I ran it on the "society if..." meme lol
Wow, someone finally made Poland-filter. It all looks exactly like I'm used to.
Pretty much any place with brutalist architecture, really. I'll happily take pretty much any revival or classical style over "modern" or brutalist style.
There's nothing more depressing than walking by beautiful historic old buildings only to turn a corner and see a monstrosity of concrete and glass somehow reaching the epitome of bland and uninviting.
Apart from some lucky places, most of the world cities looks like this or worse.
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.
You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.
Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
Singapore does actually look like the renders. By and large.
Lots of light always helps.
Especially in autumn and winter.
That’s the Joke!
Before the dystopian black and gray fad arrived most buildings that went up were sort of OK. And I didn't mind the pastel paint on commie blocks either. But a decade ago someone decided that gray cuboids with asymmetric windows were an improvement...
Even so, I think North American cities are on average uglier than most Polish ones. Overall we're not doing so bad but I want the Slavic city memes to continue lest we get Prague or Amsterdam level tourist invasion.
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton
Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.
Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
My CPM is not great (not Google) and that's 25-30k impressions
Unfortunately true.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
> Is there a better way?
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download & run on local CPUs though.
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).
It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.
This is ingenious and actually useful. I'm looking for a new apartment and I always wanted to know how do these places look in a bad weather, because that's when I need beautiful surroundings the most.
Unfortunately, it doesn't actually tell you that information: it just turns a dial. What you want is to know how much that dial would be turned by bad weather.
As long as it's not changing the form of the buildings, it seems valid. Although, the first two examples both add random telecom cabinets in places that don't make much sense.
Its not valid because it adds things like cracks, dead plants, patchwork repairs, rust, random utility boxes, loose cables, etc. Its won't tell whether a place will be maintained well. It gives you more of a worst case.
I figure that’s an architectural in-joke. The engineers will add ugly stuff because you didn’t consider stuff like HVAC or electricity.
It's infinitely better than nothing.
Fortunately, you have one of the world's most powerful supercomputers sitting between your ears, so we don't need to compare this to nothing.
POST https://fjtwtlaryvoqohkwnbwd.supabase.co/functions/v1/transf... 402 (Payment Required)
Function error: FunctionsHttpError: Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code
:(
This filter seems to also change some architectural details and features, as well as degrade the quality of some materials in an unrealistic way.
That's the 'built by the lowest bidder' feature. Probably pretty realistic in a lot of places.
Huh, I wonder if they trained it by feeding it architectural renders and "what actually got built" photos...
It's probably just prompt based. Actual fine-tuning for these kind of use cases is getting less common than it used to be.
It's GenAI. It does something that's kind of like what you asked it to do, but it will skip some details or add other ones or whatever.
Dreary architectural pictures will be more likely to have electrical boxes, poor materials, etc, so when it moves the buildings from the latent space for cheery bright architectural renderings to dreary wet November architectural renderings, it will be more likely to add some of those details, because that's what's in its latent space.
Don't expect GenAI to be magic.
It's not a filter, it's an image editing model
This drink is not a smoothie, it is a blend of fruits and berries.
In my mind "filter" is some specific algorithm that does a single expected transformation
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Also adding random electrical infrastructure and random signs, also removing a statue in the distance in one of the images
It doesn't have to be a reduction. Swapping the colour channels would be a filter, but it's perfectly reversible.
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How is it not just a midjourney prompt? The liberties it takes seem to be better described by 'upload a picture, and AI will be told to make it dingier'. Can't people already do that ad nauseam?
Au contraire, in a rather realistic way
What is it with people?
Is there some weird force dropping electrical enclosures on bridges (the cables on top even?) and random places in the street.
Those random protruding manholes next to two other drainage gates nowhere near a slope?
Why are these even the examples.
This is just like turning the HDR tone mapping up to 200%
It's not that bad actually. Over the years stuff like electrical installations, cables and random manholes often get retrofitted in an ugly way to existing architecture.
I was actually going to comment on the main post, how well tuned the AI seems with it's placement of random electrical wires and junction boxes that seem to match my impression of renderings-vs-reality.
