My experience is that many Wikipedia place photos are quite ugly.

Not really it’s just a photo search engine (albeit a very small one)

great idea, actually, I just didn't think of it!

The headline (currently: “Trying to craft AI images that are worth displaying to end users”) is misleading and changed from the original. Author isn’t crafting any AI images; they’re using AI in tandem with manual work to help choose from a set of human-authored images.

The title on HN is incorrect/misleading, they are not generating AI images. They are hand curating a database of images by location and using an LLM to pick the pictures.

Speaking of "crafting", I think this is the perfect word to describe something more than "prompting".

It's extremely hard to block out a scene with just words, eg. "rotate hand 45 degrees, stand perpendicular to the column, shadows from light source 60 degrees above horizon, large box in front of chest, approximately 2 feet wide", etc.

Image-to-image, ControlNets, previz-to-final, etc. are the way to go, and I'm convinced this is the core interface for image and video creation. Text prompts will get you a coarse grained first approximation, which you then visually adjust to your exact needs with UI/UX-first models.

I built an intentional "crafting" engine so people could mold images like clay, with full intention:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

This is really early days though. I expect more tools and models to enable you to fully manipulate everything first-class, in 2d/3d. As if everything in an image were mutable.

As a film director, this is really exciting stuff.

I’m not sure it’s good idea to use AI for this purpose. When you’re talking about travel, you’re talking about a real place.

If you show something photorealistic and AI generated, what is shown is simply an illusion.

If you use a cartoon style maybe they can work because the user will immediately understand what is shown is not a photograph.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I realize dang has already tagged this (and I get it) but I don’t know who is actually benefiting from this. This is deceptive as it doesn’t represent a traveler’s actual/expected experience and just adds more slop to the pile. This is a case where you should pay actual photographers to take verified pictures of the places you are recommending people visit. Why would someone cheapen their brand like this?