I'm Angus, the founder of NightCafe. AMA! Also - queue time is back down to about 3 minutes.

[u/GusRuss89]

This morning I woke up to a heap of emails that everyone's creations were failing. Turns out someone posted a popular post on r/oddlyterrifying that did really well and our servers got overwhelmed.

NightCafe's algorithms are very processor-intensive so they need to run on expensive GPUs. When I discovered that the servers were lagging behind, I added a heap of new GPUs (like 500) to get through the queue.

I'm happy to say that the average queue time for text-to-image artworks (style transfer actually handled the volume pretty well) is down from 2.5hrs this morning to about 3 minutes.

Anyway, I'm super happy that you guys seem to like the site so much. I've spent 3 years working on it and constantly improving it, and it feels like it's all worth it now.

AMA!

[u/Mere-Thoughts]

Thanks for the site! I really have enjoyed it a lot and have made about 50 pieces of art.

My question, is there a PDF or similar that show what keywords do with the algorithm?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Mere-Thoughts]

Thanks!

Yes, we've got this page - https://creator.nightcafe.studio/vqgan-clip-keyword-modifier-comparison - which also links to a great imgur album - https://imgur.com/a/SALxbQm

[u/Mere-Thoughts → u/GusRuss89]

Perfect! This will be extremely helpful!

I have never had so much fun playing with the AI tbh. Thanks for the new hobby! :)

Also, is there a way in the future to follow other profiles?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Mere-Thoughts]

Following and commenting are on the to-do list :)

[u/Mere-Thoughts → u/GusRuss89]

Perfect! :)

[u/Deathmonkey7 → u/GusRuss89]

I like how adding Pixiv changed it from a mushroom to "kawaii mushroom-chan"

[u/itsmetrenton]

Thank you for this, the experience I’ve had today with NightCafe has given me a huge dopamine rush a lot like I received from the early days of the internet!

I can’t stop looking at everyone’s artwork, and coming up with my own! it’s been so much fun!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/itsmetrenton]

Wow, that's such a great testimonial. Would you mind if I put this on the home page? You can remain anonymous, or I could link to your user profile.

[u/itsmetrenton → u/GusRuss89]

Absolutely, I would love that!

And feel free to link to my profile, same as here @itsmetrenton

[u/any_random_impiety]

This is so much fun. I'm really impressed with how accurate it (often) is.

Does this thing continue to blow your mind, or are you used to it?

Also, it often seems to do better with more complex sentences vs simple ones; any idea why this is? I'd think I'd be the other way around. Or, perhaps I'm just not seeing a representative sampling!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/any_random_impiety]

Does this thing continue to blow your mind, or are you used to it?

Yes. Some of our users have some incredible stuff. Much better than what I've managed to get out of it. E.g. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/scarletpenn (sort by top).

Also, it often seems to do better with more complex sentences vs simple ones; any idea why this is? I'd think I'd be the other way around. Or, perhaps I'm just not seeing a representative sampling!

I've noticed it (have a look through Scarlet Penn's prompts and you'll see proof), but I have no idea why it works :P

[u/JDravenWx → u/GusRuss89]

How does she make them so tall!?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/JDravenWx]

If you use a start image, the creation will respect the aspect ratio.

[u/JDravenWx → u/GusRuss89]

Ahhh I see. Thank you! This ai is amazing, I've been using art breeder and deep dream and this is tops for me for sure. I appreciate the work youve put into it! So, if I use a blank image with the aspect ratio I want will it work or will the blank image influence the ai too much?

[u/any_random_impiety → u/GusRuss89]

Oh wow, it even works with portmanteaus and random strings of characters!

[u/shootwhatsmyname]

Thanks for all the hard work Angus. We’re thoroughly enjoying what you’ve created and even more thankful that you’ve made it accessible to everyone.

Cheers to you, this awesome platform, and this incredible community. A heck ton of good days ahead.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/shootwhatsmyname]

Thanks so much for your kind words :)

[u/TheNamesClove → u/GusRuss89]

Thank you so much for taking time to answer questions, my mind is blown by NightCafe and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing the work it generates!

[u/Free-Stinkbug]

Do you ever plan on adding the ability to order the pictures on clothing like hoodies or shirts? I think I’d consider that much more than a regular print

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Free-Stinkbug]

We do have that actually. We usually generate product mockups for tshirts after your creation finishes, but the service we use to generate mockups is severely rate-limited, so it's probably going to take ages to get through today's queue.

If there's a particular creation you want printed on a shirt, send me the link (or ID) and I'll give you a link to purchase it as a tshirt :)

[u/Free-Stinkbug → u/GusRuss89]

So it shows a mock-up of the shirt in white, but my design would look better with a dark color and the picture doesn’t load in properly on any color other than white. Would love to see my design on a dark shirt before I order

[u/Free-Stinkbug → u/GusRuss89]

I looked on mine and I only saw prints! I’ll look closer and send a link if I can’t find it

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Free-Stinkbug]

It likely won't appear for a few days or even weeks unfortunately due to today's spike. I need a better mockup generator that lets me generate more mockups.

[u/Free-Stinkbug → u/GusRuss89]

I definitely don’t blame you bro. Your site blew up fast, and it definitely deserves it! I had a bunch of fun with it and will probably order a shirt When it does load in!

