Every time you see a stuffed animal with the wrong number/arrangement of limbs, take a shot

[erinptah]

Poking an AI art bot, trying to get some scenery for a piece where I don’t feel like drawing a background from scratch. (It’s fanart, it’s not getting sold anywhere — my alternate strategy is using a screenshot from the show, which I would have equally-little copyright to.) (ETA: also, it's a free bot, no AI company is profiting either.)

Fascinating which prompt details it manages to follow, and which ones it seems to have no context for.

Example: it will render a passable “bedroom” setting…in broad daylight! At the angle you would expect in the average real-estate ad, or hotel photo!

But it full-on refused to produce one at night with the lights off. (References excised from the training data for being NSFW, maybe…?)

Sample of the bot’s efforts at a series of prompts:

 

1) “sitcom style, boy’s bedroom, unmade beds, overhead angled view, night lights off”

2) “sitcom style, boy’s bedroom, unmade beds, overhead angled view, night dark”

3) “sitcom style, boy’s bedroom, unmade beds, overhead angled view, all dark”

4) (prompt #2 again, I’m not cherry-picking the bright ones, they’re all like this)

…After that I gave up, picked one, and started manually painting over the lit-up parts.

Bonus note: it is so funny to zoom in on these things. Here’s a selection of “what the AI art bot put on the wall when drawing a boy’s bedroom”:

1) Three analog clocks, all clustered around each other, all showing different times. Also, two posters with an unmistakable Mickey Mouse, one of his Definitely Still Under Copyright designs.

2) Blobby stuffed animals nailed to the wall? A passable cool sky-at-night poster, except for some reason there’s a clock on the front of the sky.

3) Blobby clocks! Blobby lights! Blobby things that might be intended as clocks or lights, I can’t tell! Lots of pictures of blobby things, half of which seem to have extra lights behind the frames, art-gallery style.

4) Two squished analog clocks on top of each other. Lots of cartoony abstract drawings. One guy who looks like the Sonichu version of Batman, and one that is so clearly a Spider-Verse reject. Once Disney is done suing the bot, Sony can come for it next.

 

Comments

[isis]

Bots apparently like clocks, I guess! Though I'm impressed/amused that "unmade beds" + "boy's bedroom" -> clothes, papers, and pens scattered on the floor. Do you get that if you prompt "girl's bedroom"?

[erinptah]

It "knows" that clocks go on walls, you can't go wrong putting a clock on the wall! So why not three or four of them?

I prompted "sitcom style, girl's bedroom, unmade beds, overhead angled view, all dark" and got very similar outputs, with some combination of clothes, mismatched shoes, and Lovecraft-y distorted toys on the floor. Main difference is that the girl ones all had a noticeable amount of pink items:

[lb_lee]

It's weird how good the bots are at creating something that looks fine at first glance but is so uncanny at deeper inspection, like how imagery appears in dreams.

[erinptah]

I know, right? There has to be someone doing serious studies about what this tells us about human neurology.

Like, our brains are clearly processing these images on both the "zoomed-out general impression" level, and the "paying careful attention to fine details" level -- and I don't think we've ever had such an effective way to test those separately before. There are images like impressionist paintings, where you get low-detail blobs assembled in a way that looks right from a distance...but no pre-existing big set of "images with lots of detail, almost to a photorealistic level, but they're the *wrong* details, but somehow *those* are assembled into a greater whole that looks right from a distance."