HN Explorer

I created a site to make AI generated photos of your pet (petpic.ai)

31 points by petpic_ai ↗ HN
Hey HN, I have Goats and a camel as my pets and I recently saw some very cool AI-generated pictures so I decided to build a startup with my 19 y/o brother where you can generate these AI photos for your pet. I thought this could be a cool idea for crazy pet owners who want to create new memories with their pet or to get new photos of a deceased pet. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!

56 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread
gus_massa
Are you doing a manual filtering of the results, or the generated images are send automatically?
petpic_ai
right now manual cause we're still improving prompts
joshmn
"Do things that don't scale early" really applies here. Good for you.
petpic_ai
yep we were even adding styles after the initial renders were done & delivered when we found a new cool theme. imperfection of website etc etc i can learn to live with but delivery needs to be on point. biggest challenge, figuring out how to write prompts especially for animals...
[dead] christinagoat
wy35
Seriously? We're still doing blatantly obvious astroturfing?
minimaxir
Sites like Product Hunt have normalized the "enthuisiastic endorsement from a user who definitely has no affiliation with the product" strategy, but not the knowledge that it's ineffective outside of those bubbles.
petpic_ai
sorry about that, completely new to all of this and well - it actually is wild and total fun!
pdntspa
Am I the only one who feels like inserting emojis where text belongs/alongside text feels like elementary school reading? Are we really so illiterate? What a horrible trend.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
petpic_ai
Guess it breaks it up visually and makes it easier for the brain to grasp what the text is going to be about. Not going to win a Pulitzer with it and I agree that people should still be able to properly read without needing emojis to get it but I'm still gonna go with this for a while... Totally get your point though, thanks for the feedback!
tshadley
The first of many dreambooth startups?
MasterScrat
Not even the first pet-focused one ;-)

- pets https://imaginarypaws.com/

- hair style/transplant https://www.hairgen.ai/ https://www.hairstyleai.com/

- profile pics https://photoai.me/ https://www.profilepicture.ai/ https://avatarai.me/ (also does dog/cat)

(Not a criticism of OP's work, this will definitely not be a winner-takes-all market)

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
petpic_ai
For sure! Not the first but we made it a challenge to figure this out in a week cause it was clear this ai image generation is the new thing and there's gonna be sooo much of it. It's most likely not going to be a publicly traded company anytime soon ;) But a great little challenging project for 2 siblings
tshadley
Best of luck, you've got a great look!
badcppdev
Probably advisable to not describe your customers as crazy as it might be interpreted badly.
xwowsersx
"extremely enthusiastic" is a perfectly valid and commonly used definition of the word "crazy". OP shouldn't use it because there might be some people who might inexplicably interpret them as deriding people with serious mental issues? I think it is far from a foregone conclusion that it's inadvisable for OP to use the word.
minimaxir
Customers do not care about semantics.
whartung
I have cats. Others have children, but I have cats. And if there's a single "theme" of the photos on my iPhone, it's my cats.

The iPhone every now and then crawls through my photos and spits out a movie with some music based on what it finds. It did a very nice one of my anniversary trip to San Diego with my wife.

That said, I get several "Pet Friends" movies.

I ADORE these. They always brighten my day when one of those shows up. Especially when they make one of my long past pets. It's the same photos as always, as I've always seen, but it puts them in a new light. It's a great feature.

I'm sure someone, somewhere, in some meeting, said "Hey, when we do these movies, we should be able to do ones with pets." And they were right. They should have, and they did, and I'm grateful for it.

petpic_ai
I wrote that cause I'm one of them, as described on the site as well. I'm in plenty of pet owner groups and the general consensus is that we're all crazy for our pets and probably a little crazy in general, ya. Otherwise you wouldn't spend your time and money on sending your pets images on virtual adventures. And again, I am totally one of them, I spent money and a lot of time on making up adventures for my goat. It's fun being a little crazy ;) People get offended about everything nowadays, I just let them.
NicoleJO
What's the copyright status of the dataset you're using?
m00dy
-Knock Knock...

+Who is it ?

