Out of all the things that 2022 will be remembered for, the year when generative AI art burst will be the most memorable for creatives. AI art generators evolved from being an entertaining curiosity to a powerful technology that is accessible to everyone and has become hard for creatives to ignore in the blink of an eye.
Text-to-image AI art production has advanced dramatically, resulting in models that can create more realistic graphics and more trustworthy outcomes in record time. Because of the quickness and simplicity of usage, users may let their imaginations run wild, generating visuals by just inputting what they wish to see. As a result, some strange and fascinating things have resulted.
If you missed the hype and are still unsure how the technology works, check out our guide to using DALL-E 2. Simply said, AI picture generators have been trained on millions of combinations of existing photos and captions in order to make new images in response to text cues. The AI doesn’t actually “know” what it’s doing; it merely knows what kinds of visuals are connected with specific descriptions. And this can have some interesting outcomes. Here are three instances that have inspired the good folks of the internet during the last year.
Virtua Fighter gets a makeover
One of the most exciting applications of AI art generators is to answer all of our “what if?” inquiries. What if Apple made a toaster? What was the name of every film in which Nicolas Cage appeared? What if the iconic Virtua Fighter fighting game from the 1990s was redone with current graphics? We may ordinarily reject such musings as unimportant, but with AI art generators, we can now fulfill our curiosity.
Colin Williamson utilized text-to-picture technology to improve on what was cutting-edge in video game graphics 30 years ago, feeding characters from Sega’s Virtua Fighter through the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to transform the 3D polygon visuals into photorealistic images (OK, kind of). The end effect was both amazing and humorous.
Pixar’s John Wick
Here’s another scenario. What if Pixar took over the action film series John Wick and turned the narrative of the former assassin on a mission to revenge the loss of a pet dog into a family-friendly adventure? AI art generators may provide humans with inspiration. The artist BossLogic claims to have input ‘John Wick Pixar Poster’ into the DALL-E 2 to produce the picture above, and it does, well, make us want to watch this flick.
The faces are rather unsettling, as is frequently the case with AI, with one of Wick’s eyes presumably dissolving. Pixar also seems to have resurrected Wick’s lost pet Daisy from the dead. “John Wick if Tim Burton directed,” one user remarked on Instagram, while someone believes it “feels like the cover of a Little Golden Book”. To summarize, Pixar is not involved in the forthcoming John Wick Chapter 4, although the film does feature an outstanding optical illusion poster.
Loab
But strange AI art isn’t all improbable mashups and startling transformations. AI art generators may also be utilized to generate whole new monsters. Loab is a computer-generated lady who has been haunting the internet.
Loab was accidentally developed by the multimedia artist and ‘Loabmancer’ Supercomposite(opens in new tab) when fiddling with an AI art generator. The negative prompt ‘Brando::-1’ was used to produce a logo with the letters “DIGITA PNTICS,” thus the artist attempted using these letters as a negative prompt to see if it would generate a picture of Brando. It didn’t work. It produced Loab, a kind of artificial monster described as AI art’s first cryptid (a beast often claimed to exist but never proven).
So, where did this AI beast originate from? She’s most likely a combination of many photographs that the AI was trained on, but things get crazier. When Loab’s body parts, chopped heads, and scary dolls are fed back into the AI to produce variants, the results become even more gruesome.
Loab demonstrates that much of the current wonder and terror of AI art stems from experimenting and unintentional findings. Creatives are still figuring out what the technology can accomplish, and the technology itself is improving virtually every month. See our comparison of the greatest AI generators for additional information, as well as our selection of other strange AI art that’s been making the rounds online.