This blog post proves that Dall-E 2 will not make human taste and design ability obsolete. The final image he ended up with is a lot uglier and more complicated than most of the intermediate steps. I think generative art AIs will have a similar effect on design as compilers have on software development, and will not put artists out of a job.
Not trying to be a luddite and/or vehemently defend the noble profession of nuanced graphic design, BUT...
Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I.
That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums.
Just my 2 cents.
I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
I feel like you look at this too much as a creator rather than the customer. The logo may be not optimal for every medium, not have a great palette, not have the feel you would give it... But the author is happy with the result, so who are we to say it's bad/good? Paraphrasing @mipsytipsy "colour harmony doesn't matter if the user isn't happy".
(yes, I get the nuance where it's part of the designers job to explain why certain design elements are more beneficial, but the general point stands for "i want a logo for my small project" case)
Why is the creator the only one that needs to be happy? I assume they created that project to be used by others and to possibly monetize it. That sounds more like the users / clients are the ones that are supposed to like it...
I never understood this logic, where the creator of something does something seemingly stupid and people are like "Well, don't use their project then if you don't like it". Instead of constructively calling the problem out, so the creator can try to make it better.
If my logo sucked, I'd like people to please tell me...
> Why is the creator the only one that needs to be happy?
Because they define what the success is. If their goal is to make money they may want a logo which is the closest to optimal for getting clicks. If they want a private project, they may want it to be fun. And many other scenarios... You're welcome of course to do constructive criticism, but in the end it's up to them if they want to apply it.
You're right. A million shitty logos are created every day, and for the vast majority of them, they will serve their purpose. And contrarily, there will always be a marketplace for companies/entities who want a logo that has purpose, novelty and intelligence behind its design. I definitely see a chasm between an AI-catered subclass and human-catered superclass forming.
Weirdly, with the advent of AI, we might start to see exactly what it is that makes human beings special.
I think a tool like this might be good to help clients get through a few ideation phases on their own prior to showing up to the first discussion with branding / graphics / design professionals. At least it might get them closer to understanding the impossibility of their 7 perpendicular red lines requirement.
It certainly reduces the # of designers necessary. Just because it doesn't obliterate all of the designers doesn't mean the profession isn't at risk. Today fewer data viz experts are hired despite the proliferation of data, since we now have Tableau, Looker, etc
A more obtuse example, how many lift operators do you see today?
I think this is valid criticism and feels similar to restaurants that don’t put pepper on the table because the chef considers the food to be seasoned to the intended level before it leaves the kitchen. Some customers may be turned off by that level of pride, but other customers are willing to pay a premium for that level of pride to be shown by their chef.
That's some strong copium you got there, can I have some of what you're smoking?
Ultimately the average person (who is likely the target audience anyway) won't notice anything wrong with most of those iterations and given that they're basically free in comparison would make me worried. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make it output svgs soon.
I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generally happy with the results, but it's pricey. So pricey that I honestly can't justify it for a new project I intend to sell or for an open source project I don't expect to make money from. It's usually much more cost-effective to even hire lawyers or even UI/UX people.
If I were an artist, I'd be experimenting with DALL-E, trying to run my own pirate version and learning everything about it. An artist empowered with DALL-E could give quick options to a client, iterate with them quickly, and test out some ideas before making the final work product. I'd guess a good artist who made good use of DALL-E could get a project done much faster and cheaper, and this would likely mean a lot more people hiring artists (if I could spend $100-200 for high-quality assets within a few days rather than $1000-2000, I'd gladly hire artists frequently).
I'm sure this will make some artists feel cheapened, but the reality is that art & technology have always evolved in dynamic and unpredictable ways. ML being essentially curve-fitting means that genuine inspiration and emotion is still far beyond our capabilities today, and that, ultimately, these models will only give us exactly what we ask for. A good (human) artist can go beyond that.
EDIT: Also, I agree with your assessment of the "work product," if we can call it that. I was unimpressed with the iterations, and especially the final product. I guess it's good the product is an open source tool. Nothing about the generated logo helped me understand what the OctoSQL tool did. Honestly, the name (which also IMO isn't excellent) is much more evocative than that logo. Why is the octopus wearing a hard hat? Why is it grabbing different colored solids? I guess the solids are datasets? But then the octopus is just exploring them? No thanks.
It's kinda funny that your main complaint about the final logo is that it doesn't tell you much about what the project does.
I can't think of a single well known logo that is even remotely close to what a company's product is. Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, McDonalds, Ford, Ferrari, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, RedHat, Uber, Github, Duolingo, AirBnB, Slack, Twitter, IntelliJ, Steam.
I guess the Gmail logo does tell you it has something to do with mail though, so I did find one example.