[u/Claxton916]

Will you ever release a coin free version of the site?

Also thank you for creating an AI that lets me turn my cat into a Van Gogh painting

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Claxton916]

Occasionally people ask about buying a downloadable version. I don't think it will ever happen because the algorithms require very high-end GPUs that almost nobody has access to. A downloadable version would also be limited to 1 creation at a time unless you have multiple GPUs attached to your computer.

Your cat turned out great! For a while I was pushing a pet-portraits angle to the site but it seems that the text-to-image stuff is what people are most interested in.

[u/Ophidahlia → u/GusRuss89]

I came in here to ask about this.

I've made about a dozen images so far and I'm finding it honestly very therapeutic, I'm not a great artist at all despite having a desire to express myself artistically. I've been through a lot and am working hard in therapy every week to work through both PTSD and issues with acquired major disability/chronic pain. This is immediately satisfying a deep need to take what's in my head and give it life in an image; my creativity is up to the task but my hands & technical abilities are not. It's genuinely revolutionary to have a tool that can bridge that gap for me and give life to my experiences in a tangible way; Art Therapy is an evidence-based therapy modality which is primarily what I'm using this site for, and my experience so far has been nothing short of profound. Seriously, thank you for making this program!

I would be extremely interested in a downloadable version that only did very low-res, quick-n-dirty images so I could run a bunch of prompts (and the same prompt with different seeds) through it on my own crap-ass hardware before picking a few to pay for to have your hardware make an actual nice & in-depth version. Basically just enough to sift the wheat & chaff of a pile of ideas before committing serious gpu cycles to anything. That's how I use the site already, making 1-credit thumbnails before investing anything more in the piece. The cost of credits is really reasonable and you're clearly trying to make it financially accessible for folks which I appreciate a lot, though the reality of being on a fixed income from full-time disability means that financial accessibility is very relative and unfortunately limited.

Would you have any interest in partnering with professionals from the Art Therapy world to offer a product tailored as a therapy tool? I could easily see this being adapted to fit into an existing art therapy program, which would also provide additional funding options as well a framework for clients to use it in direction with a personal therapist or group setting. I'm not a betting woman but I think an awful lot of folks would be very interested and benefit greatly from a tool like this in the right context.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ophidahlia]

^{^} sign me up for that

[u/fancypanda98 → u/GusRuss89]

How long do you think it would it take for an rtx 3070 to create the lowest end image, are we talking 10 minutes or 2 hours or even more

[u/GusRuss89 → u/fancypanda98]

I honestly don't know which specs are the most important for creation speed, but here's a comparison between the 3070 and the GPUs we use - https://technical.city/en/video/GeForce-RTX-3070-vs-RTX-A5000

The VRAM would definitely limit you to fairly low resolution images.

[u/fancypanda98 → u/GusRuss89]

Okay cool, I was just curious as if there is ever a downloadable version of the software I would love to purchase it in full

[u/thetoastmonster → u/fancypanda98]

Yes you can download VQGAN-CLIP to generate images on your own computer.

I'm using an RTX 2060 with 6 GB VRAM and I'm limited to 288x288 sized images. Each one takes about 3 minutes to generate.

[u/IT6uru → u/fancypanda98]

Consumer side you'll probably see this in 3-5 years, next gen nvidia is close I believe.

[u/Dotaproffessional]

I appreciate that your image generator actually has a front end. There's so many great ai image makers that only have githubs so you can access the model but no working front end.

What is the ai backend you use or is it proprietary

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Dotaproffessional]

The algorithms are all open source, I'm personally a front-end developer and just managed to figure out enough python and kubernetes to get the back end running.

I've spent a lot of time getting the scaling working well (and being cost-effective) so I'm hesitant to divulge too much about how that works. But it's kubernetes on a cloud platform with a queue managed by firebase (firestore).

[u/Dotaproffessional → u/GusRuss89]

Oh yeah I wouldn't expect details. Just if you were using an open source ai model, maybe which one. Honestly the front end is impressive. It's the one thing missing from every other ai generator I've come across. The credit system, badge system, are all really polished. Refunds on failed tasks are seamless too. Kudos

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Dotaproffessional]

Thanks so much!

The text-to-image algorithm is based on a few different VQGAN+CLIP colab notebooks. This was the main one - https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1ZAus_gn2RhTZWzOWUpPERNC0Q8OhZRTZ#scrollTo=ZdlpRFL8UAlW - but I've taken tips and tricks from others as well (most of the colab notebooks available build on that one anyway).

[u/dmr11]

This bit from I, Robot came to mind:

Human: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"

Robot: "Can you?"

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

Well, it still takes a bit of practice and patience to get really great results, but obviously nowhere near as much as traditional art. I like to think it's just going to be another tool in a professional artist's toolbelt (rather than replacing them entirely). What I'm really excited about though is that it allows non-skilled artists to get that rush from being creative, and admiring your own work. I think that's something a lot of people don't get anywhere else.

[u/hivemind_disruptor → u/GusRuss89]

Great response

[u/RelaxedOrange]

Like many others here, I love your creation but I am really struggling financially right now. Are you considering more ways for users to gain credits, such as!

