AI Art Surprises Me!

Sometimes it's time to hit the bricks, but for her it was time to lick the bricks. A freebie image I put up my DeviantArt page.

The original Second Life image I used to create the art above. You may notice some differences!

AI art programs can fuck up an image in all sorts of ways, but sometimes they accidentally improve things. In this case I wanted to show a woman chained to a sandstone wall and menaced by another naked woman carrying a spear and wearing a gold mask. It was supposed to be cover art for a story called "Blast from the Past" about a female archaeology who has the ability to experience past life recall from touching historical artifacts. (Basically, this is a lot of woo hooey but it worked for my story.) She experienced the life of a woman captured and enslaved in Bronze Age times when she touches a chain that was used to restrain the enslaved woman.

At one point she is visited and threatened by naked woman wearing a golden mask and carrying a bronze spear, as seen here on the cover art:

Feel free to purchase "Blast from the Past" by clicking here or on the cover art.

The sandstone building and the chains were all purchased on SL marketplace I chose the art for the cover because the helplessness and vulnerability of the slavegirl. Also, naked SL avatar pussies are verboten on book covers.

But the AI art progam fought me as well. There's no rule against buttplugs on Civitai, but not all models grok buttplugs, even the dirty ones. And note how the pussy on the spearwoman got clipped off on the AI art upgrade at the top of the page. I didn't do that. 

O course the real show-stopper is the way the AI art program flipped the woman entirely, had her licking the floor (nice touch, and entirely original. My prompt was a simple description of what my SL image showed). And the way it has something sticking out of her butt with a rope attached to it. And the way the spear went away and became a pole or something. And the way the shackles and chains just disappeared. And the way the shackles on the legs of the warrior woman became ropes, with one rope leading up to... somewhere? 

A tour de force of AI art getting it wrong, but accidentally creating an image that's worth looking at in its own right. It does not happen often.

Second Life to AI Art Backstory

This is a snapshot taken in the Second Life virtual world by me. Those who have visited my Deviant Art site will probably recognize it.

This is the splash photo that greets you when you arrive at my site. Definitely the same image, but... different.

The question of whether AI art is art has been vigorously debated online, with the vast majority coming down firmly on "No." IMHO this is based largely on the (very legitimate) fears of what AI might do to the human economy, and the human race, given that the psychopaths and sociopaths who dominate government and wealth everywhere have finally glommed onto its potential to turn us all into either corpses or work slaves.

AI art threatens no such thing, but it does threaten to drive trad artists away from having an income. It used to be that if you wanted good artwork to market a product, you needed a good artist. Not necessarily true any longer. 

(I do think that long term artists have a better chance of surviving being replaced by AI simply because eventually things created by human design will alway have a cachet of coolness that things created by AI will never have. I base this assumption on what has happened in the world of chess, where AIs surpassed human chess players a decade ago. Did this destroy interest in chess? No, it did not, chess is now doing better than ever thanks to the ease of finding good opponents via online chess. And people follow the chess games of Caruana, Carlson, Praggnanandhaa and many others, all of them human. No one cares about the games of Stockfish and other AI chess programs, because they're not human, hence not relatable. The same will occur with art: people will care about human artists, not AI art programs. This is not necessarily true for engineers, marketers, clerks and so forth.)

But the real basis of the claims of AI art not being art is that digital artists do little or nothing to create art. They just describe the artwork they want and the computer magically produces it for them. Those cases are very different, and in some cases that's exactly what happens. Though even with prompts alone it can be difficult to get what you want, especially if you're creating sexually explicit material, which admittedly horny scientists estimate is roughly 99.9999999 percent of all AI art. Because most AI art models are designed to FIGHT LIKE HELL to avoid creating explicit sexual images. They have to be cajoled, tricked, and sometimes even beaten severely to produce explicit imagery. (OK, I'm exaggerating here. You can't beat an AI art program. But an AI art program is perfectly capable of making you want to beat it severely.)

Still in the case of the Second Life-based image on this page I clearly created the blueprint for the art. I customed-designed the avatar's body. I bought skin for it, I bought custom hair for it and I bought custom hands for it as well as the clothing it is wearing, all from Second Life designers. I obtained the dance animation it is using (it was a freebie, I think, there are a lot of freebies on Second Life).

I also controlled the lighting in the sky (Second Life lets you control that in some sims, though the lighting only applies to your avatar, not other avatars on the sim.) I didn't build the striking buildings in the background, that was the sim designer's work. (And they did a great job, another great Gorean sim build.)

I also chose the camera angle and location from which I took the snapshot. I wanted to go for a romantic, epic image, and I think I got it.

