Try things like: "A white capybara with black spots, on a tricycle, with 7 tentacles instead of legs, each tentacle is a different color of the rainbow" (paraphrased, not the literal exact prompt I used)

Gemini just globbed a whole mass of tentacles without any regards to the count

  OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \
    uv run 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/python/openai_image.py' \
    -m gpt-image-2 \
    "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" \
    --quality high --size 3840x2160

I think that image cost 40 cents.

I see an opportunity for a new AI test!

At some point the level of detail is utter garbo and always will be. An artist who was thoughtful could have some mistakes but someone who put that much time into a drawing wouldn't have:

- Nightmarish screaming faces on most people

- A sign that points seemingly both directions, or the incorrect one for a lake and a first AID tent that doesn't exist

- A dog in bottom left and near lake which looks like some sort of fuzzy monstrosity...

It looks SO impressive before you try to take in any detail. The hand selected images for the preview have the same shit. The view of musculature has a sternocleidomastoid with no clavicle attachment. The periodic table seems good until you take a look at the metals...

We're reconfiguring all of our RAM & GPUs and wasting so much water and electricity for crappier where's Waldos??

(I don't think it's right).

I often have to make very specific edits while keeping the rest of the image intact and haven't yet found a good model. These are typically abstract images for experiments.

I asked gpt-image-2 to recolor specific scales of your Seedream 4 snake and change the shape of others. It did very poorly.

It can be (slowly) run at home, but needs 96GB RTX 6000-level hardware so it is not very popular.

It is a little ambiguous (what exactly is a "3x3 cube") but I tried a bunch of variations and I simply could not get any Gemini models to produce the right output.

Yes, lets make all images proprietary and locked behind big tech signatures. No more open source image editors or open hardware.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08423

I think the issue is that it's not just bad actors. It's every social platform that strips out metadata. If I post an image on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else, they're going to strip the metadata for my privacy. Sometimes the exif data has geo coordinates. Other times it's less private data like the file name, file create/access/modification times, and the kind of device it was taken on (like iPhone 16 Pro Max).

Usually, they strip out everything and that's likely to include C2PA unless they start whitelisting that to be kept or even using it to flag images on their site as AI.

But for now, it's not just bad actors stripping out metadata. It's most sites that images are posted on.

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-pro-2-tests

this thing is like 5x better than flash at fine grain detail

Without question.

AI will be indistinguishable from having a team. Communicating clearly has always and will always mattered.

This, however, is even stronger. Because you can program and use logic in your communications.

We're going to collectively develop absolutely wild command over instruction as a society. That's the skill to have.

Not a lawyer, but that reads as compelled speech to me. Materially misrepresenting an image would be libel, today, right?

Maybe i'm just bloviating also.

But yeah the quality is remarkable, and rather scary.

From the system card someone linked elsewhere in the discussion

At least they aren't pretending that a solution exists.

Seeing is not believing anymore, and I don't think SynthID or anything like it can restore that trust in images.

     magick image-l.webp image-r.jpg -compose difference -composite -auto-level -threshold 30% diff.png

There is definitely enough empirical validation that shows image models retain lots of original copies in their weights, despite how much AI boosters think otherwise. That said, it is often images that end up in the training set many times, and I would think it strange for this image to do that.

Regardless, great find.

The question still stands, "are the benefits worth the cost to society", but it bears remembering we do a lot of things for fun which aren't "necessary for society".

The advent of digital systems harmed artists with developed manual artistic skills.

The availability of cheap paper harmed paper mills hand-crafting paper.

The creation of paper harmed papyrus craftsmen.

The invention of papyrus really probably pissed off those who scraped the hair off thin leather to create vellum.

My point is that in line with Jevon's paradox there is always a wave of destruction that occurs with technological transformation, but we almost always end up with more jobs created by the technology in the middle and long term.

Maybe image generators can be a loophole for consent legally, but it seems even grosser morally.

1. Generate 100s or 1000s of low-fidelity candidates, find something that matches your vision, iterate.

2. Hand that generated image off to a human and say, "This is what I'm thinking of, now how do we make it real?"

Important: do not skip the last step.

I'm teaching my 4 year old to read. She likes PAW Patrol, but we've kind of exhausted the simple readers, and she likes novelty. So yesterday I had an LLM create a simple reader at her level with her favorite characters, and then turned each text block into a coloring page for her. We printed it off, she and her younger sister colored it, and we stapled it into her own book.

I could come up with 10 3 word sentences myself of course, but I'm not really able to draw well enough to make a coloring book out of it (in fact she's nearly as good as me), and it also helps me think about a grander idea to turn this into something a little more powerful that can track progress (e.g. which phonemes or sight words are mastered and which to introduce/focus on) and automatically generate things in a more principled way, add my kids into the stories with illustrations that look like them, etc.

Models will obviously become the foundation of personalized education in the future, and in that context, of course pictures (and video) will be necessary!

Diagrams and maps. So much text-based communication begs for a diagram or a map.

For example, take a picture of your garden. Ask chatgpt to give you ideas how to improve it and a step by visual guide.

Anything that can be expressed visually is effectively target for this technology - this covers pretty much everything.

- package design

- pictures for manuals and guides

- navigation and signs

- booklets, tickets and flyers

- logos of all sorts

- websites

- illustrations for books

And many. many others. Not every image is art and very few illustrators are artists.

Short kings on tinder no more!

/s

Noticed it earlier while updating my playground to support it

https://github.com/alasano/gpt-image-playground

https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation/

Is anyone doing this already who can share information on what the best models are?