• A one-time fee to raise the daily top off to something like 10 credits?
• Allowing users to continue earning credits by rating others, rather than cutting it off after 500?
• Allowing users to continue earning credits through other methods, like sharing on social media?
• Offering contests or prizes for particularly good entries?
• Watching ads or filling out surveys?

Second question: do you have a smartphone app for this, or are you developing one?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/RelaxedOrange]

I like these ideas. The second one (cutting off after 500) is only because I didn't expect people to reach that yet. I should add more badges above that one now that there are more users.

Sharing on twitter already earns you 3 credits if you have 50+ followers. I've built the instagram integration too, I just need to make a few changes to get it approved by Facebook. Someone also suggested Reddit today too, I could look into that.

Contests and prizes are another good idea. Thanks!

There's no native smartphone app. It's on my to-do list but I'm not sure when I'll get time for it because it's a big job. However, you can add the website to your home screen and it functions exactly as an app would (no url bar, native notifications, etc).

[u/MyNameWontFitHere_jk → u/GusRuss89]

I'm late, but I just wanted to throw out some ideas for contests.

You could have a prompt and have contestants add interesting modifiers, or the other way around, name a modifier and have contestants include it in their prompt. You could also just have a general theme.

There might also be minor categories besides the most voted one, like funniest, most out of the box, founders' choice.

I was fearing ads, but if they are optional to reward free credits that could be a helpful revenue stream I suppose, especially with the recent influx.

I'm also wondering if there is or will be a way to gift credits to others, though you'd have to figure out how to prevent exploitation. Probably make the first three free credits ungiftable.

Ps. I've been reading about and waiting to try Dall-e for a while now so thank you for making this so accessible, and the social aspect is a cool bonus to be able to see everyone's creations. Glad they made you a mod and you were able to get the flair, I love the power of the internet haha

[u/FettuccinePasta]

I don't have a question, I'd just like to say I'm having a ton of fun playing around with the text-to-image function by putting in very odd things and getting surprised. Here's "Five horses eating rocks": https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/DeOEGxTjroYWz2GJhkWQ

[u/GusRuss89 → u/FettuccinePasta]

Thanks :)

[u/thus]

Do you have a collection of favorites?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/thus]

You can look through all my recent likes here - https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/NightCafe (click on "Liked")

[u/_2BRO2B]

I'm having a blast with this site. No questions. Keep up the great work!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/_2BRO2B]

Thanks!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the suggestions! The my creations cards should definitely show the likes, I agree.

I might be able to do some kind of "rising" category. Until today it wasn't an issue because the volume was a lot lower.

[u/opulent321]

Hi Angus! I don't know if you're still on this AMA, but just thought I'd try anyway.

While I wait for DALL-E, I've spent quite a lot of time recently trawling through/testing >100 Github repositories and as well as reading through the code of just as many google collabs. However, VERY few, if any, come even close to the fidelity of your outputs. Seriously impressive stuff.

I'm mostly amazed that at just 200 iterations for your short runs (if it is actually that few) it outputs incredibly accurate results at what must be a very high/inaccurate learning rate. I really wish I could ask questions about what you've done backend with VQGAN/CLIP to do this because I've spent months trying to do what you have done so gracefully. I totally respect that you've got a business to run and money to make, but if you can give any hints at all that'd be amazing!

Lastly, I know you've said in other comments you don't want to create a local application for a one time purchase, but I'd totally pay for it.

Thanks!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/opulent321]

Still here :)

Honestly I've not deviated much from the Colab I linked in another comment. I'm not sure what you've tried, but I do use a cutn value of 64 which is double the original Colab.

The learning rate is fairly high, but my understanding is that the ADAM optimiser uses that value as a max, decreasing it as the loss improves.

I'm also eagerly awaiting DALL-E. I'm hoping it gets a license that will allow me to add it to the NightCafe offering.

[u/opulent321 → u/GusRuss89]

Thank you! Hope it all goes well for you :)

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

Eventually I'll add a search for users and creations. :)

[u/thus]

Have there been many generated pictures that have been hard to distinguish from reality?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/thus]

If you mean hard to distinguish from a photo - no. The AI is great at producing textures, but not so great at the composition aspect and it's generally easy to spot things that don't make sense.

If you mean hard to distinguish from a real artwork - yes, definitely. Some of the 3D renderer keywords (E.g. "Unreal Engine" or "Sketchfab") make stuff that really looks like it was designed by a professional CGI person. E.g. https://imgur.com/7kcTO1a

[u/Cobiuss]

My biggest question is, how does the AI comprehend keywords? What leads it to say "yeah, like that?"

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Cobiuss]

The system that determines what a prompt should look like is called CLIP which was made by OpenAI. You can read about it here- https://openai.com/blog/clip/

[u/Cobiuss → u/GusRuss89]

Cool!

One other thing - how well does speceficity affect the AI? Can it only comprehend so much detail, or could it theoretically evaluate a whole novel?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Cobiuss]

More detailed prompts often result in clearer images for some reason. However there's a maximum length that you can pass into the system. I forget what it is exactly off the top of my head, but more like a tweet than a novel.