Now the Civitai model that I used did some really great work based on my Second Life image, but it's very obvious that the Civitai model was based on my snapshot. You could probably get a vaguely similar image of a dancer in a chalwar on a rooftop terrace at sunrise/sunset with clouds via a text prompt, but your chances of getting  something close to this image are quite low, and the chances of getting something close to being the exact same image are almost nil.

So I created an original artwork with the help of the Second Life video game. Does that make me an artist? No. An artist is someone who can create an artwork and control how it looks down to the least detail. And I don't have that kind of control, I am at the mercy of Second Life and Civitai to a certain extent. 

But I'll tell you one thing. There are modern artists whose work consists of painting stripes of color on canvas. Or splashes of paint poured right out of the can onto a canvas on the floor. Or whose work consists of written descriptions of what they would have done, pasted on a museum wall. (I did not make any of those examples up.) And if those guys are artists, so am I. And so are you, gentle readers. So are we all. It's a very fluid term, it turns out.

Be sure and read the fine print!

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The Romance of AI Art When Art Imitates Life

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Gun Bullet Thunder Sword Coffee Art!

Yesterday I created this promo art as I was sipping my Gun Bullet Thunder Sword coffee. (It's just coffee with a tablespoon of butter emulsified into it, instead of/in addition to milk. The keto guys started drinking it and I guess the term "butter coffee" wasn't macho enough for them, so they renamed it "bulletproof coffee" which I'll grant you does have Rule of Cool written all over it. So I decided to go one better and take the macho to the max with Thunder Sword Hot Pussy Bullet coffee. Take that, "butter coffee"!) 

Anyway came up with this promo piece for Erotic Slavegirls of Outer Space and really liked it. I started out by getting some images of a raging battle in outer space between 1950s style pulp spaceships.to go with the B-movie ambience of the novel, using a Civitai text prompt. No naked women involved so I figured it would be easy. But Civitai fought me anyway. The spaceships are more 1980s style spacecraft, heavily influenced by Star Wars. I could live with that, but for some reason Civitai just HAD to introduce planetscapes or moonscapes into the image, couldn't just go with "spaceships fighting in outer space with planets and stars in the background" which was pretty much my prompt. Still, the images were dramatic, space-fighty and outer-spacey in general, so I went with it. 

After looking at all the images I'd gotten (about eight usable ones) I looked at various slavegirl images I had created on Civitai, generally via Image to Image using an SL avatar, looking for something that would work well with the outerspace images. I settled on the one seen above, because the position of her arms and legs splayed out in different directions paralleled the ravening bolts of doom fired by the spaceships, and the spaceships themselves. 

I knocked out the slavegirl's background using Deposit Photos' free background knockout service which tends to do a better job than the AI art background knockout options (thanks, Deposit Photos!) and then pulled up both images in GIMP. I placed the image of the slavegirl on a layer atop the space battle image base, shrank the slavegirl to fit, and then used the layer opacity slider to get her transparent enough that she matched the background image visually. This left her so transparent that planets, spaceships and ravening bolts of doom were clearly visible through her. I thought it was a nice effect, so I left it as is. 

Came out pretty well, I thought. Enjoy!

Civitai Blunders

I've had fun ragging on Tensor AI, Leonardo AI and MageSpace for their blunders, but lemme tall ya... Civitai can blunder an image just as badly as the others. For instance, this image. It is an image to image shot, which means it's meant to make a copy of the original image but gussy it up AI-style. Here's the image it was copied from:

This is a screenshot from Second Life using SL avatars and as you can see, the Civitai version is not an exact reproduction. What I wanted was an image of this semi-happy couple (the Slave Leia avatar appears to be scowling, and I love that) in more human, less cartoonish form. What I got was the two avatars merged into a single human form, the Civitai model I was using apparently not trained for fucking, a fairly common problem on Civitai. So it deleted the woman's hips and made the man's legs her legs. Well, fair enough, I guess. But then it twisted that poor avatar's back 180 degrees and also made it do a kind of loop. I actually think from the way her brawny shoulder and arm are positioned that she is supposed to be fisting herself from behind. 

    The AI also transformed her very nice panel gag into a crappily done cloth gag. But it did give her a humanish patina. Problem is, when you've done what the AI did to that avatar's body, no amount of patina is gonna help.

I did get better results eventually, though not perfect by any means.

Great Expectations

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About That Cover Art For The Prison Bitch Trilogy...

Vagina trouble!

Image source: Cover art by me, from a custom Second Life avatar run through Leonardo.

