Show HN: I used DallE to create default avatars on my Creator community website

9 points by buf ↗ HN
I'm an indie dev and I built a community for creators to get together and collaborate with each other. Mostly for amateur creators, but some famous ones use it as well. It has about 700k users so far.

There are about 100k of those users who don't bother to upload an avatar, so they've had a boring default avatar for nearly 7 years.

Today, I used my credits on DallE to do make them a bit more fun.

Since the creators self-identify, I was able to create specific kinds of avatars for them.

For example, if a creator is a writer, my DallE prompt would be:

"an oil painting portrait of a serious-looking owl, standing in front of a typewriter"

Voice Actor:

"oil painting portrait of a robot who is made out of a microphone, wearing a hat and headphones"

Comic Illustrator. This one was a little more tough, so I chose 'tablet' as my key object:

"Oil painting portrait of a brooding chameleon, wearing headphones and a hoodie, standing in front of tablet"

Producer:

"Oil painting portrait of a happy hedgehog with headphones on, wearing sunglasses, standing in front of a megaphone"

All four images on this thread: https://twitter.com/_buf/status/1564327370219261954

Overall, I generated over 200+ new avatars. What a fantastic bit of tech!

3 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 7.0 ms ] thread
Great Idea! I've been using Midjourney from something similar, but it doesn't seem to understand "microphone" very well (or, more likely, my prompt-fu isn't up to snuff just yet)
Very cool use case! They all seem to be paintings / cartoons. Have you tried creating realistic human avatars?

It would also be cool to have an api where apps could use this to create default avatars for their users.