Hmmm. I'm not sure if the anime-girls are AI. I'd need a more careful look than what's available through the article, but I can recognize them as the characters from Konosuba and from One Piece. Possibly fanart, though I know that AI-generators have gotten better at drawing copyrighted characters, the costumes don't have any obvious errors to me. A bit sex'd up, but fan-artists have a habit of sexing-up characters.
I do feel like a lot of the "art" was just redrawing various female anime characters in classic American Pinup poses though.
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To the AI-generator crowd: do you think if I typed in "Megumin Konosuba" (and maybe a few other keywords) into a Llama prompt / Stable Diffusion and run a few thousand cycles or something, that I'd get an image like those "Mojoly Limited" examples?
The easy tells were hands, at least a few months ago. These hands weren't hidden though, they're front-and-center. So have the AI-drawing apps improved upon anatomy that the "hands" problem is solved now?
Or is this a situation where you'd still need an artist to fix the shadows / hands / a few details? Like the majority of the image looks fine, but still needs an artist to fix the known AI errors (but you still grossly speed up in the creation of such images?)
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I don't think any of the girls there look real to my eyes in any case. But its still an impressive feat if AI has gotten this good at drawing.
Sex'd up characters (especially characters that are wearing costumes the target-audience is familiar with) is an age old technique for advertisements in any case. That's why the old "Makes a Porno" movie was that "Star Whores" joke, and why it works.
I'm not particularly worried about the widespread use of "sex advertisements" (even if they are AI drawn / generated), though it does seem unfair to allow AI / chatbot sexual imagery while banning real life ones. But on the other hand, I recognize them as cartoons and fake drawings, while a real-life sexual advertisement probably would be far more shocking to me, personally at least.
Just thinking out loud here. Again: sexual imagery sells, and always has sold advertisements. The only difference here is the (potential) use of AI to lower costs.
To me they are clearly AI generated but I have a very well trained eye to spot them, to generate them download a custom model from civitAI and a LoRA of the particular anime character you want to generate, then used them with automatic webui or ComfyUI (maybe also invokeAI).
Thanks for the keywords. I've given a few googles of those words to see what you're talking about.
So it seems like CivitAI has base models / training data. This seems to be more of the base artistic style for StableDiffusion or something to draw off of. LoRA is some program to tweak models / training data into a specific style (but needs a base style to work with). So the combination of those two techniques seem to generate characters (especially an anime/cartoon, where there's a lot of reference art from the show to take).
But since some characters are very popular (Konosuba is a very popular anime), the LoRA would have already been done (and is possibly being shared on forums online somewhere??). So the advertiser probably just downloaded (base model) + community-sourced LoRA of the Konosuba anime, and then used a prompt to create the advertisement?
Finally, take a classic "pin-up" model shot to provide a sexual base image and bam. Automatic, low effort image that probably gets a lot of clicks.
So CivitAI is a library where people upload custom models, LoRA etc... But no training data; custom model are full Stable Diffusion model finetuned on something, LoRAs are also weights but they are not the full checkpoint, with LoRA you are able to add knowledge to the model that do not required the entire model to be finetuned (for example adding a character).
If a character is popular there will be already many LoRA trained on them (like the characters of Konosuba)
>So the advertiser probably just downloaded (base model) + community-sourced LoRA of the Konosuba anime, and then used a prompt to create the advertisement?
I do feel like a lot of the "art" was just redrawing various female anime characters in classic American Pinup poses though.
--------------
To the AI-generator crowd: do you think if I typed in "Megumin Konosuba" (and maybe a few other keywords) into a Llama prompt / Stable Diffusion and run a few thousand cycles or something, that I'd get an image like those "Mojoly Limited" examples?
The easy tells were hands, at least a few months ago. These hands weren't hidden though, they're front-and-center. So have the AI-drawing apps improved upon anatomy that the "hands" problem is solved now?
Or is this a situation where you'd still need an artist to fix the shadows / hands / a few details? Like the majority of the image looks fine, but still needs an artist to fix the known AI errors (but you still grossly speed up in the creation of such images?)
-----------
I don't think any of the girls there look real to my eyes in any case. But its still an impressive feat if AI has gotten this good at drawing.
Sex'd up characters (especially characters that are wearing costumes the target-audience is familiar with) is an age old technique for advertisements in any case. That's why the old "Makes a Porno" movie was that "Star Whores" joke, and why it works.
I'm not particularly worried about the widespread use of "sex advertisements" (even if they are AI drawn / generated), though it does seem unfair to allow AI / chatbot sexual imagery while banning real life ones. But on the other hand, I recognize them as cartoons and fake drawings, while a real-life sexual advertisement probably would be far more shocking to me, personally at least.
Just thinking out loud here. Again: sexual imagery sells, and always has sold advertisements. The only difference here is the (potential) use of AI to lower costs.