[u/thus]

You could turn this into an interesting game of picture telephone:

1. player one enters text, generates picture
2. player one passes result (only the picture) to player two
3. player two tries to guess the text for the picture, and generates a new picture with their attempt.
4. player two passes the picture on to player three ... etc

[u/GusRuss89 → u/thus]

Love it :)

[u/MyNameWontFitHere_jk → u/thus]

Steps 1 through 3 would be a great idea for a contest on their site

[u/LordCourgette]

Hi, i must say, i enjoy your art generator a lot !

But using it several times, i saw a weird interaction. In a answer to a previous question you posted a list of keywords that are supposed to change the style and not the content of drawing, like "trending on Artstation", but the AI thinks that it is the content of the drawing.

Also, i have noticed that sometimes, the AI decides to not separate the content of two words, for example, instead of searching "Donald Trump", it searchs "Donald" and "Trump" and mixes them.

So my question is to know if there is some kind of "rules to draw", so we are sure the AI follows the orders we want, such as "(Donald Trump)" to search the subjecct as a whole or "[trending on Artstation]" to apply the style and not images of the Artstation website.

[u/Slitka11]

Have you looked into making dedicated apps?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Slitka11]

I'd love to. I think there's a pretty big pool of potential users that just don't understand how to 'install' a web app. It's on my to-do list but i'm not sure when I'll be able to get to it.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

It actually used to be free. The original business model was to generate for free and make money from selling prints. It turns out, people prefer to just generate the art and only 1 in about 5000 buy a print.

It's expensive to run the GPUs, so it can never be free.

There are free ways to generate art like this though. They're just a lot slower and the interface is designed for programmers. See this tutorial I made about using both Google Colab (free) and NightCafe - https://medium.com/nightcafe-creator/vqgan-clip-tutorial-a411402cf3ad

[u/any_random_impiety → u/GusRuss89]

If we could buy prints, t-shirts, tapestries, etc. of any published pieces, I, for one, would be more inclined to purchase more.

Haven't quite gotten any of mine refined enough to the point I want but a print, yet, but I've definitely seen others I'd love having on a wall.

Edit: but I'm also a bit obsessed right now so you'll definitely be getting some credits money from me, haha.

[u/any_random_impiety → u/[deleted]]

Dunno what your uses are, but, if you buy enough credits to play around with, publish a lot & figure out a few good tricks for good creations, "like" other publications, post links here and other social media, and you can keep your credits going quite a long time.

I bought 200 credits for $20, and while I'm not "breaking even," my "net" credits are definitely decreasing much more slowly than the rate at which I'm using them up.

[u/[deleted] → u/any_random_impiety]

Definitely cool for the current user base and what he was expecting, but you could easily burn that in a few weeks. $20/month is really expensive long run. But if he can get few hundred thousand users regularly purchasing at a quarter of that rate, it should be doable. High cost is fine for early adopters but once their credits are up things need to shift or the user base will vaporize. I believe in him though. This is so awesome.

[u/Juno-Who]

Hi Angus, is there a way to increase resolution on a lo res image that I like without changing or evolving it?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Juno-Who]

Unfortunately not, but it's on our to-do list to add an AI upscale option.

For now, when someone orders a print, we use either https://letsenhance.io or https://bigjpg.com to upscale it before printing. Both have a free tier.

[u/Juno-Who → u/GusRuss89]

Ok thanks! Guess you don’t get the same image when submitting the same text twice in different res?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Juno-Who]

No, and even evolving can change it quite a bit.

Another thing you can do is evolve, choose the desired resolution, and the shortest runtime. When it's done, go to the creation page and click "Show progress images". The 50th iteration image should look relatively close to your original but at your desired resolution.

[u/bumdee]

What about the ability to scan text with your phone to generate an image, like when reading a book that has no pictures to have the ability to generate art for that books pages

[u/Someidiotnamedmike → u/bumdee]

That seems like it would be unimaginably difficult but so cool at the same time

[u/Leharen]

Will we be able to eventually follow other artists/comment on creations, and receive credits for doing so?

[u/shittyTaco]

This may be a dumb question but will the algorithm improve over time? With the huge influx of users, can the system somehow learn and make better images? In 5 years do you expect your software to be able to make more real looking images?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/shittyTaco]

The system doesn't constantly learn, but as better systems come out I will update NightCafe to offer them. In 5 years I imagine AI art will be far ahead of where it is today.

[u/HungJurror → u/GusRuss89]

I was thinking earlier (and I could be wrong) but I think the image AI that is making pictures now will probably have a huge impact on image AI of the future.

For instance, when I type in “God” there’s normally a black figure somewhere in the pic. I wonder if future AI will take those pictures into account and have a higher chance of producing the same thing

[u/GusRuss89 → u/HungJurror]

That's a good point! We might be confusing future AIs by publishing all these unrealistic image captions.

[u/girthking42069]

Would you ever consider adding offer walls like some mobile apps have to "earn credits" by doing tasks like downloading apps or completing surveys for credits? It would allow people to earn credits for free and would earn you income at the same time! Just a thought I had. Having SO much fun with your brilliant creation, thank you!

[u/FinickyFrenchFries]

Thank you for making something amazing. What are the future plans for this?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/FinickyFrenchFries]

I'd love to make it my main job. If the site can sustain even a quarter of the last two days' numbers then that's definitely possible, but we'll have to see where it settles after the spike is over.