That actually makes it much more useful as a render, it feels like a real building.
It would probably sell better, because you’re just showing them how their building will look, instead of how it might look.
It's like a dream come true!
I've been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like "wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?"
New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It's worth thinking about them long-term.
I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.
Used it on some Fortnite screenshots, I'd play that depressing version!
https://files.catbox.moe/i8tfkl.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/mw8vbc.jpg
Then I thought what would it make from an already dark and grim scene, like HL2 Ravenholm
https://files.catbox.moe/d7z77h.jpg
but nothing really? Just made the whole thing a different color scheme + changed some architecture
Halfway to The Last of Us conversion for Fortnite
It's interesting that the video game style of the images is still preserved. I actually expected the outputs to look like real photographs for some reason.
That first scene especially looks like straight out of Fallout 4 but with a better lighting engine.
They stole the ravenholm sign
It really tied the place together.
Sandy Strip is a low rent strip club right? Based on the name and logo it can't be anything else... Anyhow, that looks like GTA to me.
Top: Sandy Strip
Bottom: Shady Sands
Nice, it made it back into PUBG :)
Fallout!
That looks like a specific level in Left for Dead 2
I mean now they just look like early Fortnite!
For the bridge, I love how it added a bunch of electrical wires along the top. Imo that’s not very realistic, given there are tons of better places to run wires on a bridge, but somehow it does look substantially more realistic. Even though it seems to be trying to make everything look sad I honestly find the results more inviting because they look lived in.
This is what my brain does automatically when I see advertisements.
Anyway, if we used this anti-filter on social media then perhaps teens would not be so depressed.
Getting a 402 error payment required when I try to run this, I'm guessing all of the credits for the API account have been used up. Great idea though!
It's some Loveable app thing. Fun idea though
I imagine, it could actually be useful for architects, to see how other people and environment will butcher their creation, so they could learn how to make it better with that in mind.
Edit: oh, it's right there at the bottom of the page!
Seems fairly simple to me: stop with the naked concrete and brutalist architecture. Old houses before that trend tend to look way nicer regardless of weather. (I'm not an expert on exact architectural style names, so I can't be more exact that that.)
Architects aren't generally brutalists themselves, but rather, brutalist architecture proposals win contracts because their TCO is lower. Facades have maintenance costs; bare concrete just requires power-washing now and then.
That's funny, the second example is the Peace Bridge in Calgary.
On a nice day the render actually looks close to the real thing!
The bridge looks much better than the anti-shine version in person (no boxes!), though they replaced the glass due to vandalism.
Maybe a real picture of the actual bridge was in the training set? Similar to how prompting for a story about a boy wizard can result in verbatim Harry Potter passages.
I think they use their eyes to see the Peace Bridge and were saying it's fairly close to their experience. :D
I think the third is plaza de España in Madrid, Spain. I was actually wondering why it looked familiar.
My city is car dependent and often no effort goes into making it more walkable.
Would love a version that renders a mix of cars and trucks onto any roads, to show up how crap the experience would actually be out front of road facing building.
This is one of the few instances of generative AI for images that I actually like.
And the real killer app of contact lens AR will be ... this in reverse.
It feels Snapchat already has beauty filters as standard. Or you can also spot the beauty filters glitching out all the girls dancing on Tiktok/IG, e.g. their eyelashes would be somewhere else for a split second...
Hah, like connected cars talking to each other, the AR goggles/lenses will talk to each other so each person can broadcast a unified beautifed version of their face to others.
Maybe the Grok AR goggles will have Grok features...
That's black mirror level content.
One of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books features this as a whole chapter, the first of the Cugel books I believe. I don’t know of an earlier appearance of the concept.
Very “futurological congress” thought
Can we re-engineer LSD so the only effect we can get is how colors look 12 hours afterwards?
This would be great for real estate ads. Make the rooms look their actual size and dark and dirty. Lived-in, if you will.
A new CA law is addressing this somewhat:
> Under Assembly Bill 723, real estate agents and brokers who display photos of a home that have been digitally altered with editing software or artificial intelligence must include a “reasonably conspicuous” statement “disclosing that the image has been altered.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/california-la...
