from Hacker News

How to make a QR code with Stable Diffusion

by andrewon on 6/11/23, 9:02 PM with 73 comments

• by great_psy on 6/12/23, 2:43 AM

  THIS is what AI art should be like. Hard for humans, easy for computers, amazing visuals. And on top of that it functional as well.

  I feel like this is closer to how human artists create, artists have a set of constraints, and a lot of limitations, and forcing NN to output valid QR codes puts the same constraints on the process itself.

  Next step, include the QR reader in the training loop, and make it differentiable to increase the valid output from 1/4 to 100%

• by cafxx on 6/12/23, 3:52 AM

  The funny thing is that no-one AFAICT has realized that the same content can be encoded in different-looking QR codes. Beside the obvious (different error-correction levels), the content itself can be changed while maintaining its semantic meaning (e.g. "https://example.com/foo", "HTTPS://EXAMPLE.COM/foo", or "HtTpS://eXaMpLe.CoM/foo" are all semantically identical) and even the QR encoding itself can be tweaked (e.g. by changing the version and mask, see the demo on https://www.nayuki.io/page/qr-code-generator-library). Each combination would yield a different-looking QR code that would encode the same meaning, and it could therefore allow the diffusion models even greater freedom.

  I'm sure somebody will get to this soon.

• by dgreensp on 6/12/23, 4:17 AM

  As an engineer, the lack of consideration for the matter of how much one should corrupt a signal (which might be scanned under different conditions, such as different light levels and resolutions) is grating to me.

  It’s like scratching a design onto the bottom of an audio CD, playing it, and if it works on your CD player, shipping it. “Works for me”

• by mabbo on 6/12/23, 1:19 PM

  There's a way to make a QR code that provides a device with all the info it needs to sign onto a WiFi network.

  I'm wondering if I could make one of those, turn it into an interesting piece of art, then frame it and put it up in my living room. When guests ask for WiFi, I would just say "take a photo of that picture".

• by alphabet9000 on 6/12/23, 2:59 AM

  there was a cool one posted to /g/ earlier https://i.jollo.org/ePE3JHak.png

• by bredren on 6/12/23, 3:21 AM

  I’ve seen these and they are so novel! The problem is they don’t look like QR codes.

  A regular QR code, regardless of the fact they are an eyesore, people know what to do when they see one on a menu.

  Artistic ones don’t really look like QR. Def don’t want to have to add an arrow and “scan this!”

  I suspect this will come on more handy incorporating QR into larger murals that people might photograph anyway.

  iOS camera “sees” QR codes w a url preview. This surprise embedded mega might make for an interesting beat in the march to ubiquitous AR.

• by lazarohcm on 6/12/23, 4:38 AM

  My phone camera couldn't recognize any of the generated ones. Looks cool though

• by GaggiX on 6/12/23, 10:00 AM

  Unfortunately, they don't look as nice as the originals that were shown a few days ago, I wonder how they did that.

  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i4WR5ULH1ZZYl8Watf3EPw

  They talk about a custom QR codes ControlNet.

• by femto on 6/12/23, 4:17 AM

  What's the noise margin like?

  QR codes with logo's typically contain bit errors and rely on the forward error correction code to correct those errors. The logo comes at the cost of some noise margin.

  I'd guess that that the same applies here? All good if decoration is your priority, but if reliability is also a priority you have to be aware of the tradeoff.

• by cinntaile on 6/12/23, 8:56 AM

  I tried to post the original a few days ago but the submission was automatically killed.

  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i4WR5ULH1ZZYl8Watf3EPw

• by prepend on 6/12/23, 11:23 AM

  This is cool and can’t wait until there’s more accepted steganography where every image has some side channel of info encoded into the image in a way that as a viewer I don’t notice it, but my phone’s camera can discern.

• by auxermen on 6/12/23, 7:02 AM

  Not bad, but the ones from the custom trained NN are way nicer in my opinion, with most of these it's pretty clear they are QR codes (which is probably better for usability, but makes the art a bit worse).

• by yonatan8070 on 6/12/23, 4:32 AM

  At least with my scanner (Binary Eye on Android) these don't scan very well. Nonetheless they are very cool.

  I wonder if this would work better or worse with different types of 2D barcodes like Aztec, Data Matrix, or PDF-417

• by diego_moita on 6/12/23, 12:01 PM

  I don't like this. I hope it dies soon.

  It has very bad UX because it muddles the "affordance" of a QR. A QR should explicitly and clearly look like a QR for people to understand they should use it as such.

  It isn't effective because it degrades the bandwidth of QR codes. It reduces the amount of information you can place on QR codes.

  This is just a gimmick, a funny trick that implements bad functionality.

  As in Jurassic Park: just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it.

• by plastic3169 on 6/12/23, 9:49 AM

  Interesting I am not able to focus on these images. Looking at them makes my eyes pop around until I have to look away.

• by AdieuToLogic on 6/12/23, 2:56 AM

  Way cool article and novel hacking of QR codes!

• by bytemonitor on 6/12/23, 11:02 AM

  Very nice post, thanks for sharing.

• by swyx on 6/12/23, 3:43 AM

  this guide starts by promoting their gumroad book which i dont want.

  currently using a1111 off of https://colab.research.google.com/github/TheLastBen/fast-sta...

  and hoping to go from there

• by kunley on 6/12/23, 8:11 AM

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  And some content in between