Nice! I peeked at the code and thought I’d share a few tips for improving the low frame rate:
Base64 encoding the JPEG bytes will increase payload size up to ~30% and burns CPU cycles on both client and server. This is unnecessary, as Websocket protocol can send binary payloads (doesn’t need to be text).
Consider removing lossy jpg compression as well, ie just send the raw RGB bytes over the network. Then on the server side you can simply call Image.frombuffer(…).
StreamDiffusion can achieve high frame rates because of extensive batching in the pipeline. You’re not benefiting from that here as the client is only sending one frame at a time and then waiting for a response. See this example for an idea of how to queue input frames and consume them in batches https://github.com/cumulo-autumn/StreamDiffusion/blob/main/e... .
Alternatively you could take a look at the SDXL Turbo and Lightning models. They are very fast at img2img but have limited resolution of 512² or 1024² pixels respectively. Which appears a bit lower than what you’re aiming for here, but they can be run locally in real time on a high end consumer grade GPU. For reference I have some code demonstrating this here https://github.com/GradientSurfer/Draw2Img/tree/main
yeah yeah yeah, do all these things, and afterwards, look at 2d interpolation methods that don't require AI for your inbetweens. There's some real fast kernel math that can lerp from one blob to another at 8 billion fps.
> Making art is hard. But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.
Not to sound like a luddite, but I do question the idea that the skill gap is merely an inconvenience. I suspect learning how to paint or make music changes something in yourself which teaches you some deeper life lessons.
I've heard the phrase (paraphrased): No great work of art was made by a genius, genius comes to you unexpectedly like a gust of wind. It seems that cultivating these opportunities is the most an artist can do, and removing the skill gap seems to be removing the cultivation, the thing that changes you, the essence.
There seems to be a few of these inherent deep workings that we as a people keep coming back to, without knowing what they are or how to discuss them (personally at least!). Not to rain on your parade OP, the project looks fun and super useful to a lot people! Just something I ponder on at times.
Literally 95% of the replies in that thread are irrelevant bullshit from "experts" that have no idea how redundant server PSUs work. I replied to some under the same username. Meanwhile another guy successfully wired two 100W USB-C ports in parallel to power an entire PC. He had no idea that the resistance of his crappy wires kept the two smps control loops stable and divided the current evenly between the two ports ensuring that neither one trips OCP: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1g8pser/let_m...
I guess there's the armchair expert and the actual, real expert and these two are completely different beasts.
I wouldn't feel comfortable with this guy's usb-c setup but probably not for 'it's all going to burn down' reasons, more like 'the connection will get loose somewhere and I'll lose my work'.
? Have you ever read musician interviews: Its like a competition on how much clichee, naivete and reality denying drivel one can compress into 5 minutes.
Idealism is not a victimless crime, millions suffer every day because some artist threw a buggy,idealized world model over the fence and the idiocy stuck hypnotizing millions into permanently damaging themselves.
I think this would be cooler if the camera was somewhere different than the frame. Looking at an artistic mirror seems a little boring. Maybe make a 2nd one, and put it in someone else's house, and then feed the camera from one into the other. So you can look at the 'reflection' of someone else and have these little moments where you're both looking at the picture at the same time. Heck, make many so you never know who you're looking at. It'll be the Omegle of picture frames.
> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.
I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them. That’s why I find a banana on the wall art, popular music is still art.
(Might be school influence but I also tend to ask myself „why”)
This invention is definitely work of art, but its output - in my eyes - not. It’s like a cloud. It can make different shapes, and some are funny, some might remind me of my close ones, but it’s still averaged randomness.
However the idea to reflect reality to this digital randomness I find without doubt - art. And, well: while not visual or audible, there is software, hardware, code and design which are also art (and difficult to make so counterpoint to thesis in first paragraph ;)).
> I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them.
But this leaves the role of intention ambiguous. If I double-park a BMW across two handicap spaces because I'm angry and entitled, is that art? It certainly evokes emotion, and it's also produced by emotion.
I would dissect it though since it’s not pure anger - frustration maybe, a complex one and caused by additional input. E.g. anxiety (you took what could be mine) or internal discord (after observing act of injustice).
I’d argue that it’s an act of random (again, like a cloud) and wouldn’t treat it as art.
