NEWS FLASH: AI Art Sucks Balls

Wow, the rare mid-week update oo la la!

As mentioned in Metal Monday this week, I am fully engrossed in Caves of Qud and role-playing my character: The Gentle Shwubas. My drawing of Shwubas is sub-par art in almost everyway but it is entirely my own. I love him.

That got me curious about how much worse AI art would be. And since Google is trying to justify blowing billions of dollars into AI research by attempting to shove it down it’s user’s throats, I’d thought to try Gemini.

Right out the gate I could feel the AI fighting me.

I guess I can kind of respect them restricting their AI to not draw a person, but I feel like it’s in effort to obfuscate any “The AI just stole a picture of Ron Pearlman” accusations.

So I then began to test the nomenclature the AI would allow:

Hmmm, so even when I’m asking it to (supposedly) create an entirely new drawing, it still has an issue with the word “man”. After trying the word “person” it came up with the same result. So already, AI is failing miserably to give me what I want which, if I wasn’t morbidly curious, I would stop here.

So I modified the search to Shwubas’ most fictional facsimile:

Ok, Shwubas is not bigfoot but at least we’re getting somewhere. Next challenge, 4 arms:

Ok, ¼ is not bad. Because I was expecting zero. Next challenge: crown of reeds;

We’ve lost the 4 arms completely. It’s weird that there isn’t an option to select a picture that already been created and and tell the AI to iterate upon it. Billions of dollars well spent Google.

This kind of sent me in a tizzy. Because I’m not sure how to clarify to the AI that yes, actually, I do want the 4 arms in the description. So I just decided to move on and hope the AI would pick it back up later? Maybe?

Still only 2 arms. MOVING ON:

The ONE picture with a singular ax, is not even in his hands.

I decided to change the description a little but forgot to get a screen cap, though I did download my favorite results: Draw a 4 armed, albino bigfoot, wearing a crown of reeds, leather armor and an ax in each hand.

That last Warhammer figurine-esq depiction of Shwubas is as close to the description I can hope to get. And let’s be clear, it is not a drawing, Shwubas is human, not bigfoot so the depiction is fundamentally flawed.

I can’t tell you how I tried to get “wearing a mask of human flesh” or “a whip in one hand, a knife in one hand, kris in one hand, torch in one hand” to work but to increasingly more horrible or no results.

I am not interested in testing any other AI service in hopes of finding the perfect Shwubas because he already exists. I drew him. He is an entirely new being. He is not an amalgamation of thousands of other artists work that AI stole.

So I think the lesson here is that it is OK to try an AI service if only to discover for yourself that they are trash.