In its initial testing, Meta gave various artists access to its Make-A-Scene to see what they could do with it. Check out the video for results:

My initial concern was if Meta was using these artists to further its understanding of visual design. In the end, if such a technology becomes available and is capable of producing extremely original and creative pictures, wouldn’t creativity and creatives suffer financial loss? What do you think? 

These examples do, in fact, provide a fascinating view into current AI research, which is currently being done purely for pleasure but may have important ramifications in the future.

As explained by Meta:

“Make-A-Scene empowers people to create images using text prompts and freeform sketches. Prior image-generating AI systems typically used text descriptions as input, but the results could be difficult to predict. For example, the text input “a painting of a zebra riding a bike” might not reflect exactly what you imagined; the bicycle might be facing sideways, or the zebra could be too large or small.”

Make a Scene seeks to solve for this, by providing more controls to help guide your output – so it’s like Dall-E, but, in Meta’s view at least, a little better, with the capacity to use more prompts to guide the system.

“Make-A-Scene captures the scene layout to enable nuanced sketches as input. It can also generate its own layout with text-only prompts, if that’s what the creator chooses. The model focuses on learning key aspects of the imagery that are more likely to be important to the creator, like objects or animals.”