But, if you’d park it sideways in front of the mall entrance, blocking it considerably, I’d consider it art (in my imagination I can see the headlines about artist making a statement against the overconsumption).
Yet art is art, so everyone has their own definition. I’d prefer “positive” emotions, so awe, nostalgia, etc., but I don’t see reason why anger should be excluded.
<<proceeds to print “THIS IS AN ART INSTALLATION” message to put behind the windshield>>
>But the best part about art is that other people don't have to consider what you do as art.
I often think of art in a way that is remarkably consistent with these statements.
My view was "Art is an invitation to consider" Sticking a banana to a wall becomes art when you do it to make people to engage or think about it.
Engagement is not compulsory, but I think the invitation might be. Sticking a banana to a wall to keep it away from ants is simple utility, not intended to be artistic expression.
>I don't have to believe your AI generated slop is art because it doesn't actually convey any emotion.
You don't have to engage, but choosing to denigrate is actively hostile engagement. There are plenty of people using AI for expression of ideas. There are also people doing a bunch of dumb things. Lowbrow art is still art in it's own way. Much of it may have very little to say, but I don't think there are very many people who have pretensions that low effort images are much more than a kind of doodling.
I don't have anything to say about the artistic value, but as a part-time tool collector with dreams of being a handy person, this passage was the most interesting:
I used a puncher to cut a hole in the frame’s cardboard for the camera (drills didn’t work).
I would love some more detail, or just people's interpretations ... in what manner can a drill fail to "work" on cardboard? There can be issues with tearing, perhaps, that I think punching works around nicely.
It's too soft and layered, the drill tends to chew it up. I've had some luck putting duct tape over both sides and drilling through that, but for very clean holes you'd still probably have to clean the edges with a craft knife.
That’s the technique I used on a piece that does inpainting across an image at a rate of about 1 image every 8 seconds - I ‘melt’ the results in for the duration until the next patch is ready:
https://hardwork.party/aws-epoch-optimizer/
I actually think the high frame rate will look worse unless the styling changes less in between frames. Otherwise, it's going to look erratic and there will be a ton of "popping" if each frame changes as much as the frames in the current video. Or maybe op wants it to be a chaotic feeling.
Also, the screen he uses (HMTECH Raspberry Pi Screen 10.1) is pretty hard to find. Do people have other good recommendations for screens with similar quality and specs?
Any idea why this uses infrared light and an infrared camera?
Every time I've looked into building something like this, when I price it out, just using an old Android tablet in kiosk mode and making it a web app ends up being much cheaper.
Really neat idea, I'd also love to have on my bookshelf.
> The main issue with the current setup is the low frame rate.
I'd call it a feature rather a limitation, it's not bad that I have second to process the image for a bit.
I would even increase the update frequency to 5 - 15 minutes and let it capture and generate a new image whenever it detects something changing / moving.
> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?
I really like this direction. I understand why some object to the genai approaches, but in practice sometimes I get an idea of something cool and don't have the skills to create it myself. I'm not going to invest months/years to create each of those ideas and they're not important enough to spend hundreds of dollars that a skilled artist would request. Now there's a way people can try generating the thing and may end up enjoying it - and that's great. (At least for personal use, it gets a bit complicated for commercial purposes)
Not everyone could build what is presented here, and inadvertently they have validated that it requires skill to produce a machine that distorts your reality. The pictures being produced isn't the art.
It would be cool to intercept the input from a webcam, transform it like this, and then present it to the OS as another virtual camera so you could select it in Teams or Zoom or whatever.
This really does change the interaction with art. As a future expansion it might be neat to recognize images on camera that would make for interesting art (i.e. detection of people/animals or recognition of certain styles of composition) as well as being able to choose amongst different styles.
It seems sort of akin to some modern art that incorporated TV screens and video to make dynamic installations, like Nam June Paik.
I think the low framerate adds a unique ambience, at least to me, watching the recorded videos. It gives time to appreciate the art style and generated features. It also feels like a time lapse of gradual changes. I could imagine it being annoying to look at in real time though.
Sounds cool! I would like pictures with people in the room doing weird things energetically like stand on their chair. Dancing. Confetti booze strange outfits. Bordering the offensive then deleted after 30 minutes.