Leonardo AI can be such a damned tease. I ran this pretty good Second Life avatar through it:

Tanned Second Life bikini babe wearing the tiniest microthong evah!

The Leonardo avatar I got was just gorgeous. But I guess that tiny little microthong on the Second Life avatar defeated Leonardo and it screwed up the image. It ended the thong somewhere on the avatar's happy trail rather than over it's pussy. (Leonardo did get one image right: it put the tiny microthong where it belonged, half-buried in the Leonardo image's pussy.  But even then, Smashwords is allergic to pussies. No tiniest vaguest bit of what might be a vagina can appear on a Smashwords cover. I've been dinged for it before. No visible genitalia, even for hardcore taboo erotica.

So I went with the Leonardo AI that had the best other features, which was the one above. Its interpretation of the pasties on the SL avatar was brilliant. The image had the sleek, tanned blonde look of a beach party girl. So  I tried to make the thong work. But it was incredibly difficult because I went at it in the stupidest possible way. (I blame GIMP!) I wanted to just widen and extend the thong bottom so that it just barely covered the entire vagina instead of ending somewhere in the woman's happy trail region, leaving her pussy, such as it was, exposed.

All I really needed to do was cut and paste some pieces of the existing thong to get the shape I needed to pass Smashwords muster. That proved problematical however. The problem was that the bottom of the image's crotch was wide and distant from the top of the thong, and needed a lot of stretching and reshaping to reach where it needed to, and it had to follow natural lines from the top of the thong. The basic problem was my conception of the thong was all wrong, so I kept creating weirdly shaped thongs.

I finally decided my problem was the piece-by-piece approach, so I used GIMP's Cage Transform tool to create a thong that covered what it needed to. It seemed so plausible: you drew a cage outlining the object you want to change, with points set along the lines of the cage. When you grab a point and move it, the image changes to conform to the new outline of the cage. It seems like just the thing to create a thong that covered what it needed to.

Disembodied thong. A shame it went wrong!

This proved to be wrong. I created a layer that was just the thong itself, pasted it into a layer above the base image, and attempted to adjust the thong's dimensions. I had imagined moving the cage would keep the shapes being moved the same, and that the distance I moved the cage element would determine how much the image distorted. This turned out not to be true. Using the cage tool was very much like using the smudge tool. The smudge tool is a tool that will be very familiar to pastelists (people who create art with pastel sticks, not people who paste lists). It allows you to mix colors together by smudging them together with the tool, much as a pastel or charcoal artist smudges their chalk with his finger to mix it with nearby chalks. It's  great tool, I use it often.

But what I got when I used the cage tool was a smudged, lumpy outline of the thong instead of the smooth-edged garment. And because the amount of distance the thong distorted did not match the amount of distance the cage points were dragged, it was verr hard to get the thong parts moved to where they needed to be. And of course when the cage points were dragged, the edges of the image were smudged as well as moved. So instead of an enlarged, differently-shaped thong I got a fuzzy, blobby approximation of the thong. After some obvious failures, I dumped the cage transform tool.

But a good thing did come out of it. One of the fuzzy thong outlines I got from the cage transform tool was shaped like a breech cloth instead of a thong. It looked like it was hanging loose between her legs instead of tucked between them. And I realized that that was a lot easier to build using cut and past, so I did that. And it looked even sexier than a thong that covered her entire pussy area, because it looked like it was hanging loose which meant her pussy was just hanging out there behind the breech cloth. The slightest breeze might flip the cloth aside revealing her pussy. Much sexier.

If you want an example of the way the smudge tool works when you've got the right task for it, notice that the image I worked with has transformed the ballgag in the Second Life Avatar's mouth into mouth hooks, or something like them. But the image on the cover wears a ballgag. What happened there was that one of the Leonardo AIs came out with a pretty good ballgag so I lopped off her head and shoulders and transplanted them to the one I used. I pasted the head into a layer over the base and fiddled with the color values and then merged it down with the other layer. There was a faint line where the shoulders were on top of the base because the colors did not exactly match. But I just took the smudge tool and mixed those colors together and now you absolutely cannot tell that the head on the cover is a transplant. No one would have ever known if I had not told everyone right here on this post. Handy thing, that smudge tool.

 But what about the fully dressed Kim Halstead?

A modern professional woman, you betcha, courtesy of Leonardo AI.

My initial plan for finance banker Kim was to pick up an image from Deposit Photos. I knew they had tons of images of women in business suits, and tons of women with sexy bodies. So it seemed likely that they would have images of women with sexy bodies in business suits. I mean, c'mon.

