Tag Archives: Stable Diffusion

An AI photography app go viral in China as youngsters turn to AI

[ad_1]

AI-powered photography app “Miao Ya Camera” grew hugely popular in China over the last week as social media has become flooded with people posting AI-generated portrait photo from the app.

For only 9.9 yuan, Miao Ya users can upload 20 images of themselves and the receive dozens of portraits, such as dentification photos, traditional costume photos, Japanese-style campus-themed portraits, gown portraits generated by the app’s artificial intelligence.

The Miao Ya Camera currently offers over 30 different templates, ranging from urban formal wear to luxurious styles. The generated picture quality has reached a remarkably realistic level, making it challenging to distinguish AI-generated photos from real ones.

The portrait template of Miao Ya Camera. Image Credit: Miaoya Camera
The portrait template of Miao Ya Camera. Image Credit: Miaoya Camera

Many users who have shared their results on social media are amazed by the quality of the generated pictures and have even joked that traditional photo studios like HIMO（” might consider “running away” due to the fierce competition from this AI-generated content.

Due to its ability to create stunningly realistic photos, the app’s popularity skyrocketed after it officially released to the public on July 17th. The waiting time for generating pictures has been consistently increasing, leading to overwhelming demand on the servers, and at times, users have had to wait for more than ten hours to get their pictures processed.

The main appeal of the Miao Ya Camera to users lies not only in its simple “picture generation” process but also in its affordable pricing and good picture quality.

Compared to the high cost of traditional portrait studios, where a basic ID photo can cost around 200 yuan and artistic portraits can go well beyond 500 yuan, Miao Ya Camera offers a fixed price of just 9.9 yuan for all its services.

The AI app operator have close ties to Alibaba Group.

According to Qichacha, a Chinese corporate database, the entity behind Miao Ya Camera is Shanghai-based Weixu Network Technology, which is associated with Youku Tudou, a company that was already acquired by Alibaba Pictures Group Limited (Alibaba Pictures) after the merger of two video streaming platforms-Tudou and Youku. The legal representative of Weixu Network Technology is Zhang Long, who also serves as the Executive Director and General Manager of Youku Video (Xi’an) Media Technology Co., Ltd. On the other hand, Feng Yunle, the supervisor of Weixu Network Technology, holds a position as a supervisor at Alibaba Group.

Founder of Miao Ya Camera, Zhang Yueguang has a background in computer enginnering and product management for Chinese tech companies. After graduating from the undergraduate program in Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University in 2012, Zhang Yueguang joined Alibaba, where he was involved in the planning of the “Collect Five Blessings” project for Alipay during the Chinese New Year.

Then, he held various technical positions at different business units of Alibaba, where he was responsible for leading teams handling various businesses such as short videos, live streaming, as well as product and design teams at Youku, a subsidiary of Alibaba.

Unlike traditional photo studios such as HIMO, the AI photography app does not require photographers or makeup artists, significantly reducing labor costs. Image Credit: HIMO
Unlike traditional photo studios such as HIMO, the AI photography app does not require photographers or makeup artists, significantly reducing labor costs. Image Credit: HIMO

The latest fad of AI image generator started with Stability AI, the company that created a network model called stable diffusion. The model uses internet data to generate images from text.

On the technical front, AI image generation applications share many similarities, mostly relying on open-source AI painting models. For example, photo editing app Lensa AI relies on a copy of the stable diffusion model. Stable Diffusion uses a massive network of digital art scraped from the internet, from a database called LAION-5B, to train its artificial intelligence.

Similarly, Miao Ya Camera also uses a fine-tuned Diffusion model based on LoRA (a model fine-tuning method). Miaoya’s neural network is continuously learning how to portray faces more accurately.

After the app gained popularity, users quickly discovered that there were issues with Miao Ya Camera’s user agreement. According to this version of the user agreement, any content generated by users using AI on the platform could be perpetually utilized by Miao Ya Camera for various purposes, including commercial use, without any restrictions.

This raised significant privacy and intellectual property concerns as users were worried about the implications of granting such extensive rights to the platform. The controversy surrounding the user agreement brought the company under increased scrutiny and prompted discussions about the importance of transparent and fair data usage policies in AI-based applications.