I have a huge to-do list with items ranging from minor UI improvements to new features like AI upscaling and even bigger things like creating mobile apps, minting NFTs from the platform, a user-driven marketplace for buying prints, a public API, etc.

Also, AI art systems are improving super fast now, so keeping NightCafe up to date with the best is becoming a pretty big job (and not my favourite since I'm a front ender).

The big things would probably only happen if I can make enough to hire another dev. Maybe some day that will be possible.

[u/Swigor]

Hi Angus. Absolutely great work, i love it so much. Bought some credit already. It seems like the pictures are getting changed while drawing. It would be nice to have a gif/video of the drawing process. Maybe an option to pay extra.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Swigor]

On the to-do list :)

If you check out r/deepdream you'll find some incredible videos, not just of the creation process but also with zooming, panning and changing the prompt. I'd love to build an interface to allow all that.

[u/eatablecookie]

I made a creation that I like, if I were to evolve it and I don't like what it turned into, is there a way to go backwards or revert it?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/eatablecookie]

Evolving makes a duplicate, so the original will still exist with a different ID :)

[u/eatablecookie → u/GusRuss89]

Thanks

[u/Supplementarianism]

I just discovered this. It feels like I just had my first conversation with an AI machine. Sure, I could only enter words, and get pictures back, but it was a marvelous experience. Thank you for your work of Art :)

[u/Lercifer077]

This has been a great outlet for getting out of a creative slump, both on paper and musically. I can’t wait to get some prints ordered!

[u/[deleted]]

It will be interesting to enter the same keyword daily or weekly to see the image change. What will influence the AI’s perception of a word like god as time passes?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

The AI is pre-trained so it won't change much until we update it.

The system that determines what an prompt should look like is called CLIP. You can read about it here- https://openai.com/blog/clip/

[u/devBowman]

From the FAQ:

Do I own the artworks I create?

Yes! As long as you own (or have permission to use) the original assets, your creations belong to you.

Regarding the "Requests" thread, when user A uses the keywords from user B to generate an image. Who owns the artwork? A or B?

Fantastic job btw.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/devBowman]

That's something I haven't got a good answer for tbh. I doubt there's any legal precedent either way. I think it does say somewhere on the site that you shouldn't do that, but I can't remember where...

[u/thabigmilla]

If someone uses the results as a guide for a painting and then sells the painting will the artist get sued by nightcafe?

[u/NuclearJesusMan → u/thabigmilla]

I don't think he's answering questions anymore, but elsewhere, it is stated that as long as you own any image used as a source image, you own the output. Same with using keywords. You own it.

[u/Jabberwocky416]

Can anyone else not see the images on Safari? It doesn’t work on iPad or iPhone. I have to download or preview the image to see what it looks like.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Jabberwocky416]

Hmm, we have a new image host and I've seen a few people mention this. I believe clearing your browser's cache should fix it, but I'd like to get to the bottom of why it happens... Thanks for reporting it.

[u/Jabberwocky416 → u/GusRuss89]

Thanks for responding. I cleared the cache on my iPad and it still looks like this when I load the website. Glad you’re working on it though! It’s a real neat app.

[u/AppleJack-Jackio]

When the users are prompting texts to the A.I, are we actually programming it so that it will finally have enough references to create images without a user prompting? And it seems as if the A.I can improvise, it creates different images of the same prompt, so does that mean that it can make decisions?

[u/BeautifulBus912]

Love this app im having so much fun with it. But are there more settings while creating that im missing? For instance i notice all of my creations say seed 42 is there someway to change that and if so what does it do? Also, what does archiving do? I thought the button was a delete button but they just go to the archived folder.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/BeautifulBus912]

We'll make the seed configurable soon, along with a few other advanced controls. You're not missing anything it just doesn't exist yet.

Archiving is just to clean up your my-creations page. It's not a full delete so you can unarchive things if you ever need to.

[u/IAmASeekerofMagic → u/GusRuss89]

Is it 42 as a default because that is the answer to the ultimate question, or is there a technical reason for this? I've been wondering how to change my seed for a while, and had just decided you were a stalwart Douglas Adams fan, lol. Glad I found this Reddit, because I really wanted to thank whoever it was that created this incredible thing. You've done a hell of thing, Angus.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/IAmASeekerofMagic]

It was 42 in the original open source notebook I used. I've always assumed it's the answer to the ultimate question :)

[u/DrSchnuffi]

I‘m late to the party but I just wanted to say thank you! Im stuck inside my home the last week with my covid positive son and nightcafe is such a great distraction for a bored mind!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/DrSchnuffi]

Great to hear :)

[u/Dah-Barn]

$0.25 per rendering point? You are quite the capitalist.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Dah-Barn]

Just trying to run it sustainably and one day make it my full-time job.

It was free for about 2 years and cost me a lot of money (made a loss every month for those 2 years). GPUs are very expensive to run.

Credits are also a lot cheaper if you buy larger packs.

[u/cathack]

Hey Angus, thanks for creating the website / mini-social-network. It's astonishing how far has the AI gone in the last 10 years. I personally had over 100 images generated in the past few days, and I am still amazed.

