Oh wow, throwback!
Pretty remarkable how looking thru these janky old images actually did give me a sort of fuzzy nostalgic feeling. The tells/flaws are such a recognizable style.
I remember absolutely abusing the DALLE endpoints when we first got access after the waitlist ended. This was in my old job, where work looked a lot different from today. Also just a vastly different time in my life, funny how much time flies in four years.<p>(I do wish this had a before/after sort of comparison to demonstrate newer sota models handling the same prompts)
Images without prompts and statistics are... meaningless. We don't know if/how these adhere, whether they took a thousand hours or a thousandth of a second.<p>> “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”<p>> “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.<p>> “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.<p>> “Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk,” said the Cat.<p>(Lewis Carroll)
No modern or over-time comparisons?<p>In some ways I prefer looking at these over the hyper-polished 2026 image generators tbh.
I've been running a benchmark for comparing generative image models with a strong emphasis on complex prompt adherence since the days of SDXL back in 2023.<p>It’s not really intended to be viewed chronologically but there is a progress metric that shows how models have improved their scores over time, which might help you compare earlier models with later models such as Ideogram4 or Moss-Image released in 2026.<p><a href="https://genai-showdown.specr.net" rel="nofollow">https://genai-showdown.specr.net</a>
Just ask any hyper-polished 2026 image generator for images in the style of August 2022 DALL-E 2.
Interesting post but I would love to see the process behind these images. I agree that the base capability has definitely increased but man, editing via prompts still remains a pain in the neck. I've found that it's difficult to be able to maintain stability in certain areas of an an image, while making changes in others, and avoiding artifacting across the images.<p>For a side project that's very art-asset heavy (and that I'm picky on), it takes me about an hour to get from an initial sketch up to a final image that I'm fairly happy with.
One technique which seems to work well for stuff with text/numbers is to ask that a JSON file be generated which contains the text, then edit that, then direct that the image be regeneratd with the updated JSON content.<p>I've been moderately curious if one could get such a description of the visual aspects of an image and make get consistency/repetition thus.
Oh my gosh. Makes me want to wake up my comfyUI setup on a RTX 2080 egpu which still works like a charm today even. I think the last time I touched it was about two years ago!<p>I always found the commercial stuff to be complete rubbish. I was astounded by how I could just spend a couple of hours using open models and open source software to produce better results.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]