Why do you care what your kebab shop uses for their menus? These people are trying to run a business. If this can allow them to clearly communicate prices in a well designed pleasant way, it's great. Why must they slave away in design and technology or pay someone to do it for them? I think it's great
If I eat at a restaurant and that restaurant has images of their food, I want those to be “real images” of what they will bring me when I pay. Otherwise it’s misleading.
Not sure exactly what images we're talking about here, places above "medium-scale" typically don't have images on their menus at all, and mostly have real iamges on their Instagram and website, of course professionally taken and edited though.
I can't disagree more. A lot of shops in our city have done this and I actually miss the shitty photoshopped images that did not even look like the real life dish anyway. AI signs are way worse.
I thought that was parents point, that currently they're using so shitty AI generated logos, that even if we despise that as a concept, at least better models output slightly less sloppy shit. But re-reading it, I'm not sure that was the right initial reading.
One of my locally owned fried rice places doodled a simple pencil cartoon of them cooking fried rice to satisfy their evil landlord and it has cascaded into a series of mildly unhinged pencil cartoon doodles every few days on Facebook. It is an incredibly refreshing break from the local food/eats FB groups being utterly flooded with identical looking slop posters and has earned my business several times. Also it's just... incredibly in-touch marketing in general.
The "composite party photo", while impressive, shows that still the miniscule details are being lost, like the teeth structure of the guy in the middle or the fact that the guy on the left is holding the cup with three fingers. Wondering why they chose this edit for the showcase.
I've also found the OpenAI image models to lose fine detail on image edits compared to Nano Banana or Flux models which faithfully retain input source image geometry and details. I was hoping this might be different but it sounds similar to previous OpenAI image models where something is lost in translation during image editing.
I know the API (assuming you're using it) lets you set the output size of the edited images - I haven't done a huge amount of testing with > 1mp, so I'd be curious if this might mitigate some of that.
Surprised to see no acknowledgement of how "AI Menu Slop" has become deeply associated with ChatGPT.
Everywhere I go now I see places that blatantly used ChatGPT for their menus or posters and they all look the same.
It feels almost existential to the service, I know its a bit of survivor bias but so many images you can tell immediately are ChatGPT vs other image providers, and I feel many people are sick of them.
I think quite a lot of people can distinguish between AI and real (maybe 30%?) but almost no one is worried about distinguishing between ChatGPT and other image generators
It's the great desemantification machine: want to look, read, sound, feel just like the median, without personal traits or individual expression? This is for you! (And people used to talk about communism and everything being same. Well, tech-broism actually achieved this.)
ChatGPT Images is for me the most impresive of all models, but also the one I hate the most, because of what it's used for: either funny wasteful use, or nefarious use, basically nothing else.
Just like WordPerfect enabled your mom to create a professional-enough cover letter, ChatGPT allows your mom to send you a more or less visually pleasing virtual birthday card of you wearing a party hat.
Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
The sad part is my mother would love "remixing" my old child photos of me.
Because elderly people who never had a connection to tech or sci-fi will have no feel for, and therefore no resistance to the kind of trickery that seems fun but is ultimately corrosive. Cheerfully meddling with the artifacts of memory at that life stage is corrosive.
Because the mother's joy should hinge on the actual photo of the actual event of the actual person, not a fictional imaginary event or fake childhood of their child. The experience of being human should be tethered to reality.
Seriously, are these really the best examples they could come up with?
What is the point of having a fake picture of your dog in a costume? What’s the point of having a fake picture about being at a party?
The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
> The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
As far as I can tell, the biggest uses of these sort of models is to pump out lots of content on multimedia-based social media, so yeah, it's basically for the sort of person who doesn't shy away from exaggerating, omitting or outright lying in order to get more views.
Trying to be as least cynical as possible, imagine if you were a party with 3 or more people, and you really wanted a nice pic like that to commemorate the night, but never got to take one all together because someone left early, and you were in the bathroom when they announced their departure.
