I mean, obviously; AI is all about copying things from patterns, and if you don’t have a pattern, well, good luck. On the plus side, you don’t feel guilty for wasting an artists time by being wishy washy. On the minus side, you are wasting your own time as Stable Diffusion offers up a pile of macaroni art and asks “well, what do you think?”

Flonk is a monster, but not a particularly threatening looking one; he’s this world’s equivalent of a goomba; a mook species that largely exists as something for lowbie adventurers to curb stomp for early game XP, and as something for middling monsters to curb stomp for a violent outburst. So I designed him to be basically a bug, little more threatening than a cockroach but with a little more crowd appeal than, well, a cockroach.

The issue I had was communicating how he looks to an AI. Flonk is chimeric; he’s a grub shaped creature, with a prominent fishlike mandible, a snake’s lack of a neck, dorsal scales a bit like a pangolin, and a pair of arms that looks a bit like a cricket’s jumping legs. If you’ve worked with AI before, you can probably tell where there’s going to be a problem. If you haven’t, well, imagine you have a crowd of children, hyped up on cake and soda, and you ask them what you should draw. So as you insert more suggestions, what you get.. well, I should just show you.

Each time I specified details or added them in, I had to also include negative prompts. Ask for a payara jaw, and you have to deal with tuna bodies. Ask for roadrunner feet (the only way I could get it to add long walking legs to a fishy grub monster), and then you get wings and feathers. Ask for an armadillo like hidden neck, and.. well, you mostly get pokemon.

So, if you are going to make a Pokemon game, and you have access to a time machine to go back in time and invent it before Nintendo patented it, please remember my contribution when you create whatever you’d call these abominations.

I spent a week working on Flonk and eventually realized that I had gone from pillar to post on the kinds of species to throw into the mix. The more times I coaxed the AI to lean in one species over another the more things creeped in. I had worked reallllly hard on just getting two legs, and as soon as I entered a species, the more legs showed up. Other important details faded out; antennae became a headcrest on a birdlike head.

So, I scrapped all these. I’ll start again with a head and get that correct; that’s one of the hardest concepts to get right. Plus side, I’m learning how to make horrible chimera. For whatever reasons I needed to make them.