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!"