Yes, it's a major first-world problem to not get a photo, but to the right person, it could mean a lot to them to "fix" the photo they took with A and B to add C to their 'rightful place.'
With this logic, what is the point to read a book about false events that did not happen? Can we please stop attacking everyone's version of fun or what makes them happy just because it isn't exactly what we like?
Is spending time with your friends not enough in 2026? Do we must provide photographic evidence of all the fun you have been having or it did not happen?
So many people I just stopped spending time with altogether as instead of being present they’d be posing for their 90th instagram shot by 10am - and then of course they want you to pose, too.
So no. Spending time with your friends is not enough in 2026. I’m not even convinced people have friends now - just colleagues and mutual parasites.
I think it depends on who your friends are, and/or culture.
I was in France the other month and walking down to the river in Saumur, I noticed an area serving drinks (out of an old converted bus) with lights and suchlike (opposite the castle on the hill), with a small acoustic band. Nobody (and I mean nobody) had their phone out. The couple of hours I spent there, nobody was observable taking selfies. The age range was from young to old.
I was shocked. It was very different from the UK. Refreshingly so.
I was also recently in France, at a very similar affair - little fortnightly village fete, with a band and food and all that.
Most everyone over 40 or so, talking. Most everyone under 40, preening and posing. I saw so many people holding plates awkwardly in midair to get a picture of themselves, the food, the bunting etc. - to the extent that the organisers were having to ask people to move along so others could order.
Then again this was the Dordogne which may as well be Bognor at this point.
You’re mistaking your preferences for the majority’s preferences. Huge chunk of humanity now chooses to experience in-person events recording it through their phones.
In the first case presumably the person is focused on their phone/the photo instead of their friends, and in the 2nd it's the opposite (then making the photo after they're no longer with their friends). It could be said the latter is better?
5 years ago, after a work retreat, I photoshopped the couple of team members who couldn't attend into a team photo we took so that we could use the photo to represent our team.
This is just that, but without the hour of tedious photo editing (I'm not very good).
In a world were there is a significant amount of people that do things just to take photos of themselves doing things rather than experiencing the thing, this may be the lesser evil.
I can’t imagine “remixing” treasured childhood memories that had a context so you can see a totally implausible and fictitious event. Am I the stupid one for not getting it?
> Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
Well, that's like the entire point of social media anyway, isn't it? People there will _love_ this. Ugh ...
My secret hope is that this kills the influencer industry and gets things back to just ads. Just the ads happen to be fake people, instead of real people pretending to be ads.
I’m less concerned about faking being at a party with friends and more with the 2006 timestamp on said photo!
Can you imagine finding a stack of photos in the basement with timestamps of the Before AI times and wondering whether they are real or just got swapped with generated and printed fakes? Scary!
It’s cool, folks… nothing bad is going to happen. Right? Right?!
If you're not familiar of the pitfalls of this tech, and the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
I wouldn't/don't really feel comfortable uploading private pictures to any other cloud provider either :). I find OpenAI especially untrustworthy because of their known business practices, unestablished business model and unknown future capabilities and role in society. You cannot take that data back once they have it. The condescending tone was unasked for, apologies to OP for that.
This is really depressing to me. I think this is abusive.
Your son has no concept of the implications of his body, face and identifying features being used here. He has no ability to opt-out, refuse consent, and avoid his data (biometric features) being swooped up in a data-centers for further training, further data collection & further monetization.
Your son didn't agree to the privacy policy of OpenAI. This is an extremely high level of disrespect to a person you created.
Why would you even have kids if you don't want to give them agency or respect?
What would it take for you to realize you are being abusive and invading their privacy? Don't complain when your son puts a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out in front of you.
The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying.
I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?
A round trip cross country plane ride for one passenger is equivalent to about 500k - 1 million image generations. So all one has to do to offset their lifetime usage of image generators is forego one vacation. And this of course is only for current day carbon usage, that could go down (or up I guess but compute-wise usually things get cheaper over time).