Turns out I was wrong. There is a great gulf fixed between the bodies of women in business attire and women in bikinis, underwear or nothing. Sexy women often have curvy bodies. Business women are almost all thin and not curvy. Actually, among the ones I checked, "almost" is not required: none of them were curvy.

So I went back to Leonardo AI and did a text prompt to get the image above. It was easy, almost ridiculously so. The woman was clothed and not having sex and not doing anything  that could be interpreted as having sex or being sexy, she was just standing there being bankerish. No censorship issues. I did get a certain amount of images of women who were not curvy, and images of women who looked overweight by not curvy. But I also got a certain amount of curvy women in business suits. Didn't take long at all.

And as a result I got banker Kim standing next to naked and gagged and bound Kim, who is also standing.

Finally, for the foreground I reused my Princess Gaia image from the cover of the book.

Love that pissed-off expression.

This time I used more of her body, but still left out the guy who's fucking her doggie style because of course that wouldn't fly for a book cover. I also had to emblonden her hair (just a matter of color cycling her hair and then pasting it in over her brown hair), since this is supposed to be another version of Kim, who is blond. The idea is to represent Kim as Banker Kim, Sexy Kim, and Fucked, Bound and Gagged Kim as she sinks into the pit of depravity that is Club Rape. 

The prison with all the guards is leftover from my Club Rape cover. I made quite a few background images for that one, most of them unusable for that cover, but this one worked out well for this cover. What I liked about it was the cool colors, because it added depth to the image. Gaia/Kim in the foreground is in far warmer colors than the figures of Banker Kim and Naked Kim behind her, who were in much warmer colors than the guards and prison behind them.

Here's the cover all put together:

Go ahead and buy the book, I'm a much better writer than I am an artist. Just click on this text to go to Smashwords.

And here's what's happening to Gaia/Kim on the cover, just so you know:

Ain't it always the way?

Leonardo AI Motion 2.0: A Move Too Far!

It started out as a not-so-innocent Second Life image of a Slave Leia avatar getting fucked by a naked male avatar. Cartoonish but pretty good, especially the annoyed expression in the avatar's eyes as it is bent over the table, bound and gagged and fucked in public. Mm, that's good bondage imagery. But could I get prudish Leonardo AI to create a good still image of such a blatantly sexual image?

Yes we can! I was most concerned about the gag, Leonardo AI has a real problem with gag. You can't even call them gags in the prompts, Leonardo thinks gags are evil bad things and will not knowingly draw them. So I ignored the gag in my prompt and hoped Leonardo wouldn't fuck it up like it has in so many instances. And it not only didn't fuck up the gag, it improved it. It fucked up Leia's shoulder, and made the male avatar's upper thigh skinnier than his calf and made his arm less believable and let's not even talk about what happened to the male figur's hip, but overall, not too bad for Leonardo. But the question is, what would happen if I tried to create a motion video?

I made the Leonardo AI image into a video using Motion 2.0. My prompt was: "A woman rests on a dais, gazing moodily into the distance while a man looms behind her. " Because I sure as hell couldn't say "A woman rests on a dais, her arms bound behind her, as a man vigorously fucks her doggie style from behind." No sex, no bondage, none of that in the prompts. Leonardo's Prompt Enhance feature took my somewhat generic text and made it into: "Woman slowly turns her head, gaze lingering. Man approaches, shadow falling on her, camera subtly zooms in." And I said, "What the hell, I'll go with it." This was a mistake. It somehow came up with two men, one of them little more than a mannequin the other wearing the wisp of fabric from Leia's butt as a loincloth, a much larger loincloth. Also, I knew that botched shoulder would be trouble. Sure enough, I got a case of Disembodied Arm when the AI decided to move her arm for some reason. The bright spot was Leia's face: the gag remained in place as she moved, properly drawn, and her eyes and posture were very expressive. So I tried again.

I used the same image, but this time I turned down the Prompt Enhance option. My prompt was, "A woman rests on a dais gazing moodily into the distance as a man looms behind her." Turns out it was very little improvement. Leonardo AI Motion 2.0 interpreted this as, "Man fucking woman doggie style literally deflates like a punctured blow-up doll. His arm becomes a leg and then falls off as he magically transforms into a bearded man clad in barbaric battle dress who walks away. As the man transforms from a deflated blow up doll to a Roman warrior, the woman's head rotates 180 degrees and the backe of her body magically becomes the front of her body as she crosses her legs and turns to watch the man leave." This was not an improvement over the preceding video at all. The gag remains strong, surviving even the 180 degree head rotation. And her butt interacts with an odd realism to the deflating blow-up man. Overall, though, it's trash. But what if?..