Most of those examples are company logos, and the branding for the company is different than the branding for its products.
So whereas Ford's brand is just a name, "Mustang" has a logo that really does tell you something about the car. You kind of understand when you see the galloping horse what it's meant to do.
Intel brands its CPUs with the name inside a square, which is colored to resemble (abstractly) a CPU.[0]
And Photoshop once had a logo that communicated what it did.[1]
As a brand becomes more established, it tends to be more abstract. Whereas Starbucks was once an elaborate siren (I interpreted it to be the siren call of espresso), details have been simplified over the years.[2] This is similar to the Photoshop magnifying glass logo becoming "Ps".
After the Apple I and Apple II, Apple sometimes used apple varieties (plus Lisa) to brand it's products (e.g. Macintosh, Newton). However, this largely stopped in the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned. Macintosh was shortened to Mac, and 'i' was prepended to various product names. Most new ones were descriptive e.g. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. The computers have retained "Mac" in the branding, along with "book" for notebooks (a convention predating Steve's return). The logos for all of these are just the names of the products typeset in its own San Francisco font; whenever Apple appears in a product name, the Apple logo is used instead.
So, yeah, I think it's reasonable to communicate what a product does or why a project exists with its logo. I didn't really see that w/ OctoSQL.
EDIT: I should also address Firefox & Chrome.
Firefox started as Phoenix (i.e. rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla). Phoenix had a trademark conflict, so was renamed Firebird. This also had a conflict, and Firefox was chosen after. In the Zeitgeist of the early aughts, Phoenix made a ton of sense: instead of extremely bloated chrome around the page as had been prevalent in Navigator and Internet Explorer, Phoenix gave you a tab bar (truly revolutionary), the navigation bad and the bookmarks bar. It was simple and clean, like a reborn Phoenix.
Chrome is interesting because the name is not related to traveling or navigation. It's telling you it's just the container for what you care about. But the logo is a bit more like a sphincter or an all-seeing aperture. I've never gotten the logo for Chrome outside a spyware context, but it has become successful.
I agree. But I think the key thing is that deciding what phase to feed the system was still the key task. Creative people are unlikely to be out of a job anytime soon, even if they end up using something like Dalle to make quick prototypes.
> Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
But isn't the logo created for most people? Does it matter that, you as a designer, think it's bad if most people don't? I see it like modern fashion shows. I look at them and think the clothes are insane and I would never wear them, but obviously other fashion designers think they look good (I'm guessing?).
I do agree that the logo isn't super practical though, it's too textured and won't scale. I would take it to /r/slavelabour or Fiverr and pay someone to vectorize it and see what they come up with.
Even things that are created for most people usually need a professional to make it actually good for regular folks. Just like most people can tell if a song is musically good or not, but would struggle to actually create that themselves. Or they know when a physical thing is easy to use, but they'll struggle to create things themselves that are easy to use.
But the point here is exactly that they don't need to create it, they just need to judge it. They make the AI create the logo and then decide if they like it.
I understand your argument but I don't think that's the problem - the problem is that even most users don't understand what a good logo looks like (even if they like them) the same as users don't know what they want. It's a known fact that you shouldn't ask users of a software how it should be designed because if you'd let them design a software they want it would be shit.
I work in the AI field, but not on image generation.
I don't think it would be technically hard to build a model with current technology which can generate logos with the attributes which you mentioned. You could simply fine-tune a Dalle-E style model specifically on a smaller dataset of logos. This would just take a small dedicated team of domain experts to work on the problem.
I've seen people screenshot logos at low res, save them as jpeg, share them with Whatsapp and put them in A0 posters. With SVG and EPS logos easily available. With detailed guidelines on how to use them. Point them out their fault and still not see anything wrong.
The thing you’re missing is AI generated content can be refined by AI. If Disney promised their meh looking movie would improve on its own over time, people would be line to it because it’s new, not just streamlined copy-pasted design we see all over media now
Painting the Titanic wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was organizing the process that produced its structure. That’s were AI content is now.
We’re generating the bulk structure pretty competently at this point. Refining the emotional touches will come faster.
I disagree with the analogy you draw (no pun intended). Good creative design is the edge case for a model like this and is naturally much less tractable than getting to this level of design (I’m not a fan).
> I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
That's a long time. I expect within a decade or two, "AI" should be able to generate an entire animated movie given nothing but a script.
Unless the tech learns to reason, it will never be able to do anything other than recombine and remix prior art. (Which is maybe what many designers already do, but it won’t ever spit out a Paul Rand logo.)
Honestly logos are currently a very low entropy art form, much lower than graphic design which is already quite low compared to many forms of art (obviously my subjective opinion, but I'd like to think I have strong reasons). If anything, I think logo design is one of the first things ai can achieve human parity on. Obviously the style in this post was unorthodox for a logo, so I wouldn't even rule DALL-E out, with the right prompt engineering.