I propose they use my body for compost to power their electricity turbines, in exchange for a advance in tokens while I am alive...I am overweight and that is good, more burning mass. We could settle at 2 million USD.
The waste overall for data centers is beyond terrifying. Enough water for 1.2 billion people. It’s like all the GenX and Boomers looked at the challenges younger people will face and decided make it as bad as possible start kicking them in the ribs for good measure.
Closed loop systems consume like 40% more power, and aren’t recycled - they’re filled with refrigerant. We’re talking in the southwest where the river is running dry, most power plants are natural gas plants and they use water for cooling (not closed loop, evaporative).
So you’ve turned on several cities worth of power plants, with the water consumption to boot, not even to fucking mention carbon costs, for your closed loop system, that you can’t just drain you have to treat it and it still evaps and needs more.
From the same companies and people that brought you climate pledges, and being environmentally responsible.
Every SDXL image uses something like 0.5 Watt-hour. That means that 2000 sdxl images uses about 30 cents of electricity. If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video), that means you get almost 700 5-second videos for a dollar of electricity, which is about a kilo of carbon dioxide. More or less depending on where your electricity comes from.
> If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video)
It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours.
My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.
Do you want to know how many identical questions ChatGPT gets asked every week, recomputing its answer each time because people stopped sharing results? I don't, but I'm sure it far exceeds 3 billion. "How to center a div", "how to install this and that package", "what is this pop culture reference", "who is this famous person",...
I ask a question to google and i spend 10-100 times longer visiting multiple websites making multiple servers generate webpages wasting electricity and time reading them finding my answer, trying different solutions
Sounds like a complex question. On average you'll visit like 1.5 sites. Those SQL queries are peanuts compared to an LLM burning through tokens. Besides, for hard questions, the LLM itself might download 30-60 websites to find the info on your behalf, e.g. checking the state of RAM prices.
Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
I’m not commenting on whether generative AI is especially resource-wasteful or not, but a lot of people online seem to have newly discovered the existence of data centers.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
Golf courses are not green spaces, come on now. They are most often limited in their access and devoid of greenery native to the area or that supports pollinators. Grass does not equal green space, and certainly not the flavor of green that is present in golf courses. The alternative to a golf course is not hot concrete either, that's a false dichotomy.
its because "green spaces" and "spaces with greens" are not the same. just imagine a 150 acre generic park or forest instead of an over fertilized over watered field for a single game played by only .002 percent of people.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
I'm not hating on golf. My grandfather would be appalled! In crowded urban areas they don't work so well anymore. And I'm also not against using our resources for human pleasure!
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people
actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up
with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
Yes. And right after we kill golf lets pave over Central Park. And we can tear down sports arenas and concert venues after that. It's a huge waste when you think about how few people actually go there and what benefit they actually have. Sports overall are a waste of time. Everyone should just walk in the woods instead. Except soccer. You're right that we need thousands more soccer fields. Its way more efficient than any other kind of exercise. And there is so much demand for soccer in the US, you can't even find an empty field. In contrast to golf courses which are mostly empty like you noticed.
you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people.
heck keep it golf but switch to driving ranges and its still like 10x more capacity for users than golf courses.
counter arguments that point out other things that are still 10x better uses of space than golf are not very compelling. a sports arena that serves 2.5m people/year is a terrible argument against a golf course that maxes out at 117k. (using sofi in LA numbers as its a similiar footprint as well 150acres)
im also not saying abolish golf, just only play it in places where the space/water use dont matter. like rural scotland. don't put golf courses in/near cities where we should use our space better.
> you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people
My counter point was that everything we do doesn't have to be motivated by efficiency gains. Sports, golf especially, isn't trying to cram the most people possible into a small space.
By your own logic, we should replace soccer fields with kicking a ball into a net.
You are joking, right? "It's fun. But people are having fun." You literally fake situations and you call that "fun"? Before calling someone else's comment ridiculous, imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images. You can't. Because it's all "fun", right? Jeez, people like you are totally crazy.
