"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I realize dang has already tagged this (and I get it) but I don’t know who is actually benefiting from this. This is deceptive as it doesn’t represent a traveler’s actual/expected experience and just adds more slop to the pile. This is a case where you should pay actual photographers to take verified pictures of the places you are recommending people visit. Why would someone cheapen their brand like this?

My experience is that many Wikipedia place photos are quite ugly.

I’m not sure it’s good idea to use AI for this purpose. When you’re talking about travel, you’re talking about a real place.

If you show something photorealistic and AI generated, what is shown is simply an illusion.

If you use a cartoon style maybe they can work because the user will immediately understand what is shown is not a photograph.

The title on HN is incorrect/misleading, they are not generating AI images. They are hand curating a database of images by location and using an LLM to pick the pictures.

The headline (currently: “Trying to craft AI images that are worth displaying to end users”) is misleading and changed from the original. Author isn’t crafting any AI images; they’re using AI in tandem with manual work to help choose from a set of human-authored images.

Speaking of "crafting", I think this is the perfect word to describe something more than "prompting".

It's extremely hard to block out a scene with just words, eg. "rotate hand 45 degrees, stand perpendicular to the column, shadows from light source 60 degrees above horizon, large box in front of chest, approximately 2 feet wide", etc.

Image-to-image, ControlNets, previz-to-final, etc. are the way to go, and I'm convinced this is the core interface for image and video creation. Text prompts will get you a coarse grained first approximation, which you then visually adjust to your exact needs with UI/UX-first models.

I built an intentional "crafting" engine so people could mold images like clay, with full intention:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

This is really early days though. I expect more tools and models to enable you to fully manipulate everything first-class, in 2d/3d. As if everything in an image were mutable.

As a film director, this is really exciting stuff.

Not really it’s just a photo search engine (albeit a very small one)

great idea, actually, I just didn't think of it!