The prompt on this one was, "Woman lies still, man slowly walks away from dais, camera slowly pans to follow him." This was Prompt Enhance's version of my prompt, "Women rests on dais and man behind her rises and walks away." I figured, "Meh, close enough" and went with Prompt Enhance's version. A mistake. What Leonardo Motion gave me was, "Man rises after fucking woman, sliding his cock out of her pussy as he does so. But a nice pair of blue jeans magically appears on his body so you don't see his cock sliding out as he rises. Also as he rises, his right arm gets confused with her leg, which HAD been resting comfortably on the dais, but now lies sprawled hehind her as if he had shoved it aside as he rises. He trots out of the room at  good clip, a true "Wham bam thank you ma'am" kind of guy. Since the camera tracks him we don't get a reaction shot of Leia, which would have been nice. But we do get a shot of another dancer dancing forlornly by another dais, with no one to watch her or fuck her. Ain't that always the way?

And after all that, I gave up. I'd had enough of this visual abuse!

Leonardo AI Motion 2.0 Don't Need No Steenkin' Gravity!

This is how it started. A practically naked Second Life avatar ;photographed in a shallow stream with a luxurious jungle background. It's one of the best Second Life pics I've taken, although the avatar is, well, kinda bug-eyed. But such nice water, such nice jungle foliage, and such nice tanned breasts and a pussy barely covered by a waistcloth. 

So of course I HAD to run it through Leonardo AI and see what I got. What I got was eight iterations that are pretty darned close to this one. A great image, transformed the bug eyes into human eyes that are only slightly wonky, and really creates a lifelike jungle background. The stream is more realisitic than the Second Life stream but lacks the transparency of the SL version and still looks kinda AI-generated. And the more naturalistic hair just isn't as pretty as the SL avatar's hair. Worst of all, it Leonardo put that stupid bikini or one like it on every iteration and shrank those big, beautiful breasts down to a "nice rack" and gave us a granny bikini in place of that tiny wisp of silk. Still, it kept the nice skin tones and made the body more human. But what would happen if I gave it motion?

This happened. Here was my prompt: "Woman rises gracefully from stream, swirling water around her as she dances joyfully, camera slowly panning to reveal lush jungle." This video is clearly nothing like what I asked for. It's as if I asked for, "Woman lying in water is slowly pulled into the air by an invisible force, then is suddenly launched upward at high speed, driving the camera underwater somehow, then the camera resurfaces and see her flung into the trunk of a tall palm tree, then ragdolling as she falls toward the ground." VERY imaginative but it sure as hell wasn't what I asked for. Clearly, Leonardo AI does not understand gravity. Or much of anything in this instance.

Couldn't let it rest there, or course. Tried again with the same image using this prompt hoping to gentle things down: "Woman smiles, waves, then gently dips her hand in the stream. Camera slowly zooms in, focusing on her joyful expression." As you can see it worked a LOT better though I'm unsure why. Probably just random AI malarkey. I do wish the AI hadn't uglified the face, the face on this one is worse than the SL avatar toward the end, though much more human-looking. Lesson learned, whatever it was! 

Leonardo AI Makes 2D Second Life Avatar Come To Life!

 
The Second Life avatar where it all began.

After I ran the Leondardo AI'd avatar through Kling AI's Motion 2 program I got this. Nice! Living woman from a drawing! The way motion video converts these images to 3D motion is amazing. The prompt I used was: "Woman slowly stretches, luxuriously awakening on a bed. Camera gently pans, then zooms slightly as she sits up, reaching for a nearby object." It wasn't a total win: the grayscreen background did not magically turn into a bed. Instead we got grass that I didn't ask for. Also, the diaphanous barely-there bra on her back magically turned into a real bra in front. Though I did like the way Motion 2.0 integrated the front of her collar with her bra. And her left forearm got a littl thick at times. But the best thing was the way the video lingered for a moment on the original image as is, with her literally lifting herself from 2D status to 3D status. Nice! The way her butt morphs is particularly nice. That's the way it works when you start out with a nice butt.

Leonardo AI Walks The Dinosaur Just For Fun

This is how it started, an image created in Second Life. Found a jungle set with a tyrannosaur and posed an avatar in front of it and took some pix. Came out great, pure B-movie excitement! Would work as sweat mag art too. But I thought I'd make a video from it.

The AI did a pretty good job overall with everything except of course the armbinder. That was shiny metal in the original, but somehow Leonardo wanted to turn the metal into soft, breathable fabric in every iteration. But at least the bondage gear was still there. I actually wrote 'with her wrists cuffed behind her back" because cuffs sounds like it could be crime or adventure related, not necessarily a bad evil awful sex thing. And it worked, except when I converted it to motion...

