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.
Cool. I never used Shopify. Didn't know you can use them to sell digital goods.
Do you have to integrate your own payment or do they handle it all for you? Do they collect the money from users and then send it to you once per month? Do they handle the tricky parts like dealing with VAT per country?
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.
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.
Thanks. So at least in theory it is possible to just set up a Shopify account and start selling digital goods. Good to know. But yes, I would probably try Stripe first.
Aren't your prints also like digital goods? I would expect you do not print them yourself but forward the image and order data to some whitelabel printing solution?
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.
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.
Interesting. I suppose if it takes minutes on a GPU, it might take ages to generate one on a mobile ML/NN chip? If it were able to be optimized to somewhat-less-than-ages, it would be a different business model w/o the need to manage credits and worry about abuse.
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.
Is the option to buy prints still there? Some services offer the possibility to buy prints on canvas tied on a wooden frame, possibly manually retouched, which look much like an actual picture you can hang in your living room
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.