> Art is ... mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.
I like the phrasing of the first part. But what art is "about" is very subjective.
For me, part of what I look for in art is intentionality - the notion that the artist has crafted each element toward a purpose, consciously or not. The less an artist contributes to the final piece, the less meaning I assign to it.
In this case: I would say that the individual pictures being displayed are not "art" - they have no meaning. But I think the device in whole is a piece of art. That is a creation that surfaces the creator's inner world, because they designed the device, wrote the code, crafted the prompts to achieve pieces that reflected their notion of beauty.
Besides what you articulated as the "intention", I often think of the "story" behind the art -- whether an idea in the creator's head was expressed via the piece (or not) makes me go "yes, this is Art" (or not).
By that token, when I see automated projects like this, I think of the "installation" as art, but the pixels or arrangements generated by the piece itself is less art-like IMO.
Let’s hook it up to a sentiment and toxicity model, and then if you’re being too negative online, it will start to deform you into a monster, we could have a real Picture of Dorian Gray!
> Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.
Precisely. There is no skill in artistry, it’s rather just a developed sense of style, that doesn’t come from a medium or method, it comes from growing to know oneself.
> I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.
Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.
> Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.
And spend more time (and intentional effort) in making art! It's like people want a shortcut to end result, when "real" artists know that the process of self-discovery is the reason and means through which they make the art in the first place.
The map is not the territory. The purpose of the journey is the journey itself; the destination is simply a guiding star. A whole lot of aspirational mapmakers think if they only had "this one weird trick," they'd be gods.
It's pretty neat, but I'd never have a webcam steaming everything in view to someone else's server on the internet. It'd be cool if the server ran on my own hardware, and ideally in the frame itself. The privacy policy at runpod.io wouldn't even display in my browsers. (their ToS loaded without an issue).
What’s wrong with that? If art is expression shouldn’t everyone have the right to artistic expression? Even people who express themselves with nerdy projects and code and hardware instead of paint and canvas?
What do you think art is?
- cache the prompting somehow, unless you are doing dynamic stuff with the prompts, the language embeddings generated should be static (this depends on the architecture of the model that you are using, it's only possible with certain setups where the language processing is a separate part in the pipeline)
- consider fine-tuning an img to img model with your current outputs instead of using a language-coupled model. My intuition is that this is currently significantly over-engineered on the ML side.
- Play around with local hardware acceleration instead of sending everything to the cloud, you also probably don't need particularly high resolution for the images either.
> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?
I don’t think the poor lad knows what Art is.
Put another way, we have hundreds of years of recorded philosophical texts and diatribes on what constitutes Art, and what art-making is. Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes. We have people who are deemed artists, not necessarily painters but people who are wired a certain way and are industrious with their abilities. Math geniuses attend certain schools and the other pupils may pick up a thing or two from them, but that doesn’t mean the other pupils are geniuses also. So too, do artists walk among us and may do what we do and we may imitate what they do. But that doesn’t put us on equal footing whatsoever.
Art doesn’t select for skill. This is a red herring and a misunderstanding. Art doesn’t select for anything, because if it did it wouldn’t be Art. This is an old somewhat trite topic that, historically, boiled down to no more than a pithy phrase: “Art cannot be taught.” as expounded by many teachers of incredible talent in their own right who have attempted to distill it into teachable material and realized their talent is not transferable as easily as they had hoped.
Most of what you read on this subject is nonsense sold to you by grifters who want your money. Now and today more than ever. I’m all for, say, “Art and Fear” and “The Art Spirit” and even a bit of “War of Art” to name some household items on the subject. These are all great recent texts. But let’s take these for what they are: self-help literature, and nothing more. The further back in literature you go the less of this patting-on-the-back attitude you get, and more serious the subject matter is treated (example: read the lectures on Art by the presidents of the Royal Academy, they are numerous, Archive has them all. One president basically tells students to choose a different profession, discussed as an aside topic in a book on portraiture from that time.)
Elsewhere in the comments people saying how art is simply good taste seem to be oblivious to the creations of artists that led them to make such a blundering conclusion. Your taste wouldn’t exist had an artist not created a thing to begin with.