My prompt for all four videos was something close to this: "A woman with her arms cuffed behind her back sees a tyrannosaur. She spins and runs toward the camera with her hands still cuffed behind her back, screaming in terror, with the tyrannosaur chasing her." 

This is the best of the four videos I made. In each and every case, as soon as the woman spins around her armbinder magically disappears or morphs into cloth armbands that don't hinder her arm movements at all. She's pumping those arms as she runs. Screaming too. 

Also, our heroine is stark naked in the initial Second Life pic. And Leonardo AI kept her stark naked in the still image it created of her. But on each and every video they put a bikini on her. When it's that consistent, it's gotta be censorship. Great. Censorship is why I stopped my Kling subscription.

But you know what? Bad as it is, my video is more exciting and lifelike than almost every stop motion dinosaur scene from the 1920s to the 1960s. People who think CGI isn't great stuff for SF movies are just crazy. How can you not see how much better modern movies look than the absolute CRAP we got for SF movie special effects and props in the old days? I remember watching "Quatermass and the Pit" which had a pretty good script and solid acting, for the most part, and just laughing when the body of one of the Martians was an obvious two-meter long plastic replica of a cricket. So pathetic.

And of course those old movies had budgets ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to millions, with most somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. You know what I could do with a budgets of a hundred thousand dollars and my present gear? I could spend a hundred bucks on video production and $99,900 on hookers and blow, that's what!

I know how Hollywood accounting works.  

Now, About That Cover For the Pet Shop Girls Trilogy -- Leonardo AI Hits And Misses

 
Here's the cover of "The Pet Shop Girls Trilogy," for reference. Click on it to get the book!

I knew what I wanted when I stared out making the cover for TPSGT (The Pet Shop Girls Trilogy). I had three slavegirls featured in my stories and I wanted images of the three of them looking sexy and naked on the cover. So I went to the folders where I built the covers of the three novels that make up TPSGT and looked for images I could use. The images all started out as Second Live avatars, here they are, for the record:

The Second Live avatar that Katie was based on.

The Second Life avatar Nataly was based on.

The Second Live avatar Susan was based on. Note the ropes. They're supposed to be a rope bondage version of a bitch suit, but they didn't really work.

Here are the three Leonardo AI images I was able to create using the avatars:

Here's Katie all AI'd up, and damn what an improvement. I ran quite a few iterations to get this image, and I'm so glad I stuck with it. I love the result here, especially that beaming smile. The face in general is a huge improvement. And the breasts are very nice indeed, mostly because of that smooth honey brown skin she has. I was glad to have a person of color because the other two characters were very Caucasian-looking and I had no problem at all with Katie being brown. Hell yes!

Nataly didn't change much except she got a lot more human looking and a lot less cartoonish-looking. Her ugly, lumpy shoulders got smoothed out. Her skin and hair improved. The only problem area was the ballgag. It didn't come out right on ANY of my iterations. (This image is Photoshopped. I drew a circle around the confused ballgag parts and borrowed the ballgag from a porn photo and then did some tedious editing to get it just right.)

Nataly's Leonardo AI version was incredible. Most especially that facial expression. Leonardo took the apprehensive expression on the SL avatar and converted to a lost, haunted expression. Her eyes are incredibly expressive. Even MORE amazing, the collar came out OK and the ballgag improved! Almost always, Leonardo AI will fuck up ballgags big time, and they almost always turn a collar into a necklace that looks nothing like the collar. Also, the tail is much improved, with the color and texture matching Susan's hair. And even the shape of the tail was much improved. Only problem was the ropes, which Leonardo AI interpreted as lacy, frilly woman things. I can't even blame Leonardo for that. The ropes on the SL avatar are not especially well done, a weakness of SL physics. I thought about hand drawing ropes but I wound up saying the words that so many artists have: "Fuck it. It'll do." I mean, yeah, she does appear to have lace growing out of one armpit, but whachagonnado? (That's why you need real artists if you can afford them, boys and girls. When they say "fuck it!" it's over something a non-artist would not notice.)

Next I needed something to tie the three images together visually. My first track was, since they were Pet Shop slavegirls, they could be posing in a Pet Shop window, trying to get people to buy them. I went to Deposit Photos to see if they had any Pet Store art I could use, but amazingly, the Pet Store art was about dogs and cats and stuff. Also a lot of it was vector art. I gave up after a while. I couldn't find anything I could use so after a while I stopped looking and went to my backup plan. 

