Comment by Jedd
1 day ago
Yeah, but so were the bored ape NFTs - none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, or interest.
1 day ago
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.
I think it sounds far more likely that 100M people signed up to poke at the latest viral novelty and create one meme, than that 100M people suddenly discovered they had a pressing long-term need for AI images all on the same day.
Doesn’t it?
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> 100 million people didn’t sign up to make that one image meme and then never use it again.
Source? They did exactly that.
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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.
Applying some filters and adding some overlay text is something some folks did, but there's such a massive creative world that's opened up, where all we have to do is ask.
You either haven’t tried it or are just trolling.
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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.
Makes sense. Although I think that's an error. TikTok is "just" a video sharing site. Joe Rogan is "just" a podcaster. Dumb things that affect lots of people are important.
> 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.)
Everything Everywhere All At Once won a bunch of Oscars. They used generative AI tools for some of their post-production work (achieved by a tiny team), for example to help clean up the backgrounds in the scene with the silent dialog between the two rocks.
You're right, nothing has value unless someone figures out how to make money with it. Except OpenAI, apparently, because the fact that people buy ChatGPT to make images doesn't seem to count as a commercial use case.
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