-Data Police...

minimaxir
Copyright is a valid question for a service based on Stable Diffusion/Dreambooth especially if the generations are monetized.
m00dy
A friend of mine has recently told me that he is working on a decentralised ai marketplace. Copyright and data laundering will be a thing of past. (He's building this for the sake of humanity)
minimaxir
Web3 buzzwords are not going to be a defense to a copyright/IP lawsuit.
petpic_ai
we're using astria so would refer to whatever their lawyers say ;) sorry, totally valid question which we will need to add to the site asap!
lijogdfljk
This sounds cool, i'd love to use it but $30 feels a bit steep for my confidence in the output.

If you could find a way to have a cheaper hook, i could see releasing $30 from my wallet. However not having that hook i struggle.

petpic_ai
More examples on Insta, we'll add more to the website tomorrow too: https://www.instagram.com/petpic.ai/ Published asap, lots of catching up to do on showing more examples - you're completely right!

We hope to bring the costs down in the future, but for now this is the price...

kirykl
Might want to look into free but heavy watermark until you buy model
petpic_ai
Unfortunately we're paying for each render so currently that's not possible but it's one of the most important next things to figure out, absolutely - would help big time cause it's really fun when you see your own pet instead of strangers
TheSoftwareGuy
Does this not work on mobile safari? I keep getting an error “sorry your login / session has changed” when I try to click the “pay $29” button, after uploading my pictures
petpic_ai
oh boy, it totally should work - sorry!! could you send us an email, please, with your name/email? we did see a few uploads without payment, hopefully we can find your images without you having to upload them again. sorry!
TheSoftwareGuy
Sure, I do t see an e-mail address for you, here or on the website though
aizyuval
It seems interesting to be honest. I’d love to participate somehow, but 30$ is simply way too high.

I would like to see more examples, to really know what im getting into. See more detailed (or more easy to detect) process.

petpic_ai
Makes sense, we're still updating the site, just pushed it out as quickly as possible. There's more examples of Insta: https://www.instagram.com/petpic.ai/

We hope to bring the costs down in the future, but for now this is the price...

yuhc
If preview is possible, $30 bucks would definitely worth a try (though it's not a very competitive price in the market). But if not, even $5 sounds too much.

I wonder whether you could use a simpler model to do the inference and don't render too much detail to lower the cost of a preview.

$30 is a small amount if we're supporting an open source project but when this comes to be a business...

petpic_ai
Yep, one of the most important next steps to figure out a free trial. The way its set up currently that's not possible as we're paying for each pet.
pmoriarty
People will pay way, way more for a painting of their pet by a human artist.

$30 is super cheap compared to that.

abinaya_rl
Great results. How are you training the user updated images? Do you run on your GPUs or rely on third-party APIs? Lately, there are a lot of AI image-generation startups coming up. Thanks to Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth training which makes things possible.

Here are some more list

- Profile pictures/Avatar - https://PicasaAI.com

- Food - http://unrealmeal.ai/

- Hairstyle - https://www.hairgen.ai/ https://www.hairstyleai.com/

- Photo restoration models - https://replicate.com/tencentarc/gfpgan

petpic_ai
Thanks :) We're currently using astria, everything else takes quite a while longer to set up and this was a quick MVP... And yes, we're definitely not the only ones who had ideas like this! gonna be a wild ride!
leo-tada
Thank you for the list! I made a website, magictools.online, that is all about various AI Tools. Right now I have 7 services http://magictools.online/images/avatar%20maker on my list for creating avatars and 62 for working with images. And I'm adding new ones every day.
tibbydudeza
No parrots ???.
petpic_ai
oh la la, we'd love to do parrots! don't have any yet but send as an email and we'll do it for free for you. it's just gonna take a couple days since we need to train AI first to find good prompts for parrots and we had so many orders yesterday that we need to fulfil first. your parrot will do ground breaking work hahaha
petpic_ai
waiting for your email, we would love to train your parrot for free :)
rapjr9
How about going a step further, train an AI on the actual live pet and create an AI that emulates the pet. It could be virtual (on a screen) or a robot. A tracking collar and some strategically placed cameras could be the source of the training data. Seems like just a matter of time before someone does this.
petpic_ai
yep definitely had this idea, but i'm not good enough to do it myself yet. basically wanted to create one of those ai companion apps but in the shape of your own pet so you can talk to your pet and they talk back lol