NightCafe has a feed of artworks, and I too was getting a lot of NSFW or very distasteful prompts. I just used an npm package to detect 'naughty words' to auto-flag any distasteful ones as 'needs moderating', where I can then manually approve or reject them.
Yeah we do use a print on demand service, and the main reason we use Shopify at all is because the printer (Printful) has a good Shopify app that handles all the product syncing and fulfillment automatically.
Shopify lets you choose which payment options you'll let customers check out with. Examples are Stripe, PayPal, Shopify Payments, Google Pay, etc. A Shopify account is enough to get started, you won't need to dabble with any APIs.
However, if you're wanting to sell digital products, it may not be the best option for you. I've had to do a bit of extra work to get it to work for my situation.
I basically use the API to create a checkout specific to the user's order, then listen to the webhook to fulfill the credits. Gateways are Shopify and PayPal. Shopify payments are in my bank account in a couple of days.
Yeah it would, but aside from the cost there are other benefits to cloud computation. It can be done in the background (i.e. it's ok to close your tab) and you can run multiple at once.
Style transfer on NightCafe has a bulk-create mode that has been used in the past to create 500+ creations at once and they all finished in 10 mins.
Most of my regular users are artists who either use it for inspiration or use it to mix into their digital art. (NightCafe has been around for a while as a style transfer app).
It's rare that people buy prints. Most money comes from people buying credits.
It's not, but I can see why the "Graffiti sunset" would make you think that. It does seem to be two different images combined.
I won't claim to have a good knowledge of the inner workings, but basically CLIP will give a score for how well the image matches your prompt, and that's used as a loss function for the GAN.
On the Colab notebooks you can specify multiple prompts with different weights, in which case I assume it has multiple loss functions that it's trying to optimise for.
I'm more of a web app guy than a deep tech guy. Some of what I wrote can probably be corrected by someone with a better knowledge of the ML.
The Colab notebooks actually have a "target image" parameter. I haven't added it to NightCafe Creator yet, and haven't even experimented much with it on Colab, but it's definitely on my to-do list.
However, adding keywords like "watercolour painting", "van gogh painting" etc goes a long way to getting more precise results.
One big difference between style transfer and GAN art is that style transfer never changes the shape of things. E.g. you can't put in a woman's face and a cubist painting and get out a rearranged version of the face (as cubists do). It will have all the hallmarks of cubism, but it's still recognisable as the original photo.
With GAN art though, you can put that photo in as a start image, say "Cubist painting of a woman's face", and the GAN will actually rearrange the face like a cubist would.
Yep, NightCafe has struggled for years with the expense of running algorithms on GPUs. It started out free, but as soon as you start to get any kind of volume, costs balloon.
I almost gave up on NightCafe when I was trying to make money from selling prints to people. Then, one user generated 3,000 creations in a week, which cost him nothing and me $300. I decided to spend the weekend implementing a credit system to prevent abuse, and was surprised to find that more people were willing to pay for credits than I expected.
It's still not much and I've had to spend a lot of effort on reducing costs in various ways just to be able to break even. But I love working on this app and have high hopes that _one day_ it will become profitable enough for me to work on it full time.
You're right, adding modifier keywords like "impasto" or "cubist" have a big effect. There are also some powerful community-discovered keywords that have a huge impact on your results, like "Trending on Artstation" and "Unreal Engine".
My best tips for good results - use a phrase describing objects you'd commonly see in pictures and art, like "House on a hill" or "Futuristic city", add some modifiers, then start with the smallest resolution and runtime. Try a few variations of phrase and modifiers, and see what looks promising. Then pick the best one(s) and use the "Evolve" button to run them for longer and increase the resolution.
I've been running an AI Art Generator for a few years called NightCafe Creator and we do most of what you suggested here. We run on a managed Kubernetes provider called Coreweave Cloud, that provides nodes with good GPUs for a good price.
From experience I can tell you that fewer people will buy prints than you'd expect (that was my original business idea) BUT more people will pay just to create the art than you'd expect.
I just launched VQGAN+CLIP on NightCafe Creator on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081130) and a commenter directed me here. I'm impressed that the OP here has managed to get this done in such a short time (since VQGAN+CLIP is still quite new).
Since you left such thoughtful feedback here, I'd be keen to get your thoughts on my own version.
NightCafe has a feed of artworks, and I too was getting a lot of NSFW or very distasteful prompts. I just used an npm package to detect 'naughty words' to auto-flag any distasteful ones as 'needs moderating', where I can then manually approve or reject them.