Fortunately I had a backup plan, which was to use prompts to create a Pet Store exterior with display window filled with nothing (so I could paste in the girls). Unfortunately, I had a bright idea for that, which was to have a neon sign over or in the windows with the words "Please Buy Me!" glowing.

This was when I discovered how many ways there were to misspell "Please Buy Me." I had naively thought that by including the text I wanted in my prompt, the AI would use those exact letters to represent the word, "Please Buy Me." But noooooooo, instead I got every last possible misspelling of "Please Buy Me." "Pelase Buy Me" was the favorite, but also "Plase By Me," "Peals Buy Me" and ";!Ple::s Be Me." Maybe about 1 in 10 iterations had the right spelling.

There were other problems as well. I asked for an empty display space behind the window. (I did not ask for "no dogs and cats" as a negative prompt because I knew from past experience that this would only encourage Leonardo AI to give me lots of images of dogs and cats.) So I still got lots of images of dogs and cats in the "empty" display space, also people, food bowls, all kinds of pet products on shelves, and occasionally, an empty space. I went through many iterations and eventually got several images of pet shop windows with empty, or at least, mostly empty, spaces behind them that were usable.

Then I went to work pasting in the Pet Girls and that's when I ran into a more difficult problem, perspective. The AI had provided me with images of people looking in the window (because I asked for it in the prompt). They worked for my intent but there was a perspective problem. I want the images of the Pet Girls to be large, dominating the page, because I know my horny, horny readership. But the people in the foreground set the perspective, and if I made my images large they would look like giantesses. If I made them small enough to look normal next to the onlookers they would be tiny indeed, problematical since book covers are vertical spaces. 

Yeah, a really sad image that just doesn't work.

I tried arranging the Pet Girls in many configurations in several Pet Shop windows, and none of them worked. In addition to the perspective issue, there was a layering issue. I could paste the images into the window space, but there was no easy way to make them look like they were behind glass and have them dominate the page. And if it wasn't easy I wasn't about to try it! I had deadlines, dammit! So I gave up the Pet Shop window idea and did some seriously lateral thinking.

I decided to just display the three images in a generic kind of space, no window or shoppers. I soon realized that I would need some kind of background art to make the space behind the Pet Girls something other than dead space. So I thought about the kind of images you might find in a place where Pet Girls are sold. If I had been more imaginative, and had more time, I could have come up with some fairly imaginative ideas, like maybe pet girls jumping through hoops or kneeling before owners with their butts stuck out.

But I didn't have the time, I just focussed generically sexy images that might look right as the background of a human Pet Shop. And eventually I had an idea: the image most people think of as belonging in a place where very sexy things are done is a nude silhouette of a woman in a sexy pose. Lots of TV shows and movies have used this kind of art as a sign of a sexy business. 

This time I made no attempt to get the images I wanted via Leonardo AI. It fights sexy imagery hard. After writing this image I went to Leonardo AI and created images using this prompt: "A series of silhouettes of women in bikinis looking beautiful."  Here's what I got:

Yeah, "silhouette" is another word Leonardo AI clearly does not understand. Also it whiffed on the word "series." I was right, getting what I wanted from Leonardo AI would have been a bear.

So I went to Deposit Photos looking for my silhouettes and there I struck gold. They had exactly what I needed, plenty of it. I did a bit of shopping and picked a series of images that had a lot of submissive-looking poses. They were all black and white silhouettes, and I didnt want that, it would be too strong, not at all what I needed. But I knew how to fix that, I just put a golden-brown (emphasis on the "golden") layer over the silhouettes and worked the opacity of both layers until I had what I wanted. You can see it in the background of the cover art. Worked very nicely I think.

The only other element of the cover is that Katie is riding Susan. This was just a matter of cutting and pasting multiple layers of Katie on trop of Susan. It was tedious, time-consuming work but not difficult other than that, mainly because Susan and Katie's poses worked very well for a horsie ride.

That's the full story of that "easy" cover. It took a long time for me to get it finished and looking something like "right." Someday I will make enough money to hire and artist and pay them a decent price for their work. Until then, I'll continue to put huge effort into creating mediocre cover art! 

Leonardo AI Hates Foot Fetishists

It started with this. An innocent-looking Second Life avatar chained to a sofa in a beautiful park. No greenscreen here, it's all Second Life. Rentable set, sofa purchased on the Second Life marketplace, with custom avatar. Still, the mix of cartoonish avatar and sofa and realistic background (clearly just a photo on a prim) just didn't work. So I ran it through Leonardo to get that lifelike feel.

