The quality of the images is incredible! Great job

How much does the api cost to run? Do you have any safe guards in place in case bots try to build 1000 stories?

It’s not cheap, but my kids treasure coloring books for a long time and probably one like this until it falls apart.

To the author, I have this idea, for each page, put a sheet of transparent plastic or something like that. So the owner will color the plastic which can be erased. But it may increase the cost anc the color may not stick to the plastic.

The OP looks like it runs images through a Ghibli filter first

I’ve done this a bunch with my son. It’s not quite that simple because often times it’ll create images that have too much detail, sometimes it’ll actually include colors. But yeah, it’s not really all that complicated

Yeah I've been doing this with image-gen AIs pretty much since they started and it's a lot of fun. Even early Dall-E etc was awesome at doing stuff like "Create a colouring in sheet with some dinosaurs having a party" or generic prompts like that, and more recently giving photos to convert has been loads of fun for the kids.

> "that contain real people"

It seems the loophole on this site, is the examples (by my best guess) are AI.

I'm not the OP, but during the recent Studio Ghiblification craze there were a huge number of photos of families and kids passing along in facebook, twitter, and other social media. It was literally everywhere you looked. OpenAI obviously saw all of that. I don't think they actually care unless it's something bordering on illegal.

I tried to do exactly that once. I was offering between $20-$40 per image to make a few coloring pages as a mother's day gift for my wife. Not complex images either -- just basic coloring pages from photos of my wife and child, without backgrounds, for my kids to color in.

I reached out to multiple artists, and got one image back (from a good friend). I gave up on commissioning actual artists, and traced the images myself on a tablet. I imagine someone with the right knowledge of where to find artists and the willingness to wait on their schedule could have done it faster, but I'd have used this service if it had been around.

In fairness no artists are advertising a personal coloring book. The time, effort and cost would put this out of reach for 99.99 of people.

No artists are losing income because of this and no industry is being upended. This is a new product that's available because of a technology advanced.

Why the focus the artist? Everytime you order in food online you take away a tip from a host, server, bartender and take away a job from a person who answers a phone. Why focus on artists when so many have been affected by technology.

Usually when you commission something you're asking the artist to do art and create something unique with their own artistic flair... not just line-trace an existing photo.

The intention and cost of something like that is not at all comparable to what is being offered here.

My opinion isn’t fully formed but I currently think either all content producers have a claim (potentially workable as eg a discount), or only those who contribute should get access to AI’s.

And by all I mean the AI companies owe a huge debt to all humans who wrote or designed or drew anything. The vast majority of the benefit of this technology relies on volume: the billions of pages and lines of code we wrote for other humans, but have now been repurposed. This technology relies on bulk, which was mainly unprofessional or freely given content, by those who intended it for other humans. It was not 100% built only on the output of the few who charge for their exquisite words or designs, even if their output is higher quality.

Alternatively, let the AI companies go for it but everyone who uses any kind of AI should understand that they’re standing on the shoulders of the millions of developers and nonprofessional writers whose work has now been repurposed. Not the few artists and journalists. So those artists and journalists should both refuse to contribute to, and use, AI.

* I’ve written very little of this useful content, but would be happy to pay my share to those that have built what we have. I also turn off training on my content, but I pay a lot for models. Feel free to help me think through this with comments of your own.

If it does not cost that much, that is obviously because the artist is too cheap. If you find that to be a preferable equilibrium, that's a choice I guess, but I find it fairly ironic in light of the purported motivation.

I can get ChatGPT to do this for literally free. Even in the free tier, I can get a couple images per day.

This is a cool technological feat but what is the cost to humanity and its artists?

Some of these replies seem rather dismissive to the artists’ plight.

Those transactions never would have happened, and never will happen.

If this person’s service was to pay human artists $24 for a 23 page custom coloring book you’d be crying on here about them not paying human artists enough.

Almost nobody is paying $100 or more for a custom 5-page coloring book.

This service isn’t taking work from human artists.

Maybe, but then I have to negotiate with the artist, handle their refusal to draw art of my choosing, and wait for their (possibly unpredictable) schedule. AIs mostly avoid these problems.

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Didn’t the artist “steal” from artists that came before them by looking at and taking inspiration from their photos? Especially ones that would do such artistic genres as commercial coloring book art?

It doesn't look particularly Miyazaki style to me; it's just a generic cartoon style.

I think the Ghiblipocalypse has gotten people on edge.

This has zero resemblance to Miyazaki’s style. (And I say that as someone who isn’t a fan of this idea at all.)

Do you not think the AI output looks far more polished and print-ready? Canny edges have a lot of noise and don't look at all clean for coloring book purposes.

Presumably you aren’t the parent of a 5-7 year-old child. I might try this manually and save some money but my kids will absolutely cherish coloring themselves, their friends, and their parents. We’re on vacation now and this is gonna be big when we get back.

You can simply open up Chatgpt and generate the image yourself, faster than it’d take to transact with this third party. The cool thing is that they are printing a physical book for you.

Presumably, it’s more profitable to sell a physical book, which makes sense.