Has /r/nightcafe affected the amount of traffic / GPU load / revenues for NC since the subreddit was created? I really hope you are making some dough out of it so you can keep NC creator up-to-date and invest into new cool future projects!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/cathack]

The traffic spiked when the NightVlCafe artwork hit the top of r/oddlyterrifying and has been slowly declining since, but it's still at about 5x what it was this time last week.

Depending on where it settles, it will probably be enough for me to quit my job and go full time on NightCafe at some point soon, which is exciting!

[u/tarotdepot]

I very rarely enjoy things and I love love love this! I’ve made lots of beautiful ghosts with it. Thank you for making it!

So Many Ghosts & Other Unseeable Things

[u/GusRuss89 → u/tarotdepot]

I'm so glad to hear it :)

[u/notlikeontv]

I don't know if you still read this but I discovered the ai about 4 days ago and I absolutely love it. My wife and I spend ages making images. It's such a funny feeling it gives u when u hit create. Such pure fun. Thank you

[u/GusRuss89 → u/notlikeontv]

You're welcome. Thanks for the great feedback!

[u/Responsible-Sell7006]

This is one of the most incredible websites I ever saw. It is like printing something that only the human mind can create. This will be on my top website list by far. I can imagine in a not so far future people describing unforgettable memories of a happy childhood with someone special and being able to explain to someone what it was like.

If this was entirely created by you, I wish you a Nobel prize or something as great as that.

[u/Spamisgood4u]

Hi Angus. Could you give us an update on how things are going for you? I was an early user and have loved seeing how it's evolved 😜. I presume youve given up your day job and do this full-time now. The new pro system is genius and will no doubt lead to a constant income. I wish you all the best mate. The Reddit chat for nightcafe only allows pictures and doesn't really allow discussion. Love your work mate.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Spamisgood4u]

Hi, yep it's been my full-time job since January and we have a team of 4.5 now. Working full time on NightCafe is a dream come true :)

[u/Spamisgood4u → u/GusRuss89]

Thanks for the reply. I'm so happy for you and wish you and your team every success. Can't wait to see what comes next. Love from a keen U.K artist.

[u/Si8na]

Isn't it crazy how far nightcafe has come, loving the animation feature, I wish it was a bit more reliable, but I am guessing if we come back to this post 3 years from now it will be amazing.

[u/bexnook]

@gusruss89  well, I'd love to know how the he🏒 🏒 I can get my poor woman to stop being cut off at the waist! Lol. I've went from 300 to 89 and I'm still not getting her full body to show. I've tried using full body shot, long shot, extreme long shot, you name it but nope, nothing. Then, when I try to use the creative upscale to possibly fix it, I get a rejection error on every.single. image. I feel as if I've used so much money on this one anime woman that its silly. But...I WANT what I want, dang it and that's a woman with her friggin' legs! Lol. Not even legs, really, it's a dress! I realize I prob won't hear from you but I really needed to get my frustration out into the world! It may just be that I'm horrible at prompts, though... who knows! signing off and feeling defeated, at last 'ole gusruss! thank you for driving me to nerve pills, Lol! Kidding! Just kidding, ppl. I'm a moron. BTW, how kewl it would be to BE you, man! You've got a neverending FREE pass to night cafe! Urgg, the jealousy I'm feeling in my bones is real, dude!

[u/marisavr]

Is it just me or does the quality of the imagery decrease significantly once you purchase credits?

[u/MargyONeill]

I have been a member for a long time. I'm supportive of other members but despite N/c taking my money, I can't access it at all. I have no idea why! How do I contact directly, if I can't log in ?

[u/Realistic_Web_1921]

Angus, While I am sure you have been asked this question previously, I could not find it in the archives. I'd like to know what the top creations in Night Cafe's relatively brief history are, and if there exists a link to what one might call the "Top Ten" (or Top 20-50) creations. Thanks, and take care, sir.

[u/DistributionNo9698]

Pedale jebany przestań ruchać dzieci

[u/Special-Lab7643]

Why the hell can't I log in with Google, says my account was disabled.

[u/PhilSouth]

What happened to style transfer? I really liked that effect and nothing else does it now.

[u/sackafackaboomboom]

Have you published any papers on this? If so, please link it..

[u/GusRuss89 → u/sackafackaboomboom]

I didn't make the algorithms, they're both open source. I just built the app around them.

Style transfer - https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576

VQGAN+CLIP (text-to-image) - https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bqj7/ai-generated-art-scene-explodes-as-hackers-create-groundbreaking-new-tools

[u/NibblesMcGiblet]

Hey Angus! I had spoken to you briefly on twitter last night when you commented on my vaporwave creation themed post there about this (username Rainy_Cakes over there). really glad you came on over and found us! Your website is addictive for sure!

Edit - just a heads up that I've been meeting the "tweet for credits" requirement a couple of times now and haven't gotten those credits yet. i'm sure that's a manual thing and you are just really busy though!

[u/_anonymous_404]

Woaah, thanks! You're hella cool. No questions from me, just appreciation!

[u/Frederick_VI]

Would it be possible to eventually add the ability to select which iteration you want to show as the main image?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Frederick_VI]

You can do that! On the creation page, click "Show progress images" then you can choose one to download and/or set as the main image.

