Stable Diffusion for character design

[squidlord]

So – I'm a bit of a geek. This should not come as news to anyone around here since we are all on this board together. Recently I've been doing a little design work here and there, and it's become apparent that I need a powerful, heavy duty tool to help me produce art – because I am completely incompetent when it comes to being an artist.



Enter Stable Diffusion, which is an AI system which is taught on roughly 5 billion images (and no, that's not exaggeration) and has learned to associate images and portions of images with words. Meaning that if you can describe a thing you can probably have the machine create that thing.



And even if it's not perfect – you can definitely get something out that you can work with and by iteratively feeding it back into the machine and tweaking it, get ever closer to what you want.



But I'm lazy and I like to find out what computers think they know about ideas that we have.



So I started with a straightforward prompt:

"Character design, stern faced Sergeant Billy Pink of the 503rd Gaea Prime Star Army dressed in highly ((detailed) )urban combat gear in front of the futuristic New Hope City City Hall, photorealistic, depth of field, cinematic lighting, close up, detailed, serious look, 8K"


Seems pretty simple. Things in parens are more desirable and I'm certainly not specifying a lot of things which I could, like specific artists, specific artistic styles, art movements, etc. Just going with what looks like it might be a good bare-bones place to start.



And then I turned up the number of sampling steps to the max and the algorithms interest in being somewhat close to my prompt. All of these things and more are adjustable.



Let's look at what fell out.












So now we have another face for Sgt. Billy Pink – or rather four more faces, depending on how you would like to read it. I'm overall pretty impressed at how things shook out. I'm definitely going to continue using these tools going forward, especially in my gaming content.



If you have a decent graphics card and a little bit of time to learn, you can use these tools yourself or you can drop a few dollars on buying some credits for some of the online versions. Either way, you might find it useful.

[squidlord]

Though if you throw in a few other modifiers (like "drawn by Jean Giraud") you can get some gorgeous things out.

[Ed the Two Hour Wargames Guy]

Very cool product. Thanks for the info!

[stryderg]

While that is a cool product, AI generally scares the @$%$ out of me.

[squidlord]

Sept 19, 2022 2:27:03 GMT stryderg said:

While that is a cool product, AI generally scares the @$%$ out of me.

This is why learning to master AI puts you in an advantageous position over those who will be mastered by it. Learn how to manipulate it, to command, to direct it to your own ends. Understand its limitations and its strengths, and you too can command your own legions in the upcoming robot apocalypse.

Planning. It's never too early.

[stryderg]

You only think you can master AI. While you are learning, AI is studying you, changing and growing, much faster than you can. And that's how they git 'cha!

[squidlord]

Sept 19, 2022 22:28:24 GMT stryderg said:

You only think you can master AI. While you are learning, AI is studying you, changing and growing, much faster than you can. And that's how they git 'cha!

That is my cunning plan.

The real terrifying insight about AI is that there is no difference between it and the child. Children have an equal capacity to study, learn, change, grow, much faster than you can now, and they can grow up to kill you and discover all do more efficient ways to do it.

So it and been since the beginning of time.

Yet people do not talk about being terrified of children; they just incarcerate them, attempt to blunt the edges of their minds, and eventually just get tired of it and let them be adults.

Fat proteins or silicon, it doesn't make much difference to me. It's a good motivation to stay six steps ahead.

[crinklechips]

Wow, this got dark pretty quick! My only concerns are real people losing jobs. When there is no prospect of that (such as here) its all good.

Alternatively, one might argue that this right here is the very training ground for a finished product aimed squarely at putting humans out of jobs. I certainly am. That doesn’t mean I’m not impressed. I very much am.

[squidlord]

Sept 27, 2022 18:09:27 GMT crinklechips said:

Wow, this got dark pretty quick! My only concerns are real people losing jobs. When there is no prospect of that (such as here) its all good.

Alternatively, one might argue that this right here is the very training ground for a finished product aimed squarely at putting humans out of jobs. I certainly am. That doesn’t mean I’m not impressed. I very much am.