We’ve used image generators for decades now. It gets the job done. The person using it may be an artist or just someone who wants a dynamic, changing generated image on the wall.
Thank you. I added those to my reading list. I don't think I ever delved into the topic.
<< Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes.
And yet, here we have someone not burdened by the serious business of art and gives his personal perspective on it. I am not saying a lot of everything is not mostly crap, because it mostly is, but I found this child-like honesty oddly endearing.
<< Art doesn’t select for skill.
Artist without a skill is just a dreamer, who can't put his vision into place. Barrier of entry has been lowered now, but I am relatively certain that was not always the case.
Nice! I peeked at the code and thought I’d share a few tips for improving the low frame rate:
Base64 encoding the JPEG bytes will increase payload size up to ~30% and burns CPU cycles on both client and server. This is unnecessary, as Websocket protocol can send binary payloads (doesn’t need to be text).
Consider removing lossy jpg compression as well, ie just send the raw RGB bytes over the network. Then on the server side you can simply call Image.frombuffer(…).
StreamDiffusion can achieve high frame rates because of extensive batching in the pipeline. You’re not benefiting from that here as the client is only sending one frame at a time and then waiting for a response. See this example for an idea of how to queue input frames and consume them in batches https://github.com/cumulo-autumn/StreamDiffusion/blob/main/e... .
Alternatively you could take a look at the SDXL Turbo and Lightning models. They are very fast at img2img but have limited resolution of 512² or 1024² pixels respectively. Which appears a bit lower than what you’re aiming for here, but they can be run locally in real time on a high end consumer grade GPU. For reference I have some code demonstrating this here https://github.com/GradientSurfer/Draw2Img/tree/main
yeah yeah yeah, do all these things, and afterwards, look at 2d interpolation methods that don't require AI for your inbetweens. There's some real fast kernel math that can lerp from one blob to another at 8 billion fps.
> Making art is hard. But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.
Not to sound like a luddite, but I do question the idea that the skill gap is merely an inconvenience. I suspect learning how to paint or make music changes something in yourself which teaches you some deeper life lessons.
I've heard the phrase (paraphrased): No great work of art was made by a genius, genius comes to you unexpectedly like a gust of wind. It seems that cultivating these opportunities is the most an artist can do, and removing the skill gap seems to be removing the cultivation, the thing that changes you, the essence.
There seems to be a few of these inherent deep workings that we as a people keep coming back to, without knowing what they are or how to discuss them (personally at least!). Not to rain on your parade OP, the project looks fun and super useful to a lot people! Just something I ponder on at times.
This goes opposite to the saying "Experts say it cannot be done; amateurs accomplish it every day.".
Sometimes it's good to have someone with fresh eyes looking and something and not be shaped by decades of prior history.
> "Experts say it cannot be done; amateurs accomplish it every day."
I love this because I seem to encounter situations like that every day. Who came up with this saying?
Recent example: This guy asked a very simple question about something that's commonly done in industry (wiring two power supplies in parallel and balancing the current between them): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/1g84zd7/usi...
Literally 95% of the replies in that thread are irrelevant bullshit from "experts" that have no idea how redundant server PSUs work. I replied to some under the same username. Meanwhile another guy successfully wired two 100W USB-C ports in parallel to power an entire PC. He had no idea that the resistance of his crappy wires kept the two smps control loops stable and divided the current evenly between the two ports ensuring that neither one trips OCP: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1g8pser/let_m...
I guess there's the armchair expert and the actual, real expert and these two are completely different beasts.
I wouldn't feel comfortable with this guy's usb-c setup but probably not for 'it's all going to burn down' reasons, more like 'the connection will get loose somewhere and I'll lose my work'.
? Have you ever read musician interviews: Its like a competition on how much clichee, naivete and reality denying drivel one can compress into 5 minutes.
Idealism is not a victimless crime, millions suffer every day because some artist threw a buggy,idealized world model over the fence and the idiocy stuck hypnotizing millions into permanently damaging themselves.
I think this would be cooler if the camera was somewhere different than the frame. Looking at an artistic mirror seems a little boring. Maybe make a 2nd one, and put it in someone else's house, and then feed the camera from one into the other. So you can look at the 'reflection' of someone else and have these little moments where you're both looking at the picture at the same time. Heck, make many so you never know who you're looking at. It'll be the Omegle of picture frames.
> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.
I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them. That’s why I find a banana on the wall art, popular music is still art.
(Might be school influence but I also tend to ask myself „why”)
This invention is definitely work of art, but its output - in my eyes - not. It’s like a cloud. It can make different shapes, and some are funny, some might remind me of my close ones, but it’s still averaged randomness.
However the idea to reflect reality to this digital randomness I find without doubt - art. And, well: while not visual or audible, there is software, hardware, code and design which are also art (and difficult to make so counterpoint to thesis in first paragraph ;)).
> I always thought that art is all about emotions, both preserving and creating them.
But this leaves the role of intention ambiguous. If I double-park a BMW across two handicap spaces because I'm angry and entitled, is that art? It certainly evokes emotion, and it's also produced by emotion.
An interesting viewpoint for sure.
I would dissect it though since it’s not pure anger - frustration maybe, a complex one and caused by additional input. E.g. anxiety (you took what could be mine) or internal discord (after observing act of injustice).
I’d argue that it’s an act of random (again, like a cloud) and wouldn’t treat it as art.
But, if you’d park it sideways in front of the mall entrance, blocking it considerably, I’d consider it art (in my imagination I can see the headlines about artist making a statement against the overconsumption).
Yet art is art, so everyone has their own definition. I’d prefer “positive” emotions, so awe, nostalgia, etc., but I don’t see reason why anger should be excluded.
<<proceeds to print “THIS IS AN ART INSTALLATION” message to put behind the windshield>>
If you present it as art, sure.
But the best part about art is that other people don't have to consider what you do as art.
I would find it hard to believe you are presenting it as art though, as you'll want your BMW back after you've bought whatever crap at the store.
I don't have to believe your AI generated slop is art because it doesn't actually convey any emotion.
This generation of the picture itself is art, similar to other "experience" art pieces. Its referred to as immersive art.
>If you present it as art, sure.
>But the best part about art is that other people don't have to consider what you do as art.
I often think of art in a way that is remarkably consistent with these statements.
My view was "Art is an invitation to consider" Sticking a banana to a wall becomes art when you do it to make people to engage or think about it.
Engagement is not compulsory, but I think the invitation might be. Sticking a banana to a wall to keep it away from ants is simple utility, not intended to be artistic expression.
>I don't have to believe your AI generated slop is art because it doesn't actually convey any emotion.
You don't have to engage, but choosing to denigrate is actively hostile engagement. There are plenty of people using AI for expression of ideas. There are also people doing a bunch of dumb things. Lowbrow art is still art in it's own way. Much of it may have very little to say, but I don't think there are very many people who have pretensions that low effort images are much more than a kind of doodling.
I don't have anything to say about the artistic value, but as a part-time tool collector with dreams of being a handy person, this passage was the most interesting:
I used a puncher to cut a hole in the frame’s cardboard for the camera (drills didn’t work).
I would love some more detail, or just people's interpretations ... in what manner can a drill fail to "work" on cardboard? There can be issues with tearing, perhaps, that I think punching works around nicely.
It's too soft and layered, the drill tends to chew it up. I've had some luck putting duct tape over both sides and drilling through that, but for very clean holes you'd still probably have to clean the edges with a craft knife.
reminds me of the classic 80's "Take on Me" music video
Have you considered a high frame rate morph effect between images? That would increase the effective frame rate and probably would look pretty cool.
That’s the technique I used on a piece that does inpainting across an image at a rate of about 1 image every 8 seconds - I ‘melt’ the results in for the duration until the next patch is ready: https://hardwork.party/aws-epoch-optimizer/
I actually think the high frame rate will look worse unless the styling changes less in between frames. Otherwise, it's going to look erratic and there will be a ton of "popping" if each frame changes as much as the frames in the current video. Or maybe op wants it to be a chaotic feeling.
Even a simple crossfade.
FYI, the link to the frame used to mount the display just blocks you:
https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/decoration-eclairage/dec...
For those curious, it's a MILO 21 x 29.7 cm black frame. These links work for me:
https://www.leroymerlin.pt/produtos/decoracao-e-tapetes/mold...
