This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/stablediffusion by /u/Sandro-Halpo on 2024-09-15 22:50:28+00:00.
A while ago I made a post about how SD was, at the time, pretty useless for any professional art work without extensive cleanup and/or hand done effort. Two years later, how is that going?
A picture is worth 1000 words, let's look at multiple of them! (TLDR: Even if AI does 75% of the work, people are only willing to pay you if you can do the other 25% the hard way. AI is only "good" at a few things, outright "bad" at many things, and anything more complex than "girl boobs standing there blank expression anime" is gonna require an experienced human artist to actualize into a professional real-life use case. AI image generators are extremely helpful but they can not remove an adequately skilled human from the process. Nor do they want to? They happily co-exist, unlike predictions from 2 years ago in either pro-AI or anti-AI direction.)
Made with a bunch of different software, a pencil, photographs, blood, sweat, and a modest sacrifice of a baby seal to the Dark Gods. This is exactly what the happy customer wanted!
This one, made by Dalle, is a pretty good representation of about 30 similar images that are as close as I was able to get with any AI to the actual desired final result with a single generation. Not that it's really very close, just the close-est regarding art style and subject matter...
This one was Stable Diffusion. I'm not even saying it looks bad! It's actually a modestly cool picture totally unedited... just not what the client wanted...
Another SD image, but a completely different model and Lora from the other one. I chuckled when I remembered that unless you explicitly prompt for a male, most SD stuff just defaults to boobs.
The skinny legs of this one made me laugh, but oh boy did the AI fail at understanding the desired time period of the armor...
The brief for the above example piece went something like this: "Okay so next is a character portrait of the Dark-Elf king, standing in a field of bloody snow holding a sword. He should be spooky and menacing, without feeling cartoonishly evil. He should have the Varangian sort of outfit we discussed before like the others, with special focus on the helmet. I was hoping for a sort of vaguely owl like look, like not literally a carved masked but like the subtle impression of the beak and long neck. His eyes should be tiny red dots, but again we're going for ghostly not angry robot. I'd like this scene to take place farther north than usual, so completely flat tundra with no trees or buildings or anything really, other than the ominous figure of the King. Anyhows the sword should be a two-handed one, maybe resting in the snow? Like he just executed someone or something a moment ago. There shouldn't be any skin showing at all, and remember the blood! Thanks!"
None of the AI image generators could remotely handle that complex and specific composition even with extensive inpainting or the use of Loras or whatever other tricks. Why is this? Well...
1: AI generators suck at chainmail in a general sense.
2: They could make a field of bloody snow (sometimes) OR a person standing in the snow, but not both at the same time. They often forgot the fog either way.
3: Specific details like the vaguely owl-like (and historically accurate looking) helmet or two-handed sword or cloak clasps was just beyond the ability of the AIs to visualize. It tended to make the mask too overtly animal like, the sword either too short or Anime-style WAY too big, and really struggled with the clasps in general. Some of the AIs could handle something akin to a large pin, or buttons, but not the desired two disks with a chain between them. There were also lots of problems with the hand holding the sword. Even models or Loras or whatever better than usual at hands couldn't get the fingers right regarding grasping the hilt. They also were totally confounded by the request to hold the sword pointed down, resulting in the thumb being in the wrong side of the hand.
4: The AIs suck at both non-moving water and reflections in general. If you want a raging ocean or dripping faucet you are good. Murky and torpid bloody water? Eeeeeh...
5: They always, and I mean always, tried to include more than one person. This is a persistent and functionally impossible to avoid problem across all the AIs when making wide aspect ratio images. Even if you start with a perfect square, the process of extending it to a landscape composition via outpainting or splicing together multiple images can't be done in a way that looks good without at least the basic competency in Photoshop. Even getting a simple full-body image that includes feet, without getting super weird proportions or a second person nearby is frustrating.
6: This image is just one of a lengthy series, which doesn't necessarily require detail consistency from picture to picture, but does require a stylistic visual cohesion. All of the AIs other than Stable Diffusion utterly failed at this, creating art that looked it was made by completely different artists even when very detailed and specific prompts were used. SD could maintain a style consistency but only through the use of Loras, and even then it drastically struggled. See, the overwhelming majority of them are either anime/cartoonish, or very hit/miss attempts at photo-realism. And the client specifically did not want either of those. The art style was meant to look for like a sort of Waterhouse tone with James Gurney detail, but a bit more contrast than either. Now, I'm NOT remotely claiming to be as good an artist as either of those two legends. But my point is that, frankly, the AI is even worse.
*While on the subject a note regarding the so called "realistic" images created by various different AIs. While getting better at the believability for things like human faces and bodies, the "realism" aspect totally fell apart regarding lighting and pattern on this composition. Shiny metal, snow, matte cloak/fur, water, all underneath a sky that diffuses light and doesn't create stark uni-directional shadows? Yeah, it did *cough*, not look photo-realistic. My prompt wasn't the problem.*
So yeah, the doomsayers and the technophiles were BOTH wrong. I've seen, and tried for myself, the so-called amaaaaazing breakthrough of Flux. Seriously guys let's cool it with the hype, it's got serious flaws and is dumb as a rock just like all the others. I also have insider NDA-level access to the unreleased newest Google-made Gemini generator, and I maintain paid accounts for Midjourney and ChatGPT, frequently testing out what they can do. I can't show you the first ethically but really, it's not fundamentally better. Look with clear eyes and you'll quickly spot the issues present in non-SD image generators. I could have included some images from Midjourny/Gemini/FLUX/Whatever, but it would just needlessly belabor a point and clutter an aleady long-ass post.
I can repeat almost everything I said in that two-year old post about how and why making nice pictures of pretty people standing there doing nothing is cool, but not really any threat towards serious professional artists. The tech is better now than it was then but the fundamental issues it has are, sadly, ALL still there.
They struggle with African skintones and facial features/hair. They struggle with guns, swords, and complex hand poses. They struggle with style consistency. They struggle with clothing that isn't modern. They struggle with patterns, even simple ones. They don't create images separated into layers, which is a really big deal for artists for a variety of reasons. They can't create vector images. They can't this. They struggle with that. This other thing is way more time-consuming than just doing it by hand. Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the censorship is a really big problem.
AI is an excellent tool. I am glad I have it. I use it on a regular basis for both fun and profit. I want it to get better. But to be honest, I'm actually more disappointed than anything else regarding how little progress there has been in the last year or so. I'm not diminishing the difficulty and complexity of the challenge, just that a small part of me was excited by the concept and wish it would hurry up and reach it's potential sooner than like, five more years from now.
Anyone that says that AI generators can't make good art or that it is soulless or stolen is a fool, and anyone that claims they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and is going to totally revolutionize singularity dismantle the professional art industry is also a fool for a different reason. Keep on making art my friends!