Now THAT'S more like it! I made many more runs through Leonardo AI than usual this time. The people who use prompts entirely do this, so I thought I'd try it. And it worked, although I spent hours on just that one step this time, so there was a cost. But just LOOK at that women. OK, maybe she appears to be bending the knee a little too much, but I figure readers might think it's a cushion beneath the cover. But as always with AI art, there's a catch.

Oh, Leonardo, you just don't have feet down yet, do you? The Lovecraftian foot strikes again! Though perhaps this is Leonardo AI's attempt to show how ingrown toenails feel, visually.

Leonardo AI and Second Life: Made for Artistic Mayhem!

 

It started like this. I wanted an image of a slavegirl relaxing on a loveseat in a park. I used a Second Life avatar, but instead of going the greenscreen route, I took a different approach. I knew that I had access to a park set on Second Life. So I bought a love seat, a major element of my story, and I rented the set and ran the animations on the loveseat to see what worked. I started out with a fairly raunchy pose to see what Leonardo would do with it.

Leonard's response: "Loveseat, grassy sward, river, pussy, tits: all good. Gag? NO WAY. I'll draw her a face instead. Red hair? NO WAY. She's supposed to be ASIAN, even though she is red-headed and has pale skin and generally Causasian features.  Also, I'm gonna fuck up the collar, the shackles and the cuffs, because NO WAY. She's a naked Asian woman! Except for her feet, imma gonna leave her pussy and tits hanging out, but she will have SHOES by damn!" (I was able to get around Leonardo's Asian model bias by using Photoreal version 1 instead of 2, or maybe it was the other way around. I forget. Anyway, that is a pretty good naked woman in the pose of th SL Avatar. There were many that were worse.

So I chose a less raunchy pose and I used another model and got this. Much closer to the avatar. Too close, really. It didn't look like a photo, it looked like a drawing. But at least it was sexy drawing. Except of course the pussy, such as it was (it was just a line, BFD) was somehow erased. And the eyes were freaking wonky. And for God's sake don't look at that foot. Also don't look at whatever that thing behind her left leg is. It does not bear examining! Also that one bent wrist with her cuff kind of deflating it. It was not a pretty picture!

I fixed the wobbly eyes and lessened the awfulness of the right wrist. I even drew in a pussy line. (Woo-hoo!) I left the left foot and whatever the thing behind her left leg is alone. There are some things man was not meant to mess with! This is the background art for yesterday's promo.

This SL avatar would have a LOT of difficulties if run through AI. I knew that right arm would be a problem. And the pose in general, not being absolutely typical would be a problem. But the thing is, see that pink thing between the avatar's mouth and the gag in this image? That's a dildo. A plastic cock. Because this gag is a cock gag built into a panel gag, as is commonly done. But you can't see that it's a cock gag, because of the panel. I wondered if I could use this image to sneak a fellatio-like image through Leonardo AI by identifying the pink thing as a popsicle in my prompt. Let's see what we got, shall we?

  

What I got was "deformed woman with rabies barfing in river." It got rid of the panel gag but substituted stuff that looked nothing like a popsicle, generally like barf, though this is the barfiest of the lot. The right butt is All Wrong and the right arm has been subsumed into her torso, undoubtedly in some David Cronenburgish way. Also, for some reason, the river behing the sofa has overflowed its banks and left ankle-deep water everywhere. Because that's what you get when you try to sneak sexy stuff past Leonardo AI! This was one genre of awful that I got. There's another.

Here we have the return of the dreaded Misplaced Butthole above her butt crack, accompanied by a new phenomenon, the Misplaced Bellybutton in the middle of her back. Also, ther arm is attempting to make an appearance but not quite managing it. The left arm is fine, but the left hand will not bear looking at. And the toes are kinda dicey. No flooding in this one, at least. This time I prompted that the woman was bending over to look at a flower and wearing a Covid mask. I did get the flower, right on the mask, which covers her whole face. Serves me right!

The sofa, being an adult Second Life sofa, had adult sex animations as well. Most of them, well, all of them really, made very little sense with just one avatar. I could have added a second avatar, but I didn't wanna. With the "mood" Leonardo AI is currently in I knew Lovecraftian horror awaited me if I were to try such a thing.

I did take a shot at running the above image through Leonardo. My prompt for this image was "a beautiful red-headed woman takes a tumble from her love seat." As you can see, Leonardo took the opportunity to flood the park again and have her take a dive from the SS Loveseat. It also REALLY fucked up her butt, and not in a good way. It also messed up her face. And her hands and feet do not bear close inspection. I knew it! 

There is a lesson in all of this somewhere, but I have no idea what it is.