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couldn't you just encode the images into text?


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Huh. Surely there's a better way to do that than post text in an image? Even just using pixels to encode the text.

If only there were some automated way to convert those images to text.

Many languages support creating image maps and then writing strings to text to it. Not that hard a process.

Would it be impossible to train their own text encoder on just the images they have? How many would one need?

Or just regular text. Or algorithms with PNG or binary blob seeds.

you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image.

Then you still need some way to handle text, and image to text is not reliable. Text simply has so much more distilled information. Images are nice for humans, but I can't imagine them as a storage format for programs.


Yes, you can make text become image

How do they manage to do that? Embed the text as an image?

Why would you say that? Every word can be easily encoded in a tiny picture.

You can go from an image to text and vice versa. People have done it.

Image extraction would be cool, but to me getting a readable block of text is more important.

Yes! I love the idea of being able to find images that actually include the text you want. Even better if the image itself is relavent.

Is it time to admit that simply storing everything as an image is the future?

Sure, it isn't technically as neat, but it gives far more flexibility. It happens already in memes (where text is usually part of a gif)

Text and text encoding dates back from the days when every byte of storage space mattered. Now lossless high resolution images are the norm, and wouldn't constrain what symbols could be included. If you want to make a word be slightly bendy for style, you can!

Accessibility, relayout, etc. can all be done with images too - you simply have a tool which extracts the text, transforms it however you please, and then puts it back as an image.


The text to image results look pretty awesome, but I feel like they all have a "neural net" quality to them. Whilst the style transer results come out more unique. Do you think it would become possible to combine the two techniques? Eg. Generate me a pic of this text, but in this images style?

My understanding is thta the image embedding is included, rather than converting to text.

If only there were some way to describe in a few lines of text what an image should contain?

Really impressive. If we are able to generate such detailed images, is there anything similar for text to music? I would I though that it would be simpler to achieve than text to image.

That's true. But, it's also completely possible to make a machine learning algorithms to separate "real text" (text meant for human to human communication) from text encoded images since they differ in significant ways. Granted, you could always try to make a text encoding format which resembles real text, but I'm fairly sure the machine learning algorithm could be constructed in such a way to make its usage unfeasible.

How do you generate the original image? And what about the subsequent images, do they come automatically from the text? I'd love to know more about the process.
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