This reminds me of “emo” music. All the emotions except happiness. These renders are depressing.
Huh. I kinda like 'em. I've spent a good deal of time loitering in areas like this, of my own volition. Unsurprisingly, I tend to like emo music too. Maybe I'm a salmon, happiest fighting against the current.
This would be useful if it actually did some reasoning about the effects of aging on different materials, consequences of certain design decisions, etc. It's not doing that at all, and so it's just misleading instead. If you actually built these things and took pictures years later it wouldn't look like this. Some things would look better and some would look worse. So you can't use this to make decisions about what to build.
This was exhausting to read. Don’t you ever have fun?
No, it would look like this, just not exactly like this. Say, the fancy bridge example has some rust runoff but no obvious metal for it to come from. Other than that, the guess is quite believable, and certainly much more so than the render.
You do to fun what this website does to pictures.
It would be great if I can run this as a browser extension that works on Zillow and Redfin.
I spent years doing that post processing on Photoshop, trying to increase realism on my archviz scenes, clients never went for it. They use to prefer the fake, perfect 3D look. Nice project, well done.
One takeaway for me is how important landscaping is to making a space beautiful.
I do something similar with my Curation Engine outputs. Interesting to get photorealistic outputs on a GPU via language pathing instead of photons.
oh wow, the results are very Ukrainian... at least while we don't talk about places where Russia struck
I am very curious if this app is making money or are users just using the two generators and then leaving? If so I am very impressed with your wrapper around the image gen models.
I can imagine the reverse model could be very profitable with every real estate agent using it to make dreary photos look great.
Reverse model aimed at estate agents already posted in this thread by someone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829566
this landing page is a lead gen tool for the architect at the bottom
Ahh, I see that. Thanks
Recovering architect here. This made my night. Bravo, no notes!
(Currently getting an error when I try it)
One think I wish is if I could get it halfway. I don't need it to look dreary, I just want it to look real instead of overly optimistic.
Deserves an award.
This does more than remove shine. It makes every building look like it's in the UK!
I keep getting "Edge Function returned a non-2xx status code." Run out of tokens?
Same here. Disappointing. I wanted to run it on that picture of a church that looks like a chicken.
I wanted to run it on renders from the owner's website
This would be really useful if it came in a real estate photo version. Turn the photos that agents post back into the photos they took.
I like how it adds random electrical boxes everywhere.
And water meters too. And the rust on all the welds is chefs kiss.
And the trash cans
Excellent idea. So many modern buildings age so poorly. Maybe this will give some starchitecs a bit of a pause...
I am patiently waiting for LARP AR glasses that have all kinds of these filters.
Nano Banana is indeed a powerful model :)
Aha, make it drab, soviet, and raining filter. Peak hipster, I love it.
The rust stains in realistic locations on the bridge is very well done.
please take this down before architects find this forum
Honestly this looks nicer than the previous image, it feels more real
Did someone try to connect output to the input for several iterations, to make it progressively more Poland?
They still look great on a rainy November day. A nice cozy, quiet vibe.
Could use this on all real estate and apartment listings
I did a similar thing for anti image censorship, back in 2022-2023 with ML, basically all available APIs were returning image classifications that would tell you if something was adult, used in order to not display the image
I wanted something to tell me what was adult about the image, by feature set, in order to display just those images
Worked pretty well, never released/launched it - just needed more capital for the marketing. But then that market cratered - were were going to use the classification attributes on NFTs, since the marketplaces let collectors sort by attributes, so it would have been easy to "find out the market value of particular physical features", and we could have empirical data on what physical attributes people value, instead of just anecdotes
kind of good that we didn't deal with the NFT market in general, project would still work though, just less revenue from sales possible
Wow. Umm, the "free generations" limit is running on a client-based honour system...
Used it on the line. That got dark fast..
Looks beautiful tbh. I prefer the greyness
Show me reality: vibe coded AI blows up on HN and says "429" (probably... it said non 200 status code, and no F12 to check)
Render has 2 meanings here. Clever.
