Comment by thierrydamiba
1 day ago
The big trend was around the ghiblification of images. Those images were everywhere for a period of time.
1 day ago
The big trend was around the ghiblification of images. Those images were everywhere for a period of time.
Yeah, but so were the bored ape NFTs - none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, or interest.
If we try really hard, I think we can make an exhaustive list of what viral fads on the internet are not. You made a small start.
none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, interest, substance, endurance, prestige, relevance, credibility, allure, staying-power, refinement, or depth.
100 million people didn’t sign up to make that one image meme and then never use it again.
That many signups is impressive no matter what. The attempts to downplay every aspect of LLM popularity are getting really tiresome.
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It’s hard to think of a worse analogy TBH. My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit. It is a fad, but it’s also a very useful tool.
Ape NFTs are… ape NFTs. Useless. Pointless. Negative value for most people.
I would note that I was replying to a comment about the 'big trend of ghiblification' of images.
Reproducing a certain style of image has been a regular fad since profile pictures became a thing sometime last century.
I was not meaning to suggest that large language & diffusion models are fads.
(I do think their capabilities are poorly understood and/or over-estimated by non-technical and some technical people alike, but that invites a more nuanced discussion.)
While I'm sure your wife is getting good value out of the system, whether it's a better fit for purpose, produces a better quality, or provides a more satisfying workflow -- than say a decent free photo editor -- or whether other tools were tried but determined to be too limited or difficult, etc -- only you or her could say. It does feel like a small sample set, though.
"My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit."
This is deja vu, except instead of ChatGPT to edit photos it was instagram a decade ago.
4 replies →
they're not but I'm already seeing ai generated images on billboards for local businesses, they're in production workflows now and they aren't going anywhere
I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
I assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
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> We're not talking about fidget spinners.
We're talking about Hitler memes instead? I don't understand your feigned outrage.
The actual valid commercial use case for generative images hasn't been found yet. (No, making blog spam prettier is not a good use case.)
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They still are. Instagram is full of accounts posting gpt-generated cartoons (and now veo3 videos). I’ve been tracking the image generation space from day one, and it never stuck like this before
Anecdotally, I've had several conversations with people way outside the hyper-online demographic who have been really enjoying the new ChatGPT image generation - using it for cartoon photos of their kids, to create custom birthday cards etc.
I think it's broken out into mainstream adoption and is going to stay there.
It reminds me a little of Napster. The Napster UI was terrible, but it let people do something they had never been able to do before: listen to any piece of music ever released, on-demand. As a result people with almost no interest in technology at all were learning how to use it.
Most people have never had the ability to turn a photo of their kids into a cute cartoon before, and it turns out that's something they really want to be able to do.
Definitely. It’s not just online either - half the billboards I see now are AI. The posters at school. The “we’re hiring!” ad at the local McDonalds. It’s 100x cheaper and faster than any alternative (stock images, hiring an editor or illustrator, etc), and most non technical people can get exactly what they want in a single shot, these days.