However, once you reach a certain budget, it's much more involved to *choose* a logo that "fits" how the company wants to present itself, than it is to generate candidate logos of sufficient quality. I can assure you that the "many-chefs problem" for a high budget design project is very real, and the major cost driver. You have a mix of "design by committee", internal politics, what designers wants on their portfolios, etc etc.
I was thinking something similar. The editing process is still a human one, and I agree that the one chosen was weaker than a lot of the intermediate choices. It's a matter of taste, obviously, but to me the red ball with a nondescript sketched square around it feels unfinished. The yellow cartoony logos look more finished and professional to me.
The tech will get better, but ultimately there still has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good', which strongly depends on someone's taste and skill in identifying what a good image looks like.
There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
This is an interesting conversation. Good taste is what we see and like … but also patterning after people we want to impress / be associated with, is it not?
Taste is very complex: it's hierarchical, social, not fixed, not absolute, not rational, is specific to audience and has irregular overlaps across groups, much of it (all?) derived from human sensation and context-specific situations.
The path to something being considered as good taste is generally not simple: much of it flows through lines of power/desire/moment whose branches are not easy to trace as they're being formed. Much of taste is the hidden "why" which most of us never see.
It's realistic that Dall-E could understand what trends are on the rise, or in good taste … it's much harder to say if Dall-E could create something of originally good taste.
That just sounds like pattern recognition with extra variables. Subdividing people into groups and then analyzing them certainly doesn't sound like a task that a machine will struggle with. Why should the algorithm need to be able to see the hidden "why" when most of us creative types can't see it or define it either? It's just a function of having observed enough people of a certain type. You want to generate something that will impress the people I'm targeting? Just analyze the posts of all my followers on social media. Analyze the content that is "liked" by people in my demographic range and with close proximity to where I live. Analyze the works of creators who belong to my generation and who listen to the same music as me. Do that all nearly instantly and then offer me a selection of options picked from those various methods. I don't expect "good taste" will be hard to conjure up. I already can't tell that a lot of these octopus drawings weren't created by a talented human, and we're still early and unsophisticated in our data analytics.
> has to be a human who decides 'that's the one that looks good'
Assuming the status quo, true. As we evolve our lives around emerging AI tech I think we will at first be the curators and creative directors of AI, but eventually a creative agency will defer to the AI as it knows more about our tastes, market, audience, and the ENTIRE HISTORY of art, design, marketing, tastes, trends, and so on.
Eventually it won't make sense to have a stupid human rubber stamp what the all powerful AI suggests. Just as it does not make sense for Facebook to curate news feeds.
Maybe one day product advertising will look different depending on who looks at it. Pepsi logo "just for you".
I still remember a HN article, might have been a Paul Graham article, from 15 years ago about “Why are all of Trump’s buildings so poorly designed when he can afford the best designers?” It came down the the fact the he personally has bad taste and therefore cannot pick good designers or approve good designs.
That aside, a great use of these tools is to generate N spit-takes of wildly varying styles that you can present to the customer very quickly and very cheaply. Once you pin them down to a particular range of styles you can get down to the carving out the details by hand.
Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated.
What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E.
We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.
If you can have humans sort the generated images into "good quality" and "bad quality", you can just keep iterating. Our subjective ratings is another score to optimize for.
When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection.
With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
I've saved some of the worst images Dalle generated to be able to showcase just how bad it can be sometimes. And then other times the bad image is hilariously bad. They can probably build another layer on top of the feedback system though to filter that sort of thing out.
I would guess your use-case is a statistical anomaly. If most of the images that are saved are saved by people who like them best, which is most likely the case, enough data will erase the problem.
Sure, but there are millions of people on the DALLE waitlist, who would happily rate the output for better performance / more credits. The famous ImageNet data set only has 1.2M images.
DALL-E2 and similar are unbundlings: the best artists synergize 1) technical ability with 2) good taste. 1 is the ability to climb a hill and 2 informs the direction of "up", and both take years to develop well.
What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.
Train Dall-E on more logos that you like. I can imagine a creative agency purchasing a Dall-E 2 instance and training it up on a model specific to the work and clients they have ongoing.
If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.
Will DALL•E 2 make human taste obsolete? No, absolutely not. But DALL•E 3? 4? Other similar models in the next 5 years? Absolutely yes. This blog post proves that with current algorithms, human input is needed, but it proves nothing about future algorithms.
In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.
I agree, what a clunky process. Hard to express in written prose what you want, so much ambiguity.
Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)
It depends.
Is the customer happy with the result?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There are many professions where cheap products killed handmade quality.