The weirdly narrow and cynical purview of your example proves my point.
It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.
People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.
Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.
None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
> imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images
If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.
Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
I hate it because I hate having to look at these AI generated images. In fact I want an internet where I have to explicitly opt-in to see AI generated content in general.
I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.
That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.
I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...
Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.
"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.
Today I got stuck with a hairy frontend problem, which even AI couldn't help me with. Luckily, I managed to find a Medium article from like 2019. It was joyfully absent of 'comparisons that actually hold up' and 'X that is only a part of the picture' and nothing was load-bearing in there.
I forgot that once there existed a magical time when human beings used to write Medium articles by hand.
I would imagine a lot of it is mundane shit like getting ChatGPT to render the same room with different coloured walls or provide inspiration on plant pots. I have a decent amount of image usage and it's all things like this, not generating content I intend to distribute.
this is an oddly dismissive comment that says more about the commenter then what is commented on.
generating an ai image is vastly more costly than loading a webpage…but still not that costly compared to most other things.
this is depressing in the same way content slop or fyp feeds are fun.
if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
"if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as "
???
You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?
What are you even talking about?
On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?
That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:
People can now make images.
It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.
It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.
People are putting this out of proportion.
Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.
>if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
Yeah seriously, the cultural mindset is so damn kneejerk negative to everything right now. It's pathetic. This is an exciting time, and lots of good things are happening.
Maybe? Transformers and neural networks in general can do lots of interesting things for sure. But an image with the default ChatGPT aesthetic mindlessly produced by a generic prompt isn't one of them.
Seriously, it’s so fucking lame and boring to read these cynical takes. I might just make a HN comment that filters these people out, they’re ruining the site.
To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.
Yea, “fun”, sure. I’m sure none of those billions of images were used to lie, mislead, or cheat anyone. I’m sure none of those images were used to create fake news narratives, used in advertisements to bait people into buying fake products, or create misleading mockups of rental properties. Definitely not.
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
Yesterday my wife used ChatGPT to generate an image of our cat as a toilet, which was very funny for the both of us. She's also used it to turn him into a basketball getting dunked, a tsetse fly, a clown and a napkin. It's hard to say whether she uses it more to generate inside joke images about our cat, or to generate mockup plans and layouts for her flower gardens, but it is safe to say she does it all for fun.
This i did like 15 images just today, mostly just editing and fixing one of my wifes photos that she wanted the lighting and stuff leaned up with so i decided to test out 2.5... it did a great job, but that was easily 15 images 1 of which was the end result but all 15 count toward that figure, i'd honestly guess its more 1:100-1:500 that actually makes it outside the chatgpt servers
I assume the comment I am responding to was made in sarcasm, so I'm basing my response on that register, so apologies in advance if I have got this wrong.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
What is weirdly dystopian is how anyone could possibly think I was being sarcastic. :)
I'm not attacking you here or anything :)
I'm just a bit shocked at how cynical people can be. The thought would not cross my mind ... and I'm a skeptic of many things!
There's a video somewhere of some people in Wyoming, riding horses.
All of the comments are young people shock of these 'boomers' committing 'animal abuse'.
I mean ... just ranchers riding horses.
People think that 'Ward Cleaver' form 'Leave It To Beaver' is some 'creepy twilight zone figure' ... when he's just literally a nice guy. Or rather the character is.
We're getting way to jaded!
So - I really mean it: AI is going to be mostly very pedantic stuff.
I witnessed the birth of computers and the internet - and while AI is definitely a big deal ... I think it's just going to feel like 'more computing stuff' in the end.
Computers started out for Science - then it became about video games, socialization, design, commerce, and of course 'gambling and porn' and all the 'same vices'.
Every step of the way there were people thinking it was being 'debauched' etc..
AI is going to be about the most mundane things, just as most technology is today.
It will be boring and in the background, and probably weird like a poorly designed, slow web-page full of cruft, but it will 'do the thing'.
