Using Stable Diffusion's img2img on some old Sierra titles
sciprogramming.com
sciprogramming.com
Again, I think the results are impressive in their own right. But they seem impractical on account of the flaws in the details.
My brain had upscaled that human like blob to a woman spinning around with a sword so her hair covered her face.
Looking closely. None of that is there really, just a suggestion of it. And that is enough.
The more I learn about vision and sight the less I’m sure that we see reality.
In contrast to the photorealistic pixel art?
Objective reality exists, for some definition of "exists" - there is physical matter present, with properties enabling some or all wavelengths of light to reflect (and similar for other senses like hearing). However, if we viewed reality devoid of the subjective processing, we'd "see" everything, but key existential concepts such as object permanence would not be possible, as that requires our brain be able to process and recognize an object in order to identify what the object is in the first place, to even be able to remember what it is. Not entirely unlike the iterative process of modern machine learning.
When learning drawing I gradually got a sense of what is really going on is that I'm gaining a more conscious command of different shapes, just like when I learned to write letters; but instead of abstract marks, I'm learning the shape of hands, arms, etc - and from various perspectives. And so if I study a lot of the same shapes in a topic like anatomy or wildlife, I can replicate them from memory with fairly accurate proportions.
The difference between me and the AI, in its current form, is that the AI continues along the path of being an extremely smart shape recognizer and reproducer(as it should be, given some the first applications of the tech were to text recognition). So it can output a lot of details I can't(without lots of reference) and blend in stylistic ideas I'm unaware of. But I, while having a much more limited visual library, can mix in more details of the perspective, how anatomy and clothing work, and other kinds of logic. I can push the shapes to convey specific action and expression, design lighting situations and so on.
AI's ability to do it all in one step gives it a result that is very "savant", because it doesn't know what is and isn't a coherent image, but it has total mastery at making the shapes and applying rendering. Some of the things I've seen it do to prompts are wildly creative in interpretation as a result. It's a good tool.
The current approach creates huge limitation of input/output images being like 512x512 small and a whole load of texture-turning-to-shape and vice versa artifacts.
It could be possibly overcome with a paradigm shift, though.
The difference between AI art and actual human art is the level of intention one can detect in it. When I look at human art I absolutely marvel at the cleverness of the artist to convey something that still looks like what I was imagining even when I look closer at it.
With AI art I look closer and realize that the blob presents more confusion the closer I look at it.
I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that AI art isn’t stealing much lunch when it comes to professional art. But it may very well be a powerful tool to artists to speed up their workflows and artists who refuse to use the tool stand a chance at being left behind the same way some artists got left behind in the illustration industry world once digital tools showed up.
Yet. These models have been out for only a matter of months. Just last year the state of the art was DALL-e v1, which is a toy in comparison[0] to DALL-e 2/imagen/SD.
Making predictions is perilous but it would be surprising to me if computers did not have fully super-human artistic ability in the next 5 years.
Relationships between things is complicated. Someone resting their face on a fence is going to have a huge number of effects on the deformations of the face, especially the eyes and hair depending on how they are resting. It’s not enough for AI to have seen enough pictures of faces on fences to be able to apply that in an image. It needs to understand what pressure and gravity is doing to the underlying structures. That’s how human artists study at least. It’s why they can take that lesson and apply it to learnings about how skin behaves depending on the age of a person. They aren’t copying. They are solving problems by thinking about muscles underneath and how they change depending on any number of factors.
None of this even touches on lighting and colours.
If there’s one prediction of the future I’m willing to make, it’s that until research progresses on teaching computers to apply actual knowledge, AI within the creative space will remain assistive instead of replacing.
As you repeat that cycle things are going to get better, but it does require human labor at that point.
It's not a complete magic tool, but once you put a little bit of fixing effort in you can get a long way with very little.
It's hard to look at what's happened in the last few months and not think of it as akin to the invention of the steam engine, but for art.
It's not perfect, as early machines had many flaws, were wildly inefficient, produced irregular output. But the innovation that followed created the industrial revolution.
I'm not sure how you could read my comment and possibly come to this conclusion.
computer generated art *
I think it's because the prompts are often sterile as well. you have to add stuff like "matte painting" and "dream" just like in the first example in dreamstudio."very detailed landscape with xy" also works fine. Avoid prompts like "digital art" or "render".
This is the beginning of something pretty big, I think.
There was also a time when I (unironically) classified McDonald's food a delicacy (at some point when I was younger than ten).
Never said you did, but there are, ahem, parallels.
:D
All of the output here is cool and impressive for sure, but good art it is not.
I do not mean to discount the creator as it’s cool regardless, it just doesn’t really have anything to do with art. They’re literally just running some old computer images through a technology. That’s it.
There will probably be good art conceived of good artists that uses this style and these techniques at some point, though.
What I’ve found more amazing than the tech is how rapidly and intensively a community has formed around Stable Diffusion and all the stuff they’re doing with it. I’m more confident than not these issues will get worked out.
This whole thing has been a breath of fresh air. We can run this stuff on high-end workstations and we’re not beholden to tech giants for interesting creative ML applications.
We’re about to see a thousand flowers bloom.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x2wwxx/usi...
and
https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x5qrje/usi...
I love what the AI did with the hot tub girl from Leisure Suit Larry!
1 and 2 (unofficially) have VGA ports that updated the graphics. So, I may have to run some screen shots through to get an even newer backdrop.
The correspondence to the original image is not especially high: the Leisure Suit Larry image, for example, enhances the original colours of the sea in a nicely realistic way, but all the foreground detail is essentially reinvented from scratch, including some very obvious omissions. In some of them the changes to perspective and more lifelike skull/canyons etc might improve on the original image, but it also flips even pretty basic stuff like which shoulder the woman's hand is placed on (and yes, once you look at that hand closely, the fingers SD has had to add in are all wrong...)
Ideally for this sort of use case you'd want high fidelity to the geometry of the original image but less fidelity to the palette (use more than 256 colours and naturalistic or artistic textures rather than lines and pixel dithering), but I'm not sure SD can manage that at the moment
There is an art to conveying a feeling with limited resources. That's what makes early computer game images (the good ones... because there were plenty of bad ones) so special.
The same could be said even more strongly for words. I'm not a writer and I don't remember everything, but someone famous once said something about eliminating everything non-essential from writing to make it better. That's what makes a writer really great.
Even so, the AI-upscaled versions of the original art are impressive.
I said it before on this topic, and I'll repeat it. We will someday (soonish) have games where the art is generated in real time, unique for each player, based on good inputs. And it will be awesome. Every play and every experience will be relatively unique, but most or all of the plays will be excellent. That's an exciting prospect.
I thought about this in a slightly different way: D2 remastered has a great switch back feature.
You could easily train a network with tons and tons of D2 old vs. New and just use it to Auto upscale /reimagine of old D2.
Image rendering a old D2 video into 4k D2 remastered style.
You can run it with a command like this (I'm on windows): docker run -it -v <model file path>:/stable-diffusion/models/ldm/stable-diffusion-v1/model.ckpt -v <outputs folder>:/stable-diffusion/outputs -v <inputs folder>:/stable-diffusion/inputs -v <cache folder>:/root/.cache --gpus all knightley python /stable-diffusion/scripts/txt2img.py --W 256 --H 256 --prompt "a horse wearing a top hat"
assuming you build the image and tag it "knightley"
Contrary to what you wrote, these AI-generated ones aren't replacing the originals. The originals are still there.
Sorry, but I think you're reading way too much into this... it's a fun toy, it's not replacing game art and it's not an "abomination". It's cool and new. That's all.