Lessons learned building an AI Art Generator
Like many here, I wanted to dip my toes into AI Art generator tech. I learned a few interesting things building out a simple flow for customers on my website for Tabletop RPG players. I figured I'd share what I learned here with the community.
- AI prompt crafting is still a big value add to many folks. This kind of tech is still quite early. Closed beta users loved the quality compared to other options like Midjourney (though all I’m doing is smashing together prompts on the backend).
- Combining the art generator with my other generators was surprisingly fun. Makes me want to tap tap tap.
- Writing cancelable long-polling in React is a PITA.
- Supabase surprised me with its limitations on data "egress". My dev instance is now over the limit due to 1000s of images generated in closed beta. OOPS.
- The business model is pay-as-you-go credits but people sometimes feel frustrated when they get back crap from the AI. I'm still trying to think up the best way to frame this without overcomplicating.
- Replicate.com is my service provider. Overall they have been pretty good and simple to use but still has maturing to do. You can only have 1 API key. They changed their image URLs and caused a brief outage with CORS issues which my users experienced. Image URLs are not guaranteed forever so you need to store them yourself for people.
- Because image URLs aren't guaranteed I am manually pulling images into Supabase storage but it's fragile. I need an elegant way to solve this and do reconciliation but my stack is super simple (next.js + supabase) so I'm hesitant to complicate with a job queue.
As always, I really enjoy launching with slightly high prices because:
- I can more easily lower them than raise them
- I can ramp up AI quality without concern
- I can shower people with credits when stuff breaks
- I can give people deals and sales galore
Thanks for reading! You can check out the announcement and the feature here: https://swordandsource.ca/the-oracle-is-live-today/
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Love to hear ppl doing more in the AI image gen/art space! Especially when most of the attention has been put on text gen.
Also, what models do you guys currently have on Oracle?
Mainly asking because we recently launched Evoke, which is faster and cheaper than Replicate. Want to see what models are most in demand so we can get them up on there.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask our discord, also feel free to share your AI tool in there as well.
Also cool to see another Canadian doing AI stuff!
Hi, we love this content! We are currently running a #newsletter specialized in #ArtificialInteligence named #GenAI. Can we feature this in our upcoming edition and give you credit and a link back to your profile? Reply using @goodbitsio and #GenAl if you’d like us to do so.