. But for FB, Reddit, and Discord I strictly curate what I see.

  • derwiki  18 hours ago

    Not sure if this is sarcasm or sincere, but I will take it as sincere haha. I came back to work from parental leave and everyone had that same Studio Ghiblized image as their Slack photo, and I had no idea why. It turns out you really can unplug from social media and not miss anything of value: if it’s a big enough deal you will find out from another channel.

    • stavros  1 hour ago

      Why does everyone keep calling news "social media"? Have I missed a trend? Knowing what my friend Steve is up to is social media, knowing what AI is up to is news.

azinman2  1 day ago

Except this went very mainstream. Lots of turn myself into a muppet, what is the human equivalent for my dog, etc. TikTok is all over this.

It really is incredible.

MattRix  17 hours ago

To be clear: they already had image generation in ChatGPT, but this was a MUCH better one than what they had previously. Even for you with your stable diffusion app, it would be a significant upgrade. Not just because of image quality, but because it can actually generate coherent images and follow instructions.

  • MIC132  6 hours ago

    As impressive as it is, for some uses it still is worse than a local SD model. It will refuse to generate named anime characters (because of copyright, or because it just doesn't know them, even not particularly obscure ones) for example. Or obviously anything even remotely spicy. As someone who mostly uses image generation to amuse myself (and not to post it, where copyright might matter) it's honestly somewhat disappointing. But I don't expect any of the major AI companies to release anything without excessive guardrails.

bufferoverflow  18 hours ago

Have you missed how everyone was Ghiblifying everything?

  • adrian17  17 hours ago

    I saw that, I just didn't connect it with newly added multimodal image generation. I knew variations of style transfer (or LoRA for SD) were possible for years, so I assumed it exploded in popularity purely as a meme, not due to OpenAI making it much more accessible.

    Again, I was aware that they added image generation, just not how much of a deal it turned out to be. Think of it like me occasionally noticing merchandise and TV trailers for a new movie without realizing it became the new worldwide box office #1.