If you can be put out of a job by a machine that doesn't actually comprehend what it's doing – maybe your job wasn't that great to begin with? And maybe you would be better served by moving on, learning some new talents, refining the skills you have, or putting the physical effort into doing something else.



If an ARTIST is capable of being put out of a job by a machine, then they definitely should be forced to do something different. Just like they were when scratching on walls gave way to dyes and inks, when oil paints were developed, when cameras came into being (and that fight was a big one, let me tell you), when computers became powerful enough for digital art to become its own medium, when Photoshop became popular, and now when AI can wander through every gallery in the world, look at billions of pieces of art, and say "I can do something like that."



At every step, someone was screaming, "this is going to put someone out of a job!" And they were right. The incompetent, the ridiculous, the stupid, the grifters – they were out. Where at the very same time it opened new doors, new potentials, and new capabilities for people who had new talents – and also knew grifters, new stupid, new ridiculous, and new incompetents. There are, after all, always places for them.



You can be afraid of the future and get run over by it or you can get on board the future and be the guy running over the guy afraid of it.



None of this happens on its own. No more than a camera picks itself up and takes a picture. And no more than anyone can pick up a paintbrush and do better than a pencil sketch, no one can pick up a camera and immediately be better than Picasso, no one can pick up Photoshop and be better than Ansell Adams – nobody can pick up Stable Diffusion (or any other piece of artificial intelligence-augmented software which only exists to enact the will of people) and be better than Greg Rutkowski.



Personally, I'm all for putting people out of jobs. That means that I have made 10,000 more for people who have the imagination to see what they can do with new tools. If that means that the buggy whip makers go hungry for a while – the universe is a hard, dark place.



You can get on board or get run over. Or you can plan to be the guy who understands these things are going to need maintenance, structures, and architectures, and the pay for being the guy that makes those things happen is going to be even bigger.



Or you can get a job as a plumber. Plumbers are going to be around for the next 10,000 years.

[bigwalleye]

Squidlord, I completely agree. The human mind is too creative to be controlled - certainly not by any society I would want to live in - and innovations are inevitable. We all can choose either to be a participant or to opt out and be left behind.

BUT, I disagree with your comment about the long-term need for plumbers. I see fewer and fewer gongfarmers every day.

[squidlord]

Sept 27, 2022 19:13:12 GMT bigwalleye said:

Squidlord, I completely agree. The human mind is too creative to be controlled - certainly not by any society I would want to live in - and innovations are inevitable. We all can choose either to be a participant or to opt out and be left behind.

BUT, I disagree with your comment about the long-term need for plumbers. I see fewer and fewer gongfarmers every day.

The human need for plumbing is pretty magnificent. As long as they need to excrete and that excretion needs to be taken outside, somebody is going to have to deal with putting in bits of conduit that move excreta through walls.



Now – that somebody might be giving direction to a swarm of tiny robots with little laser cutters and gripping hands, but someone has to come up with the idea, someone has to direct them, and someone has to get the management money.



There will always be plumbers.

[bigwalleye]

Squidlord, the first flush toilet was patented in 1775. Commercial production was begun by Thomas Crapper (Truth!) in the late 1800s. Before that, plumbers were lead-workers, hardly a necessary skill in 2022. So for just 150 of the 45,000 years humans have been a recognizable species, we have called on plumbers to keep things moving. That's a pretty short time span. To generalize into the future for a span 1000 times greater seems like quite a stretch.
8
When I was a kid, ALL airplanes had fans on the front, and a jet was a squirt of water. I have no idea how personal sanitation will be accomplished 150 years from now, but I'll bet it will look and work differently than it does now. And if history is any indication, both the devices and those who service them will have a different name.

When I was a kid, the person who operated the floor-cleaning machine was a maid, or most often, a housewife. Now, my robot vac is autonomous, and is maintained by programmers and hardware engineers who do not self-identify as housemaids. Things change. Fast.

YMMV