It is 100% not. You can create a whole lot of misinformation with an image. You cannot do that by visiting a website. To dismiss the concern with “people are having fun” is, at best, a naive idea and, at worst, a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment.
"which anyone can use to do, relatively easily" this is not true at all. Not anyone can use Photoshop, you need to first buy or get the software, then you need to learn how to use it, then work on the images. Whereas now you can just use Grok and immediately create pedophilia. Another deliberately deceitful and malicious comment
I know of entire media departments that went from - let’s hire an artist and see what they come up with to - let’s produce hundreds if not thousands of images to explore all possible ideas (and end up with something bland anyway).
to be fair you need to create a dozen images to get a decent one. Many times i need to get to almost what i want using paint.net and hope chatgpt removes the aliasing/cleans up the pixel boundaries without messing anything up - i'm not complaining though, still faster and cleaner than photoshop -- when it works
I’m doing renovation . I slap a prompt in a tile store over my room and design several types of tiles and paint from one prompt while causally browsing in almost real time .
Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case .
What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly not unsubstantive + negative ones, which kill the kind of discussion we're hoping to have here (i.e. curious and thoughtful).
What? He quotes the opening line of the article, and notes that he reacts negatively to it. Interpreting his sentiment as "curmudgeonly" is a clear exaggeration.
And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion.
This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.
This was not a borderline call. The GP comment is simply not in keeping with the kind of discussion we want here, especially not at the top of a thread—which is where cheap negative comments often end up.
But respect to you for replying to me. I wish you only the best in moderating, and I hope that this forum can remain healthy--especially in a time where enormously well-funded actors are flexing their power to set the narrative they want.
I've been struggling with this for a few years for Yoto LED icons. Design rules didn't cut it, but a pymagick workflow did, more or less.
I have abandoned the work I was doing, but if you provide the image constraints along with some examples and descriptions of those examples using the terminology of your constraints, you should get something iterable.
The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.
This one should go in the history books when we pass the 3C warming threshold. We decided that the natural world's value amounted to.. 3 billion AI-generated images per day.
Even with LM Arena being flawed, this is significant. I was planning to do a writeup on the original gpt-image-2 as it crushed every complex image comprehension benchmark I had...I'm glad I procrastinated since ChatGPT Images 2.5 seems like an even better starting point to test out what these models can actually do nowadays.
Many people still think AI images output the wrong number of fingers on a regular basis.
I mean, it would probably be better than many tattoo artist’s art. At the very least it’s not a bad way to see how something would look on you before you permanently do it.
The Facebook Marketplace experience for used items has depreciated considerably with the widespread adoption of LLMs. Between placing attractive models in photos to help sell items to "improving" the visual condition of items that completely misrepresent the real condition of the item, it's becoming a trickier landscape to navigate to find what you're looking for.
I just saw a Twitter thread of someone calling out realtors with absolutely egregious editing examples. Think pools and landscaping being added to backyards, a background being changed to a mountainous region, and furniture being “staged” in an attic space that definitely couldn’t fit that furniture.
A realtor in the comments said they legally need to also post the same images but unedited, but I’m sure when you’re doing this the first 50 are the edited ones and the last 50 are the unedited. How many people make it to the unedited?
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https://developers.openai.com/api/reference/python/resources...
Everywhere I go now I see places that blatantly used ChatGPT for their menus or posters and they all look the same.
It feels almost existential to the service, I know its a bit of survivor bias but so many images you can tell immediately are ChatGPT vs other image providers, and I feel many people are sick of them.
The sad part is my mother would love "remixing" my old child photos of me.
Except you need to have taken a photo of the unmade bed, uploaded it to ChatGPT, prompted for the 'fake made bed' version, and downloaded the image.
Surely it's less effort to just make the bed?
It's not about the bed.
People areaddicted to generating now.
Slopoholics the whole bunch of them.
How is that sad? Why is your mothers joy sad?
What is the point of having a fake picture of your dog in a costume? What’s the point of having a fake picture about being at a party?
