Kapwing Blog

The author gives three examples of queries that they liked:

surreal ideas amidst a maelstrom of color in the style of art nouveau
the cat is sleeping under the promethean cloud
astronaut floating in pink outerspace

and three queries that are "random, trolling-type inputs":

rabbit eating human
mike tyson as a clown on a building
moms spaghetti

> These random inputs don't reflect an art-making intent

Yes they do. All six are pretty equally abstract, the author just doesn't like that the latter three reference pop culture.

> What's further surprising about this is that VQGAN+CLIP was never designed to generate truly explicit content, which begs the question of the intent of these users. Is is that the internet just craves NSFW content so much that they will type it anywhere?

It's the scientific method. It would be pretty neat if VQGAN+CLIP managed to spit out something that looked like porn. It can't, apparently, but you may as well try.

Obviously, the author can use their GPUs for whatever they want and they can blog about whatever they want, and if the internet didn't use the tool in a way they would have liked, it's fair for them to be disappointed. The upshot is that the post gives off "old man yells at cloud"[1] energy.

[1] https://www.kapwing.com/ai-video-generator/61237ae901d7a3003db5ab93

In case a future reader stumbles across this thread.. today I read someone else's description of exactly this. From https://www.kapwing.com/blog/unexpected-challenges-of-making-money/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16542603):

> 8. Customers are bad at telling you how much they would pay: Before we added the paywall, we asked a sample of users if they’d be willing to pay a fee to remove a watermark. The majority said they wouldn’t be. But when we actually added the paywall, several people who said they wouldn’t pay did. After we launched, some people have told us our product is cheap and plenty have said it’s too expensive. Takeaway: The easiest way to tell if people will pay is to make them an offer and see if they cash in.

One of the things that we did at Kapwing (https://www.kapwing.com) was manually edit videos using our own platform and sharing these videos with bloggers to try to convince them to use Kapwing. We could create a relevant video from an article that they wrote, and then share them the link to the project so that they could edit it directly with our tool.

Another random thing we did was try to make chalk posters on the streets of SF. We chalked our logo out in front of the 4th and King Caltrain station so that tech people would see it when coming out of the station. Unfortunately, that only worked for a day though, because the SF crews are very good at powerwashing the sidewalks.

I'm going to double down on this one. I poked around their site and read the blog post on their flyer campaign :

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/

And it ends with this quote :
"By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - Put up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - Taken 25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape"

Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to do that work.

They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the time of their employees.

I don't know why you're so resistant to the idea that harassment is commonplace for certain groups of people. Look at the stark difference when this founder replaced her picture with her male cofounder's on their support chat, for example [1].

Or again, just ask women or other marginalized people in your life what their experience is like online. Tons of ordinary non-famous people I know have stories just like these.

[1] https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-i-dont-use-my-real-photo/