Behold the Horror of Civitai AI Botches

 Here's a few of the weird-looking disasters I got while trying to use Civitai to create sexy, kinky images in the midst of the credit-card company crackdown on sexiness. To be fair, these images were exceptions. Most of the images I got had minor issues like a deformed hand or wonky eyes in an otherwise all right picture. And much more frequently than I got these monstrosities, I got very nice, very usable art, which I have been using to promote my books. And when AI is good, it can be very, very good.

Yeah, this is straight-up body horror. I did not ask for anything like this. As I recall I was going for a fairly prosaic porn pose, but the Pornmaster model I was working with gave me more, and less, than I had bargained for.

Another bit of horror imagery brought to life unasked. This was from SDXL with no model, just a prompt for a naked woman tied to a bed spreadeagled with ropes. SDXL never did manage to actually tie the woman with ropes, though it did put ropes in every iteration, just lying around looking ropey. This is the worst of the lot, with most of her body sunken into the bed and both hands deformed and horrible. Hence her expression. SDXL got that right! 

So I decided to try prompting SDXL with a request for an image in an artistic style rather than a photorealistic style. In this case I went with pulp novel cover art because I love that stuff. And this was the absolute worst of them. Once again, I just wanted a woman tied to a bed. Where SDXL got this, I have no idea, and I don't want to know, either. (To be fair, most of the images were much better than this. They just didn't include nudity or bondage. But very nice otherwise!)

The thing that gives AI art its particular horror when it strays off the reservation is that parts of the image look so human and real and then other parts get twisted in weird nonhuman ways but also, very realistically... and it's that realistic weirdness that does the trick.

And then there's the images where the AI art really seems to be getting the hang of it, until you notice the model has three legs, one of which ends in a hand... a beautifully rendered hand, mind you, and also with an extra handish thing growing out of her knee. And of course those wonky, wonky eyes.

And at the far end of the spectrum, you get this... the poor woman is just a fading greasy spot on the wall with meaningless iron bars around her. I mean, it could be a woman, but the only part the AI got right was the leg. And it didn't get the leg all THAT right, just looks better than the brown blobs that constitute the rest of the figure.

A lot of my work is image to image work, where you give the AI software a guiding image for it to work from, often in conjunction with a prompt. At left you see my guiding image, a vidcap of a Second Life avatar. At center you see the result I got from Civitai using a simple prompt, "A beautiful woman kneels." As you can see, the Second Life avatar is infinitely better than the "improved" AI version. But on the right you see the version that Leonardo came up with. Images like that are the reason I like working with AI. 

But you know, as I put this post together the Civitai version of the kneeling SL cutie kept reminding me of something. And I soon remembered what it was: It was the botched restoration of the famous historical masterpiece painting of Christ, "Ecce Homo." (I thought it was Italian for "no homo" but it actually means "Behold the Man" which makes more sense.) The flattened colors and the cruder artwork are both there in the botched version of Ecce Homo and in the botched AI version of the SL avatar. But what really nails it is the warped lips, the simplified eyes, the absolutely crude eyebrows. It's truly an eerie echo, and yet at the same time, it's a truly inspiring example of the way both artificial intelligence and natural stupidity can bring us all together to say, "Eew!"

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! 

Cover Art and Inspirational Art For "Captured By Gangsters"

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Underwater Beauty

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Art of Bondage Photo 4 - The Perma-Squirmer!

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Guido Crepax: Getting Mainstreamed

A panel from Guido Crepax's graphic novel version of The Story of O. Image source: Comic Art Fans .com. You can get The Story of O and other Crepax works on Amazon, but they are freaking expensive. I have seen some listed as low as $90 but I would say, "buyer beware."

The flying monkeys, bless their leathery little hearts, brought in an interesting article on Guido Crepax. The article itself is a worth a read but the part I found most interesting was where the flying monkeys found it: the Comics Alliance website.

The Comics Alliance website deals with comics of all sorts, but it gives a lot of attention to DC and Marvel comics, in addition to webcomics, and also has no problem with dealing with adult comics like Crepax's work. Batman and Superman are commonplace topics, but Fetishman has shown up as well. And Guido Crepax.

Now if you'll read the article you will find many references to Crepax's powerful visual style, etc., the way he was one of the first to really use page frames in a different and unique way to tell his story. And that's true. But his title is "Bianca Fails As Bondage Porn" which admits that much of the appeal of Crepax's work is its bondage element. And he's right about the power of Crepax's work. But only partly. And he's wrong about Bianca failing as porn.

You can see why in the panel from Crepax's Story of O that leads off this article. Crepax absolutely minimized the text in his stories, a good thing for us English readers because he is Italian and his characters' text speech is Italian. So far as I know, there are no English language editions of his work. that said most of his panels contain no text or muffled grunting or random noises.

Speech is also not very necessary because the characters in his stories barely relate to each other, their eyes are out of focus in some middle ground almost always, even as they speak to one another. They all appear to be engaged in internal reveries, even when they're talking to each other. Which they don't do all that often.

The thing is, you can see Crepax's talent in that Story of O panel ... the images are raunchy and yet filled with erotic tension. Look at the hands on the woman being branded, even if he did not include text to show she is screaming, you would know how she is responding to being branded. And the way the woman's lips twist around the gag. And the way the other woman's eyes are so intense over her panel gag. And the way the weight of the woman's butt sags against the tight leather straps that hold the dildo plug in her ass. All done with just pen and ink.

Being forced to stick to the narrative structure of The Story of O helps overcome Crepax's great weakness as a storyteller. His skill as an artist and visual storyteller is like having a powerful sports car capable of moving at great speed, turning on a dime and braking to a halt in a second ... but as a storyteller, he drives that sports car like it's a clown car. He's all over the place. The guys has a weakness for dream imagery, which DOES give him freedom to use his powerful abilities as an artist, but the narrative splinters and fractures and you're left with a story that is no story, just a succession of images. Which is kinda what "Bianca" looks like.

And on a personal level, I find his style of drawing faces kinda repulsive at times. Take the face in the upper right of the Story of O panel. Please. I THINK what Crepax was going for was a powerful older woman with a big nose. But what I get from it is an older woman with a big nose looking bored, and just not that interested in the proceedings. Not erotic at a all.

Furthermore, the "lion tamer" frames in Bianca ... as a guy who likes bondage imagery ... they work JUST FINE as bondage porn, thankyewverymuch.

And the great thing here is, I can have this discussion about Crepax's work based on an article on a mainstream site and have it be about Crepax's style and technique as a storyteller and artist and not have it be only about the BONDAGE BONDAGE BONDAGE BONDAGE just because a lot of his work contains bondage imagery. Bondage may well be mainstreaming, and that's a good thing. Being able to talk reasonably about things instead of being overcome by the sex fear hysteria common among social conservatives (see this post for some great examples) will make us all mentally healthier.