Also, the screen he uses (HMTECH Raspberry Pi Screen 10.1) is pretty hard to find. Do people have other good recommendations for screens with similar quality and specs?
Any idea why this uses infrared light and an infrared camera?
Every time I've looked into building something like this, when I price it out, just using an old Android tablet in kiosk mode and making it a web app ends up being much cheaper.
> Any idea why this uses infrared light and an infrared camera?
I'd guess it's to make it work in the dark as well.
Really neat idea, I'd also love to have on my bookshelf.
> The main issue with the current setup is the low frame rate.
I'd call it a feature rather a limitation, it's not bad that I have second to process the image for a bit.
I would even increase the update frequency to 5 - 15 minutes and let it capture and generate a new image whenever it detects something changing / moving.
Prize for the most power-hungry mirror.
I also notice that the paintings are not stable over small changes in the inputs.
To me, that’s the charm.
Is there any way to freeze some of the images?
I thought some of them would be awesome to keep (e.g. pfp or lockscreen photo).
> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?
I really like this direction. I understand why some object to the genai approaches, but in practice sometimes I get an idea of something cool and don't have the skills to create it myself. I'm not going to invest months/years to create each of those ideas and they're not important enough to spend hundreds of dollars that a skilled artist would request. Now there's a way people can try generating the thing and may end up enjoying it - and that's great. (At least for personal use, it gets a bit complicated for commercial purposes)
But unfortunately they did not.
Not everyone could build what is presented here, and inadvertently they have validated that it requires skill to produce a machine that distorts your reality. The pictures being produced isn't the art.
It would be cool to intercept the input from a webcam, transform it like this, and then present it to the OS as another virtual camera so you could select it in Teams or Zoom or whatever.
You can do this with OBS.
This really does change the interaction with art. As a future expansion it might be neat to recognize images on camera that would make for interesting art (i.e. detection of people/animals or recognition of certain styles of composition) as well as being able to choose amongst different styles.
It seems sort of akin to some modern art that incorporated TV screens and video to make dynamic installations, like Nam June Paik.
I think the low framerate adds a unique ambience, at least to me, watching the recorded videos. It gives time to appreciate the art style and generated features. It also feels like a time lapse of gradual changes. I could imagine it being annoying to look at in real time though.
Sounds cool! I would like pictures with people in the room doing weird things energetically like stand on their chair. Dancing. Confetti booze strange outfits. Bordering the offensive then deleted after 30 minutes.
> Art is ... mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.
I like the phrasing of the first part. But what art is "about" is very subjective.
For me, part of what I look for in art is intentionality - the notion that the artist has crafted each element toward a purpose, consciously or not. The less an artist contributes to the final piece, the less meaning I assign to it.
In this case: I would say that the individual pictures being displayed are not "art" - they have no meaning. But I think the device in whole is a piece of art. That is a creation that surfaces the creator's inner world, because they designed the device, wrote the code, crafted the prompts to achieve pieces that reflected their notion of beauty.
I love this framing (pun unintended) of "art".
Besides what you articulated as the "intention", I often think of the "story" behind the art -- whether an idea in the creator's head was expressed via the piece (or not) makes me go "yes, this is Art" (or not).
By that token, when I see automated projects like this, I think of the "installation" as art, but the pixels or arrangements generated by the piece itself is less art-like IMO.
how much does this end up costing to run?
Let’s hook it up to a sentiment and toxicity model, and then if you’re being too negative online, it will start to deform you into a monster, we could have a real Picture of Dorian Gray!
I chuckled, but that is actually an interesting ( and very doable ) fun project idea.
> It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill.
Jackson Pollock begs to differ.
Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.
> Artistic skill lies not merely in the hand, but also in the eye.
Precisely. There is no skill in artistry, it’s rather just a developed sense of style, that doesn’t come from a medium or method, it comes from growing to know oneself.
I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.
> I agree. I think the distinction between arts and crafts is largely one of utility, rather than skill or technique.
Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.
> Which is why I take offense to someone claiming that it selects for and requires skill. Especially because the ones making that argument are usually the ones arguing that they’re incapable of making art. I would tell them they just need to spend more time finding themselves.
And spend more time (and intentional effort) in making art! It's like people want a shortcut to end result, when "real" artists know that the process of self-discovery is the reason and means through which they make the art in the first place.