I did exactly the opposite with https://prontopic.com
thanks for helping people to lie
Geez, I'm reminded of a business student's idea of "Uber for photoshoppers" (this is ~20 years ago): you upload your picture, you say what you want changed, and I guess you pick which photoshopper's work looks convincing from a marketplace of them...
He had a website, and the sample pic is a girl lying on her back, and in the "after" picture she's wearing a bigger cup-size..
Works great. I hate it.
Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It's just the "prettification" of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.
This is just a Nano Banana wrapper I imagine.
It's because of Autodesk BIM no?
British filter.
Okay now do it on character models so that they don't look like plastic dolls.
Ha this is great - I always thought this would be a brilliant application for AI.
does this work on people
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The absolutely 100% leafless trees stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit. They look less like "end of fall/beginning of winter" and more like "dead".
Also, the model goes a bit overboard with the electrical appliances. I had to laugh at the bridge one.
Apart from that, it's a great idea!
That's like every new building I've seen around here. Developers plant trees directly into compacted soil and then they grow half a foot within 10 years and then die in a hot summer. The building owner then just leaves them in because it's easier than taking them out.
I have to say both the leafless trees and electrical box spawning is very on point for what you would find in eg Belgium. Check this full blown ugly building/container that spawned in the beautiful Liege Guillemins station https://maps.app.goo.gl/T1J7WwCCYDvBgJEc7
If they are young trees along the side of the road, generally they are broken off at the stump by a car before they can grow, and then you're left with an empty tree well.
Yeah, both are good additions - in moderation. I think the model just went into extremes with them.
Maybe.. or maybe you underestimate the insanities you can find in real life too (the model isnt that creative unfortunately). See here, 5 different no-parking signs for the same 2 spots: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S74r7eawH2vL24CX7
Good point...
For those like me not up on the hip memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-world-if
It's funny how know your meme has to sanitize the 4chan out of memes.
The 'how society would look without x' has been a racist trope on 4chan since way before the cited examples.
That doesn't pass the sniff test, many other pages on knowyourmeme correctly attribute memes to 4chan.
If you were right that would be easily verifiable. Do you have an example of a post dated before 2018? Maybe you're getting tricked by the fact that 2018 was 8 years ago?
I think you are taking their point literally, its not that knowyourmeme is not crediting 4chan, its that the racism/edge is polished off presenting a more mainstream version of many memes.
Link to a message on one of the many historical archives of 4chan?
What’s going on with that (robot?) dog leash?
It's funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for "previz-to-render upscaling" workflows are actually incredibly useful.
I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):
https://getartcraft.com/news/world-models-for-film
The best model I've found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It's absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.
Here are some older experiments:
https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U
https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...
https://imgur.com/aOliGY4
I just wish it didn't require invoking such heavy-weight, slow, and expensive models to do this. I'm sure open models will do this work soon, though.
This is just Moscow
OK this is too fun. I did Reverse Anti-Render on a dreary scene in Moscow:
https://imgur.com/a/mqMEPUl
That almost looks like a scene from half-life 2
As someone in the UK, this was especially chilling.
Looks like Machinarium. I like it.
What a beautiful and nostalgic game that was. I’ve never had a game hit me like that since!
I played it with my wife on the couch over many winters evenings, and then ten years later played it with my daughter. Good times. Reminded me of playing Sierra games as a kid.
I really enjoyed "Samorost 3" by the same developers. Machinarium still takes the cake though.
Yeah, it's really a masterpiece. It's utterly fantastic.
You are a genius.
the world if autumn comes
Ugh, this looks way too real...
Does anyone have a mirror? I’m in authoritarian UK so the link is blocked
The link is blocked by imgur themselves, not the British government (authoritarian or otherwise), because the ICO was going to fine them for historic poor handling of children's data. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
What does that even entail? Why does a site like Imgur even need to know which users are children?
The rimigo proxy works for me: https://rimgo.vern.cc/a/nFQN5tx
If you're in the UK in January, you can probably just look outside and that's approximately it.
I wish the UK looked this good.