The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
As far as I can tell, the biggest uses of these sort of models is to pump out lots of content on multimedia-based social media, so yeah, it's basically for the sort of person who doesn't shy away from exaggerating, omitting or outright lying in order to get more views.
Yes, it's a major first-world problem to not get a photo, but to the right person, it could mean a lot to them to "fix" the photo they took with A and B to add C to their 'rightful place.'
Is spending time with your friends not enough in 2026? Do we must provide photographic evidence of all the fun you have been having or it did not happen?
So many people I just stopped spending time with altogether as instead of being present they’d be posing for their 90th instagram shot by 10am - and then of course they want you to pose, too.
So no. Spending time with your friends is not enough in 2026. I’m not even convinced people have friends now - just colleagues and mutual parasites.
I was in France the other month and walking down to the river in Saumur, I noticed an area serving drinks (out of an old converted bus) with lights and suchlike (opposite the castle on the hill), with a small acoustic band. Nobody (and I mean nobody) had their phone out. The couple of hours I spent there, nobody was observable taking selfies. The age range was from young to old.
I was shocked. It was very different from the UK. Refreshingly so.
Most everyone over 40 or so, talking. Most everyone under 40, preening and posing. I saw so many people holding plates awkwardly in midair to get a picture of themselves, the food, the bunting etc. - to the extent that the organisers were having to ask people to move along so others could order.
Then again this was the Dordogne which may as well be Bognor at this point.
This is easily observable in literally any social situation.
This is just that, but without the hour of tedious photo editing (I'm not very good).
Well, that's like the entire point of social media anyway, isn't it? People there will _love_ this. Ugh ...
Can you imagine finding a stack of photos in the basement with timestamps of the Before AI times and wondering whether they are real or just got swapped with generated and printed fakes? Scary!
It’s cool, folks… nothing bad is going to happen. Right? Right?!
I meant to say when they launched their promo [1] for Siri AI. Can’t find a non IG link, sorry.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBBgEWQP2b5/
Most depressing thing I have read today
Costume generation gimmicks on the internet.
> the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things
More ethical what? For what? Costume generation tricks?
> I'm not sure what to tell you.
I'm not trying to argue. I literally have no idea what you're talking about.
Your son has no concept of the implications of his body, face and identifying features being used here. He has no ability to opt-out, refuse consent, and avoid his data (biometric features) being swooped up in a data-centers for further training, further data collection & further monetization.
Your son didn't agree to the privacy policy of OpenAI. This is an extremely high level of disrespect to a person you created.
What would it take for you to realize you are being abusive and invading their privacy? Don't complain when your son puts a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out in front of you.
I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?
Theres going to be a reckoning.
Most are closed systems. Water gets recycled. Water gets used like bathtubs and water bottles, right?
You cannot believe water is destroyed.
So you’ve turned on several cities worth of power plants, with the water consumption to boot, not even to fucking mention carbon costs, for your closed loop system, that you can’t just drain you have to treat it and it still evaps and needs more.
From the same companies and people that brought you climate pledges, and being environmentally responsible.
It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours.
My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.
I ask a question to google and i spend 10-100 times longer visiting multiple websites making multiple servers generate webpages wasting electricity and time reading them finding my answer, trying different solutions
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people.
heck keep it golf but switch to driving ranges and its still like 10x more capacity for users than golf courses.
counter arguments that point out other things that are still 10x better uses of space than golf are not very compelling. a sports arena that serves 2.5m people/year is a terrible argument against a golf course that maxes out at 117k. (using sofi in LA numbers as its a similiar footprint as well 150acres)
im also not saying abolish golf, just only play it in places where the space/water use dont matter. like rural scotland. don't put golf courses in/near cities where we should use our space better.
My counter point was that everything we do doesn't have to be motivated by efficiency gains. Sports, golf especially, isn't trying to cram the most people possible into a small space.
By your own logic, we should replace soccer fields with kicking a ball into a net.
People are having fun making images.
Like they do all sorts of things on the web.
