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Return of rotating banners?

FlagellaStink

FlagellaStink

Established member
The Nexian e-zine
This might be sort of trivial, but since migrating to the new forum the Nexus banner at the top has remained the same. My memory might be wrong, but wouldn't the banner on the old forum change each time you'd load the website? Was there a reason this wasn't carried over?

I wasn't a member for long before the switch, so i might be making this up, but I personally really liked the shifting artworks.
 

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stuartroelke said:
The debate about whether AI is "art" focuses on semantics—our language is meaningless to the birds, bees, and trees.
But, does AI benefit the soul? Is it "progress," or will it become our ouroboros?

Fear of limitations may be humankind’s biggest limitation.
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A.I. is just another tool, just like a brush, a pencil, a book press machine, a hammer, canvas, etc.

With a hammer you can easily do some handy work around your house, you can also go on the street with it and swing it around other peoples head.


If you use this A.I. prompt for example, you will probably not get a good result with the default settings:

"generate a banner for the DMT-Nexus

It should have the text 'DMT-NEXUS' in the center and below that 'Learn, Share, Expand"


So lets try it!


Gemini 2.5 Flash:
1755254865026.png

Gemini 2.5 Pro:
1755255071373.png

ChatGPT 5:
1755254840375.png

Sora:
1755254973476.png

Flux Dev:
1755291011965.png


Stable Diffusion SD 3.5
1755255011201.png

Out of these, IMHO, only the one from Flux Dev has a chance of making the grade, even though it just completely skipped the slogan and needs the font to be fastly improved, and maybe also the Gemini 2.5 Pro version with some further tweaks and iterations might make it.


A solid written prompt, with the right LoRA's, the right settings, the right iterations, the right tweaks, the right scaling, the right model, the right VAE, the right text-to-image model, the right clip, the right control nets, the right..... etc. And imagine doing this over and over again to slowly iterate into something that approximately gets close enough to what you imagined. With enough experience you can reduce these times, which actually sounds like what you would get with any other artistic trade. ;)

Anyway, I think you get the gist of it: Getting something out of A.I. is easy, getting descent looking stuff out of A.I. is actually pretty amazingly hard to get completely right.

Also all great A.I. images I've seen have been heavily edited with image editor software afterwards as well. So yeah, generating an amazing A.I. image is not as easy as people think it is (or maybe some have just a pretty low artistic standard?).


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 

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Transform said:
Don't get me started on critiquing the finer points of that image, however pleasing to the eye it may appear at first glance. That would better be done in its own thread :p
(apols for lateness of reply, I've been at the beach 🏖️ )
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Totally agree, I just had my previous post almost fully made this morning, when I got distracted by helping someone else out. ><


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
I won’t quote your entire post, but I will say (personally): a decent tool does not involve gambling on results. I understand the allure of AI, but it’s not even remotely close to any “tool” I’ve ever used. It’s not like holding a paintbrush, staring at a blank canvas, standing in front of a table saw, &c. I personally would prefer seeing other people create—regardless of their experience or competence—instead of relying on a roulette wheel–esque approach that produces based on stereotypes. The fear of attempting creative work will only become worse if people continue to worry about the results of their own abilities.

This is simply my opinion as a seasoned artist. Technology is meant to create “heaven on earth,” and I see AI as yet another barrier to accepting more and preferencing less.

What makes art special isn’t quality; human participation is sacred. Current AI models don’t innovate, they imitate.
 
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Nydex said:
Rotating banners are back, thanks a lot @The Traveler <3
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Well this was pleasant to see after opening up the website!

It also started a pretty interesting discussion.. Of course, this isn't my domain (no pun intended), so I'm not at liberty to objectively say what should or shouldn't be done, but as it stands I think I have to agree with seemingly the majority on AI not being used, even just for aesthetic reasons (I personally love the sort of kitsch, stylized designs which I think give a lot of charm to the Nexus.)

AI-generated images can look good, sometimes scary good, but I'll also admit that anytime I see it being used, whether in advertisements, websites, storefronts - it lacks that charm, and furthermore makes whatever it is representing lack a certain charm. I have empathy for people who use AI due to a lack of resources for traditional artwork, but I would definitely say the DMT-Nexus is not such a place. There's already a lot of artwork from throughout the years that has been contributed here, so even if everyone was enthusiastically on board with the AI banners, I don't even think it would be necessary. If you ask me, I would take the tacky banner from two decades ago over a clean, perfect, AI-generated one solely for the coziness of it and the lasting culture of this community it represents.

At the end of the day though, I love that the different banners are back. 😄
 
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stuartroelke said:
I won’t quote your entire post, but I will say (personally): a decent tool does not involve gambling on results. I understand the allure of AI, but it’s not even remotely close to any “tool” I’ve ever used. It’s not like holding a paintbrush, staring at a blank canvas, standing in front of a table saw, &c. I personally would prefer seeing other people create—regardless of their experience or competence—instead of relying on a roulette wheel–esque approach that produces based on stereotypes. The fear of attempting creative work will only become worse if people continue to worry about the results of their own abilities.

This is simply my opinion as a seasoned artist. Technology is meant to create “heaven on earth,” and I see AI as yet another barrier to accepting more and preferencing less.

What makes art special isn’t quality; human participation is sacred. Current AI models don’t innovate, they imitate.
Click to expand...
If you are experienced with A.I., you can start with your own fixed starting seed and then there is no more ramdomnes. You can shut down any randomness, and then move towards your goal, no roulette at all. You can make your own LoRA to give more sights to the things you want, use RAG for past generation lookup etc. It's a highly complex field where most people only know about the easy and simplified tools instead of all the highly complex available tools within the A.I. arena.

Basically layman are only given some basic painters set, and that's it. Pro's even make there own chisel equivalent equipment for example, or even tools never seen before with amazing creativity, which takes a lot of time and effort to perfect.

A.I. as a tool for the layman is incredible easy, if needed, while for the expert it can be as complex as they like.

Also, A.I. is all machine learning and no real A.I. at all. And they are many 'ways' of doing this, like LLM, HTM, HDM, etc.


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
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It's not too different to using it for programming. You can "vibe code" a whole program that then (unless trivial) will be almost impossible to understand, maintain and riddled with poor choices. You can also use it as a tool to refactor, generate boilerplate, complete trivial sections and try out different ideas. A non-programmer can only do the former, a programmer also has the option of doing the latter (and should choose that option for anything serious IMO).

Similarly, you can one-shot an image from a prompt, or you can use it as a tool inside an image editor to complete certain parts, try out ideas (that you will do yourself afterwards) or do some systematic modifications. The layman only has the first option, while an artist can opt for the latter.

The risk for the professionals in both scenarios is to be too lazy and rely too much on it, sacrificing quality. But this is not a new risk, there have always been ways to be sloppy.

For laymen, it's a boon in both art and programming: it enables them to partially translate their ideas into forms that weren't possible for them before. The result won't be up to professional standards, but that's what professionals are for.
 
We now have a separate subforum where you can submit your self created/generated banner. There we can all vote if we should add it to our rotating banner list (or not).

Banner Submission & Voting Hub


Currently we do not know how many votes you need before passing the grade yet, we first have to learn about the real value of this over time. ;)



Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
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