Faced with the criticisms and doubts surrounding the user agreement, Miao Ya Camera issued an apology statement “We have received feedback from users regarding the Miao Ya user agreement, and we acknowledge that there were inaccuracies in the original content. We took immediate action to rectify the situation based on the actual circumstances of Miao Ya. We solemnly promise here that the photos you upload will only be used for generating digital avatars (or digital clones), and they will not be extracted or used for identification or any other purposes. Furthermore, once the digital avatar creation process is complete, the uploaded photos will be automatically deleted.”

[ad_2]

Why The Creative Economy Shouldn’t Fear Generative A.I.

[ad_1]

Artificial intelligence is all over the news. When ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new chatbot, was released last month it seemed, finally, to match the hype that generative A.I. has been promising for years—an easy-to-use machine intelligence for the general public.

Wild predictions soon followed: The death of search engines, the end of homework, the hollowing-out of creative professions.

And, for the first time, such predictions didn’t seem abstract. When an A.I. bot like ChatGPT can write a coherent story or essay in seconds, and visual applications like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, produce similarly comprehensible images you have to wonder if human creativity—slow and often uncertain—might be superfluous.

We’ve been here before.

In 1839 a French painter named Louis Daguerre revealed an invention to the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris that stunned their members—a process for taking and fixing a photographic image.

The enthusiasm for his invention, the daguerreotype, was immediate and off the charts. And so were predictions for how it might change the world.

After seeing his first daguerreotype, the artist Paul Delaroche exclaimed, “From today, painting is dead!” On one level, he was right. The kind of painting practiced by Delaroche, ultra-realistic and painstakingly rendered portraits, would largely be replaced by photographs. But other artists saw potential in the new technology and quickly incorporated it into their creative process.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec photographed his models so he could continue painting when they were no longer sitting in front of him. Edgar Degas described photographs as “images of magical instantaneity.” He reveled in the way a photograph could freeze time and show aspects of motion that had never been seen before.

Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro began dramatizing the color, light and movement of a scene, using thick oil pigments and broad brush strokes that made their canvases look like sculpture. Several decades later, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí returned to a more realist style in their paintings, but with images that a camera could never capture—the human dream-state.

In America, a young painter named Mathew Brady learned about Daguerre’s invention and decided to abandon painting altogether. Brady opened a photography studio in New York City in 1844 and quickly established himself as a master of this new art, taking portraits of the most famous public figures of his time.

But it was his decision in 1861 to abandon the studio and take his equipment to the Civil War battlefields that established Brady’s place in history as the founder of an entirely different profession, photojournalism.

For the first time, the public at home saw the reality of war—dead men sprawled across the road, trees shorn of their leaves and branches from a hail of bullets, amputations being performed in squalid field hospitals.

War had been recorded by painters for hundreds of years. But few ever saw a battle with their own eyes. If they did, a sketch and their memory of the event was all they had to guide them. Photography allowed incidental horrors to be documented. A soldier’s recurring nightmare could now become our own.

By the last years of the 19th century photographic techniques had advanced to the point where they were revealing truths about nature that artists had missed for thousands of years. How did a horse gallop? Renderings before Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies in 1878 show it one way. Ever since then we know it, and see it, differently.

In 1893 Thomas Edison announced the Kinetoscope, a machine for viewing moving images. Just two years later in Paris, the Lumière brothers invented a machine for projecting film, called the Cinématographe. Photography now had motion and a rapt audience.

In our time, photography’s reach has only grown—from full-length Hollywood movies on our phones to immersive virtual landscapes in our VR headsets.

When people saw photographic images for the first time, soon after photography’s invention, they often marveled at its strangeness—the extreme tonal range and foreshortening, the unusual perspectives, the arbitrary framing, the capturing of the immediate and the casual.

But then, with time and familiarity, they began to see the world the way a camera sees. It’s hard for us to imagine that mental shift. Everyone living today has always known photography. We can’t go back.

Perhaps this is our future too. What now feels shocking and portentous may be something we soon can’t imagine living without. Photography gave us new eyes. Who knows what creative tools A.I. will offer?

[ad_2]