The map is not the territory. The purpose of the journey is the journey itself; the destination is simply a guiding star. A whole lot of aspirational mapmakers think if they only had "this one weird trick," they'd be gods.
Um, no, I want illustrations for my stories. That’s the end, and the means can be whatever. I don’t care to search for self-discovery in that.
That’s a reasonable expectation and desirable outcome in and of itself. Not everything needs to be intended to be art for it to be perceived as such.
Art is in the eye of the beholder.
Do you share your stories publicly? I’m curious what kind of stories you would write.
It would be cool to have an HN writing group!
Super cool! I've had similar ideas when I first saw StreamDiffusion. The possibilities are endless
It's pretty neat, but I'd never have a webcam steaming everything in view to someone else's server on the internet. It'd be cool if the server ran on my own hardware, and ideally in the frame itself. The privacy policy at runpod.io wouldn't even display in my browsers. (their ToS loaded without an issue).
I wonder if you could do something like this with hardware acceleration (like google coral)
Unfortunately no, they only have a TensorFlow target and none of the hobbyist / released big model image stuff works with it
This is great.
>But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world
Oh good lord.
What’s wrong with that? If art is expression shouldn’t everyone have the right to artistic expression? Even people who express themselves with nerdy projects and code and hardware instead of paint and canvas? What do you think art is?
This is very cool and I applaud you OP.
Some optimization suggestions:
- cache the prompting somehow, unless you are doing dynamic stuff with the prompts, the language embeddings generated should be static (this depends on the architecture of the model that you are using, it's only possible with certain setups where the language processing is a separate part in the pipeline)
- consider fine-tuning an img to img model with your current outputs instead of using a language-coupled model. My intuition is that this is currently significantly over-engineered on the ML side.
- Play around with local hardware acceleration instead of sending everything to the cloud, you also probably don't need particularly high resolution for the images either.
> But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?
I don’t think the poor lad knows what Art is.
Put another way, we have hundreds of years of recorded philosophical texts and diatribes on what constitutes Art, and what art-making is. Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes. We have people who are deemed artists, not necessarily painters but people who are wired a certain way and are industrious with their abilities. Math geniuses attend certain schools and the other pupils may pick up a thing or two from them, but that doesn’t mean the other pupils are geniuses also. So too, do artists walk among us and may do what we do and we may imitate what they do. But that doesn’t put us on equal footing whatsoever.
Art doesn’t select for skill. This is a red herring and a misunderstanding. Art doesn’t select for anything, because if it did it wouldn’t be Art. This is an old somewhat trite topic that, historically, boiled down to no more than a pithy phrase: “Art cannot be taught.” as expounded by many teachers of incredible talent in their own right who have attempted to distill it into teachable material and realized their talent is not transferable as easily as they had hoped.
Most of what you read on this subject is nonsense sold to you by grifters who want your money. Now and today more than ever. I’m all for, say, “Art and Fear” and “The Art Spirit” and even a bit of “War of Art” to name some household items on the subject. These are all great recent texts. But let’s take these for what they are: self-help literature, and nothing more. The further back in literature you go the less of this patting-on-the-back attitude you get, and more serious the subject matter is treated (example: read the lectures on Art by the presidents of the Royal Academy, they are numerous, Archive has them all. One president basically tells students to choose a different profession, discussed as an aside topic in a book on portraiture from that time.)
Elsewhere in the comments people saying how art is simply good taste seem to be oblivious to the creations of artists that led them to make such a blundering conclusion. Your taste wouldn’t exist had an artist not created a thing to begin with.
We’ve used image generators for decades now. It gets the job done. The person using it may be an artist or just someone who wants a dynamic, changing generated image on the wall.
<< Archive has them all.
Thank you. I added those to my reading list. I don't think I ever delved into the topic.
<< Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes.
And yet, here we have someone not burdened by the serious business of art and gives his personal perspective on it. I am not saying a lot of everything is not mostly crap, because it mostly is, but I found this child-like honesty oddly endearing.
<< Art doesn’t select for skill.
Artist without a skill is just a dreamer, who can't put his vision into place. Barrier of entry has been lowered now, but I am relatively certain that was not always the case.
Micasso