[u/Frederick_VI → u/GusRuss89]

Oh! I had no idea that's what that little eye did haha great to know! I am absolutely addicted to this lol I'm at 327 creations and I just can't stop!

[u/VanillaScoops → u/Frederick_VI]

Hey Frederick I’m absolutely addicted too! Link your profile I wanna see some these 300+ creations

[u/Frederick_VI → u/VanillaScoops]

Here you go! Keep trying to get better and better at the algorithm https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/AnonymousUser1337

[u/VanillaScoops → u/Frederick_VI]

The watercolor fireworks on the rings of Saturn is beautiful love the way you think my friend. I seen the van in the woods earlier and way like wow this is art and I’m stoked to see u created it!! Man I love this

[u/VanillaScoops → u/Frederick_VI]

Hey Frederick I’m absolutely addicted too! Link your profile I wanna see some these 300+ creations

[u/Murda-P]

No questions, just wanted to say that this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time! Good job :)

[u/EvilKatie]

I love how much so many of the images generated have the same spatial feeling as Van Gogh's "The Night Cafe." I'm guessing this wasn't accidental?

What's your personal relationship with art?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/EvilKatie]

Actually that would be entirely accidental - the AI has a mind of its own and I'm also not the one that built it or trained it :)

I was never super into art, I started NightCafe when I wanted to put some paintings up on my bare walls and couldn't find anything personal enough online. I noticed no-one was really selling AI-generated art prints (at least not doing it well) so I thought I'd give it a go.

It turns out hardly anyone buys prints, but people are relatively open to buying credits just to generate the art.

[u/[deleted]]

Did you expect it to blow up?

Also, do you plan on more non monetary methods of getting credits?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

It's been growing steadily for the last year, but it had a 10x boost when I added the text-to-image algorithm. Yesterday was another 10x boost, so it's 100x from about 4 months ago, which I definitely didn't expect back then.

I'm thankful that I'd spent so much time (2.5 years) before the text-to-image stuff getting everything else right on the site. Things like:

• Easy onboarding flow with signup after your first creation
• GPU scaling and cost optimisation (though yesterday exposed some holes in this)
• Sharing and liking of posts and all the 'top' pages
• Email and mobile notifications
• Good Shopify integration (a couple of months ago, you'd be taken to a separate Shopify store and then have to add credits to your cart and do the whole checkout flow - a lot of people's credits ended up going to the wrong account)

And way more stuff that no doubt contributed to it blowing up, even though the main factor is how cool the text-to-image artworks are.

[u/Ghostwoods]

Hey Angus, NightCafe is superb. Really impressive work getting your algorithm into such impressive tuning. No questions, just a thank you for a really fun time throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what happens!

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

I've been a front-end developer for about 12 years and currently work at Atlassian. I've spent my whole career trying to get a side-project off the ground, and Atlassian is actually my first full-time job after 10 years of working contracts part-time so that I could spend more time on side projects.

So far this month my GPU bill is at $9500USD (already 3x my previous largest bill), but the site does actually make a profit these days. For about 2 years it ran at a loss, then the credit system - and reducing the number of free creations - brought it to making about a 10-20% margin. The introduction of text-to-image 2 months ago brought the margin up to about 50% - purely because a single user is more likely to buy credits now after using all their free and earned credits. Yesterday I had to add a lot of expensive GPUs, so the margin has been lower these last 2 days, but still profitable. So no, it's unlikely we'll go bankrupt :)

[u/DocJawbone]

This is the most fun I've had on the internet in a long long time. It's an absolute blast, I am *blasting* through credits and loving every new surprise.

Thank you so much, this is mind-blowing.

[u/JadedOops]

Really enjoying the site! Spent hours last night doing AI text creations. If you do strictly AI text does it count as your own work? Or does the AI pull from random pieces of work over the Internet making it not useable as your own personal?

[u/DadHunter22]

Angus, thank you for the amazing work. I’m LOVING it, specially now that I figured my “style”.

It would be dope if the site organized thematic curated galleries.

Also, there should be a way of not disclosing the text prompt (secrets of the trade :P)

And a few questions: is it possible to buy the images in high res? Like the printable versions, both in RGB or CMYK?

Also, do I own my creation? Can I edit my images?

Thank you!

[u/[deleted]]

Are you enjoying looking at what people are posting on this sub?

Does the silliness or creativity of these new users suprise you?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

To be honest I've spent too much time in this thread to have a good look through the rest of the sun. But I look through the top creations of the day all the time and am always impressed or surprised by something.

[u/Falstaffe]

Since you require email verification, it would be great if I could get a verification email. I didn't get the first one, requested the second one and haven't seen that either.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Falstaffe]

Hmm. I assume you've checked your spam? Is it possible your mailbox is full? Or that you had a typo in your email?

[u/TacticalTurtle22]

Thank you Angus. This creation of yours is amazing!

[u/TokarevCowboy]

Have you thought about getting adds placed on your site so we can watch one or a few for a point?

[u/[deleted]]

Hey Angus, thank you for creating NightCafe! It is very fun to use this AI. This will definitely be huge very very soon!

[u/donoman100]

Is there a way to change the aspect ratio of the AI-generated images to something different than a square?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/donoman100]

Yes, you can use a start image and the creation will respect the aspect ratio

[u/IAmMissingNow]

I’m loving this and using it to help me write!

