by Of all the things for which 2022 might be remembered, for creatives, it will be the year when generative AI art exploded. In the blink of an eye, AI art generators went from being a fun curiosity to a powerful technology available to everyone that has become impossible for creatives to ignore.
Advances in text-to-image AI art generation have been dramatic, resulting in models that can generate more realistic images and more reliable results super-fast. The speed and ease of use means users can let their imaginations run wild, creating images by typing what they want to see. And that has led to some weird and wonderful creations.
If you missed the fuss and you’re still not sure how the technology works, check out our section on how to use DALL-E 2. Basically, AI image generators have been trained on millions of combinations of existing images and captions, like that they can produce new images based on text messages. The AI ​​doesn’t really “know” what it’s doing, it just knows what kind of images certain descriptions are associated with. And this can lead to some fascinating results. Here are three of the examples that inspired the clever people of the internet in the past year.
Virtua Fighter is getting a makeover
One of the most fascinating uses of AI art generators is to answer all those “what if…?” questions that may come to us. What if Apple designed a toaster? Which movie did Nicolas Cage star in? What if the classic 90s fighting game Virtua Fighter was remade with modern graphics? We might normally dismiss such musings without too much thought, but with AI art generators we can now satisfy our curiosity.
Tech artist Colin Williamson (opens in a new tab) used text-to-image technology to figure out how to improve what 30 years ago was cutting edge in video game graphics, and fed characters from Sega’s Virtua Fighter through the AI ​​image generator Stable Diffusion to turn the 3D polygon graphics into photorealistic images (OK, in a way). The results were both impressive and quite amusing.
Pixar’s John Wick
I wrote (John Wick pixar poster) in #dalle …….. Life is strange 🤣 pic.twitter.com/LSAdIbuEki19 September 2022
Here’s another “what if…”. What if Pixar took the John Wick action franchise and spun the story of the former assassin out to avenge the death of a beloved puppy into a family-friendly adventure? AI art generators can give us an idea. The artist BossLogic (opens in a new tab) says he wrote “John Wick Pixar Poster” in DALL-E 2 to get the image above, and well, it actually makes us want to see this movie.
As is often the case with AI, the faces are a bit terrifying, with one of Wick’s eyes seemingly melting. Pixar also seems to have brought Wick’s lost puppy Daisy back from the grave. “John Wick if Tim Burton directed,” suggested one person on Instagram, while others thought it “feels like the cover of a little golden book.” Suffice it to say that Pixar is not involved in the upcoming John Wick Chapter 4, but the film does have a stunning optical illusion poster.
Loab
But weird AI art isn’t all improbable mashups and radical makeovers. AI art generators can also be used to create brand new monstrosities. Loab is an imaginary woman painted by an AI and she has haunted the internet.
The multimedia artist and ‘Loabmancer’ Super composite (opens in a new tab) accidentally created Loab when tricking an artificial art generator. The negative message ‘Brando::-1’ to try to generate ‘the opposite of Marlon Brando’ generated a logo with the letters “DIGITA PNTICS”, so the artist tried using these letters as a negative message to see if it would generate a picture of Brando. It didn’t. It created Loab, a kind of digital demon that people describe as AI art’s first cryptid (a beast often claimed to exist but never proven).
So where does this AI monster come from? She is presumably a composite of many images the AI ​​was trained on, but things get weirder. When Loab is fed back to the AI ​​to create variations, the results become even more macabre, with Loab surrounded by bloody body parts, severed heads and creepy dolls.
Loab shows that much of the magic and horror of AI art currently comes from experimentation and chance discovery. Creatives are still trying to figure out what technology can do – and technology itself continues to make leaps forward almost every month. To learn more, check out this comparison of the best AI generators and our selection of other weird AI art that’s been making the rounds online.
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