I think you meant more expensive, right? Because it would make sense for it to be cheaper as there are less pixels.

I feel like this is something people in the industry should be thinking about a lot, all the time. Too many social ills today are downstream of the 2000s culture of mainstream absolute technoöptimism.

Vide. Kranzberg's first law--“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

For icons in particular, this opens up a completely new way of customizing my home screen and shortcuts.

Not necessary for the survival of society, maybe, but I enjoy this new capability.

I just recently used for image generation to design my balcony.

It was a great way to see design ideas imagined in place and decide what to do.

There are many cases people would hire an artist to illustrate an idea or early prototype. AI generated images make that something you can do by yourself or 10x faster than a few years ago.

Also, this can’t be real. How many publications did they train this stuff on and why are there no acknowledgment even if to say - we partnered with xyz manga house to make our model smarter at manga? Like what’s wrong with this company?

There is nothing that cannot harm. Knives, cars, alcohol, drugs. A society needs to balance risks and benefits. Word can be used to do harm, email, anything - it depends on intention and its type.

I started being totally indifferent after thinking about my spending habits to check for unnecessary stuff after watching world championships for niche sports. For some this is a calling for others waste. It is a numbers game then.

Is that true? Don't think I'd get tired of images that are as good as human made ones just because I know/suspect there may have been AI involved

Visual explanations are useful, but most people don't have the talent and/or the time to produce them.

This new model (and Nano Banana Pro before it) has tipped across the quality boundary where it actually can produce a visual explanation that moves beyond space-filling slop and helps people understand a concept.

I've never used an AI-generated image in a presentation or document before, but I'm teetering on the edge of considering it now provided it genuinely elevates the material and helps explain a concept that otherwise wouldn't be clear.

I used to have an assistant make little index-card sized agendas for gettogethers when folks were in town or I was organising a holiday or offsite. They used to be physical; now it's a cute thing I can text around so everyone knows when they should be up by (and by when, if they've slept in, they can go back to bed). AI has been good at making these. They don't need to be works of art, just cute and silly and maybe embedded with an inside joke.

I get this sounds elitist - but tremendous percentage of population is happily and eagerly engaging with fake religious images, funny AI videos, horrible AI memes, etc. Trying to mention that this video of puppy is completely AI generated results in vicious defense and mansplaining of why this video is totally real (I love it when video has e.g. Sora watermarks... This does not stop the defenders).

I agree with you that human connection and artist intent is what I'm looking for in art, music, video games, etc... But gawd, lowest common denominator is and always has been SO much lower than we want to admit to ourselves.

Very few people want thoughtful analysis that contradicts their world view, very few people care about privacy or rights or future or using the right tool, very few people are interested in moral frameworks or ethical philosophy, and very few people care about real and verifiable human connection in their "content" :-/

If a work of art is good, then it's good. It doesn't matter if it came from a human, a neanderthal, AI, or monkeys randomly typing.

I dont think gamers hate AI, it is just a vocal miniority imo. What most people dislike is sloppy work, as they should, but that can happen with or without AI. The industry has been using AI for textures, voices and more for over a decade.

You'd think these kickbacks leaders of these towns are getting for allowing data centers to be built would go towards improving infrastructure but hah, that's unrealistic.

WTF is that unrealistic? SMH

I dunno how long this is going to hold up. In 50 years, when OpenAI has long become a memory, post-bubble burst, and a half-century of bitrot has claimed much of what was generated in this era, how valuable do you think an AI image file from 2023 - with provenance - might be, as an emblem and artifact of our current cultural moment, of those first few years when a human could tell a computer, "Hey, make this," and it did? And many of the early tools are gone; you can't use them anymore.

Consider: there will never be another DallE-2 image generation. Ever.

That's it. I can't think of a single actual use case outside of this that isn't deliberately manipulative and harmful.

Agreed mostly, BUT

I'm building tools for myself. The end goal isn't the intermediate tool, they're enabling other things. I have a suspicion that I could sell the tools, I don't particularly want to. There's a gap between "does everything I want it to" and "polished enough to justify sale", and that gap doesn't excite me.

They're definitely not generated without effort... but they are generated with 1% of the human effort they would require.

I feel very much empowered by AI to do the things I've always wanted to do. (when I mention this there's always someone who comes out effectively calling me delusional for being satisfied with something built with LLMs)

As for advertising being depressing - its a little late to get up on the high horse of anti-Ads for tech after 2 decades of ad based technology dominating everything. Go outside, see all those bright shiny glittery lights, those aren't society created images to embolden the spirit and dazzle the senses, those are ads.

North Korea looks weird and depressing because the don't have ads. Welcome to the west.

Maybe it's meant to convey pace & hype

But the broader concept of fake news and the manufactured nature of media and rhetoric is much more relevant - e.g. whether or not something's AI is almost immaterial to the fact that any filmed segment does not have to be real or attributed to the correct context.

Its an old internet classic just to grab an image and put a different caption on it, relying on the fact no one can discern context or has time to fact check.

> Wow, the difference between AI and non-AI images collapses. I hate the future where I won't be able to tell the difference.

Image generation is now pretty much "solved". Video will be next. Perhaps things will turn out the same as chess: in that even though chess was "solved" by IBM's Deep Blue, we still value humans playing chess. We value "hand made" items (clothes, furniture) over the factory made stuff. We appreciate & value human effort more than machines. Do you prefer a hand-written birthday card or an email?

Storefronts like Steam require disclosing use of AI assets for art. In most indie dev spaces, devs are scolded for using AI art in their games. I wonder if this perspective will change in a few years.

Hopefully film makes a come back.

It's just another step into hell.