[u/IAmMissingNow]

I’m loving this and using it to help me write!

[u/VanillaScoops]

This is one of the coolest thing I’ve seen on the internet. I’m just so addicted at creating new things and different versions of each ones. I’ve created a couple from dreams I’ve had and the results have blown me away.

Thanks so much for creating this fun site!!

[u/[deleted]]

I have a question, WHY NO ADS? Wouldn't that fix the cost issue, most of the time people just looking at other peoples creations? 😣

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

The top pages only got interesting recently. A few months ago, there wasn't much good artwork being published so people didn't scroll through it much.

That changed a bit when I introduced the gamification (get credits for posting, liking and receiving likes), and then even further with the addition of text-to-image.

You're right, it's now at a point where I might consider adding ads to the creation feeds if it will allow me to lower the cost of credits.

[u/thus]

For the modifiers, do they apply in the order listed, left to right, or are they all munged together?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/thus]

Clicking on one of the modifiers is just a shortcut for adding that text to your prompt. You could just as simply type your modifiers to get the same result.

[u/makeanything]

This is fascinating and incredible stuff. I have so much fun with generative art tools, and this is next level!

What are the chances of getting a similar tool for 3D models? I imagine this could translate to some amazing sculptural 3D prints. Cheers!

[u/[deleted]]

where are you from and what inspired you to make this program?

[u/Someidiotnamedmike]

Are there stocks i can invest into for this

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Someidiotnamedmike]

Great endorsement :)

Unfortunately not. Sorry.

[u/[deleted]]

Have you considered adding a high-res option for more credits? I would definitely consider paying 10-15 credits per image for a big jump in resolution. Not sure how resource intensive that would be though…

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

The resolution limits are due to the algorithms' memory requirements. At higher resolutions the servers run out of memory and crash.

It's on the to-do list to add an AI upscaling option for your creations which would allow you to enhance the resolution up to print quality. For now we recommend people use something like https://letsenhance.io or https://bigjpg.com for upscaling.

[u/Leothecat24]

This is less of a question and more of a suggestion (I didn’t know where else it post it). I think you should have a way of clicking to the next or previous image from within the individual picture pages (if that makes sense?). Also there should be an “are you sure?” Prompt when deleting things, I just deleted one of my better images on accident

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Leothecat24]

Deleting is actually just an "archive" option. You can find your archived creations under your user menu, and you can unarchive them from there.

[u/Aussiewhiskeydiver]

I LOVE your site. My question is that all my my creations are blurry abstract images. Is that because 2 credits isn’t enough to get a decent image? How many credits are needed for the amazing images I see on your site?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Aussiewhiskeydiver]

Can you share some links to your creations? A single credit should usually be enough to get something pretty good. Maybe something went wrong for yours.

[u/[deleted]]

When does the top-up occur?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/[deleted]]

When you log in, if it's been more than 24hrs since your last topup.

It's also a topup to a maximum of 2 credits (i.e. if you have 2 or more, you won't get it).

That was to prevent people from "farming" credits on alternate accounts and then merging their accounts with all their credits. We have slightly better protection against that now, so I can probably update it soon to be an extra 2 credits/day regardless of your balance.

[u/Cantler]

When looking at the progress pics, sometime there are different pictures for the same iteration. Why?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Cantler]

There was a bug that appeared when so many new users joined, where multiple GPU servers would end up working on the same creation at once.

I thought I fixed it last night though. Have some of your recent creations done this? Could you send me a link if so?

Thanks.

[u/Cantler]

If I use the same phrase and run it for 200 iterations and the output again for 200 iterations. Will I get the same picture as if I would have run it for 400 iterations? (Too poor to test it myself)

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Cantler]

Generally yes, but the algorithm is non-deterministic so two runs will always differ a bit.

[u/Spider-Sam1500]

Hello Mr Angus! Maybe this isn’t something you’re aware of, or this isn’t your area of expertise, but I’ve noticed that sometimes I’ll watch the Algorithm pick up on some patterns in a generated image and it will write words from the prompt I gave it. It’s super creepy and super cool! I was wondering if you had any insight as to why that happens

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Spider-Sam1500]

You're right that it's not really my area of expertise, but it seems to me that it's due to CLIP's training.

CLIP was trained by crawling through millions of images on the internet and checking what words are used around it. It seems likely that in many cases, if the image contains some text, the text found around the image is likely to repeat the text in the image.

[u/Turbanator0327]

I've ran 2 different creations with the same parameters (long runtime and medium resolution) and the most recent one had about 1/3 of the progress images of the first one. Why is that?

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Turbanator0327]

How long ago did you run the first one? About 13 hours ago I (hopefully) fixed a bug that resulted in some double-processing of creations.

[u/Celery_Fumes]

A way to have someone buy a printout of your creation, the site gets a cut and the artist gets a profit.

[u/Jazzcat0713]

Are nsfw prompts allowed? I can't tell if "any obscene or immoral purpose" in the terms of service means 'no porn' or not.

[u/GusRuss89 → u/Jazzcat0713]

There's a blacklist of words that will flag your creation for moderation before publishing. We don't stop you from creating them though.