Making an image is as simple as visiting a web-page.
That's it.
It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.
People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.
Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.
None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.
Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
Yeah ignoring the massive environmental, social, and moral implications I suppose it’s not a big deal at all.
That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.
I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...
Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.
"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.
Weird feeling.
I forgot that once there existed a magical time when human beings used to write Medium articles by hand.
generating an ai image is vastly more costly than loading a webpage…but still not that costly compared to most other things.
this is depressing in the same way content slop or fyp feeds are fun.
if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
???
You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?
What are you even talking about?
On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?
That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:
People can now make images.
It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.
It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.
People are putting this out of proportion.
Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.
And it's 'net slightly positive'.
Incredible alternative. Talk about depressing.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.
Well, that and infographics on what to do when the AI's start to take over.
3 billion images per week isn't people, it's automated farms, dogshit marketing companies and other attacks on your brain.
What percentage is benign?
Do you have a source?
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
But yea sure, it’s all just “for fun”. Sure.
Some of us find opportunities for the small joys that help offset the background radiation of despair.
A hammer is great for pushing nails into wood. It also can crack someone’s skull with efficiency. I’m assuming you do not use hammers then, right?
AI is: 'my wife wanted better lighting in our reno pic thingy'
This is healthy and way in the range of normal, not dystopian.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
What is weirdly dystopian is how anyone could possibly think I was being sarcastic. :)
I'm not attacking you here or anything :)
I'm just a bit shocked at how cynical people can be. The thought would not cross my mind ... and I'm a skeptic of many things!
There's a video somewhere of some people in Wyoming, riding horses.
All of the comments are young people shock of these 'boomers' committing 'animal abuse'.
I mean ... just ranchers riding horses.
People think that 'Ward Cleaver' form 'Leave It To Beaver' is some 'creepy twilight zone figure' ... when he's just literally a nice guy. Or rather the character is.
We're getting way to jaded!
So - I really mean it: AI is going to be mostly very pedantic stuff.
I witnessed the birth of computers and the internet - and while AI is definitely a big deal ... I think it's just going to feel like 'more computing stuff' in the end.
Computers started out for Science - then it became about video games, socialization, design, commerce, and of course 'gambling and porn' and all the 'same vices'.
Every step of the way there were people thinking it was being 'debauched' etc..
AI is going to be about the most mundane things, just as most technology is today.
It will be boring and in the background, and probably weird like a poorly designed, slow web-page full of cruft, but it will 'do the thing'.
... for almost the last 40 years
"a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment."
This is a 'lost contact with reality' type of thing to say.
This thread is not about AI, it's entirely about people's ability to ground reality.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/02/20/a-blast-from-the-past-demos...
It's incredibly depressing.
Concerns about misinformation? Compute/energy use? Creative work Replaced by AI?
From my kids schools to banners for food places.
Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case .
What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion.
This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.
But respect to you for replying to me. I wish you only the best in moderating, and I hope that this forum can remain healthy--especially in a time where enormously well-funded actors are flexing their power to set the narrative they want.
I have abandoned the work I was doing, but if you provide the image constraints along with some examples and descriptions of those examples using the terminology of your constraints, you should get something iterable.
The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.
Added support for GPT 2.5
http://batchbanana.com/
gpt-image-2.5-sunburst: 1421
gpt-image-2.5-flare: 1399
gpt-image-2 (medium): 1381
mai-image-2.6: 1331
Even with LM Arena being flawed, this is significant. I was planning to do a writeup on the original gpt-image-2 as it crushed every complex image comprehension benchmark I had...I'm glad I procrastinated since ChatGPT Images 2.5 seems like an even better starting point to test out what these models can actually do nowadays.
Many people still think AI images output the wrong number of fingers on a regular basis.
There's literally an image of a dude with 3 fingers in the Composite Party Photo.
A realtor in the comments said they legally need to also post the same images but unedited, but I’m sure when you’re doing this the first 50 are the edited ones and the last 50 are the unedited. How many people make it to the unedited?