I am impressed enough by what AI art can do that I forget that it needs a lot of training to be even vaguely competent at a task. When you’ve gotten it decently trained on a specific character, and ask it to change the appearance of that character in some unique way, generally it can wow. Unfortunately that builds a lot of trust in the “artist,” like “oh hey you made a really good pot, can you make me an ashtray as well, since you’re soo good at making hollow vessels out of clay. So when the AI “artist” returns with a pot that has been set on fire, points proudly and says “is ashtray,” it does not gel with your raised expectations.

I got ahead of myself, apparently. It has been enough months since I worked on Alastrina’s art that I forgot how much you need to keep it simple for AI. Instead of describing an elaborate pose in a unique situation, you really, REALLY, need to get the main subject correct first. Otherwise, you’ll make a monster out of the subject and no matter how correct the background is of the image, the image is useless because, well, you done effed this up.

So rather than tell Gemini “make this guy, who is this ethnicity, have a cool thing going on” I had to slow my roll considerably and just say “make this guy crouch” and “make this guy throw.” The results are, admittedly, bland, but, with a good body posture and a consistent face, its not hard to make a few tiny tweaks here and there, and then put him in front of a baseball stadium or something thematic.

A few things I do need to be mindful of:

• The hat: GG easily turns into CC. Which, if you know your purines and pyrimidines, you can understand how those letters could be mutated pretty easily. And if you really knew your purines and pyrimidines, you’d be going “ehrm, ackshully..” and tell me that cytosine and guanine are not purines. You are seen, fellow bio nerds.
• The glove: Seems to switch hands pretty regularly. And you really have to be careful when you ask Gemini to remove the glove, because it has no problem lopping entire arms off at the shoulders because you commented on the hand.
• The ear rings: This is subtle, but Jo has a few piercings that either mutate or just disappear. Maybe he had to hock them for hand cream or something; unclear. But I’ll need to make sure he gets those back.
• The mustache: Just kinda dips out a lot. Much like for Alastrina, I’ll have to start from a good base image where he has his stache so that the AI art doesn’t hallucinate too much.

I did have one last funny to share, and mostly because I was getting into the zone, and Gemini mostly had understood me all session:

Kamehame-ha! But also: “Your leg’s off!” In fairness I did ask exactly for this reference and I’m glad he didn’t end up being cartoonishly ripped for being Saiyan.