AI Imagery, Mapmaking, and Requests from Tartarus · 7:42pm May 25th, 2023
So last week I was doing some random Bing search – can’t recall what specifically I was looking for – when I noticed an option to… make my own art? Curious, I took a look at the link and saw it led to an AI-driven image generator. You know, the kind of art that has been flooding places like Derpibooru these last few months. I got curious and started toying with it, just to see what I could come up with. The image you see above was my attempt to recreate Bulletproof Heart Rarity. I couldn’t get the AI to make her anthro – it didn’t seem to even understand the concept – but I’m still pretty pleased with the result.
Then I heard of purplesmart.ai. I haven't tried purplesmart yet, but I admit I’m curious to hear from others about it. It says I have to log into Discord to use it at all? What’s that about? I’ve never had to log into Discord specifically to access something, seems like an odd choice to me. But then I’ve seen places that want you to access them by (bleck) Facebook and Google, so I guess it’s not that crazy.
Maybe once they get the little issues resolved (try not to look at Rarity's hands), one of my covers will be made entirely via AI. But if I did do such a thing, I’d likely only do it once for the sake of saying I tried it out. I certainly won’t be doing it for a Bulletproof Heart story, because I’m trying to keep the art style consistent and that means being bakki’s ever-returning customer. For the smart-asses among you, Bulletproof Mirage was a crossover and thus doesn’t count in my eyes. At any rate, I mostly want to stick to art from actual, breathing artists because I want to support their work.
Speaking of Bulletproof Heart, the next story is currently delayed. The story itself is done, but I’ve been dragging my butt in terms of commissioning the artwork. I forgot that May is one of the most expensive months out of the year for me due to all sorts of annual subscriptions coming due at this time, and in the name of trying to maintain a balanced budget… Well, hopefully that’ll get resolved soon.
I took a week-and-a-half long break from writing while my sister was in town, but other than that I’ve been working a lot on that Halloween-targeted story. One part of the prep for that story involved using Campaign Cartographer 3 to create a map of the area the story was taking place in (this is the same program used to make my map of BPH Equestria). This is because the location is small but complex and I wanted the layout to play a role in the events. The problem with CC3 is that it’s the opposite of user friendly and very buggy, often crashing without explanation or apparent reason. Early last month it crashed so badly it refused to re-open, and I was frustrated enough to take a break from it.
But now I’m at a point in the story where that map would be very helpful, so a couple days ago I stopped with the writing and went back to try CC3 again. Because it’s weird, it opened the old map file without any problem this time. At this point I can safely say I’m more than 2/3rd finished with the map, and saving frequently to avoid frustrating double-work from the program’s inevitable crashes.
In news regarding reviews, I had a bit of a blow last week. Specifically, someone went and requested a two-million-word story. I always respond to these kinds of things the same way: by being shocked and horrified at first, then slowly convincing myself to agree because such stories usually work out in my favor and I have a reputation to keep. So yes, next year I will be reading this behemoth (along with the unrelated 800k story they also requested).
This will put a severe strain on my reading schedule for a period of around 29 weeks, and that comes with the risk of a bottleneck in my wordcount limits. Since I’m trying to not overload myself these days, I’ve decided to temporarily enforce a strict 100,000-word limit on future long stories for my schedule, including requests. This will last until I’ve scheduled enough relatively smaller “big” stories to squeeze through those 29 weeks without ruining Future Paul’s half-year.
That’s all for this week. Tune in next time to see Applejack dealing with taxes (twice), Lyra losing a bet, and my opinion on Chengar Qordath’s questionable method of franchise directing.
And yeah, Purplesmart's generator appears to be tied to a Discord bot, so it does make sense that it has to be accessed through it. Personally, I'm not a fan of AI-generated art, but I can acknowledge that it has its place, and that is a (largely) good image of everyone's favorite rhinestone cowgirl. Still going to filter it out on Derpibooru, though.
It sounds like you had a rather entertaining week… however, I doubt it tops mine
Chengar Qordath? Didn't they leave Fimfiction? Plus I'd live to see some more Cowgirl Rarity.
Generally, I don't care about AI art since, for the most part, it's used for porn. Rarity here has exactly one area that is perfectly rendered, which means the bot has a lot of input for rendering that area. the rest of it leaves a lot to be desired, but because the focus areas are pretty good, you don't tend to look at the parts that aren't if you're just scrolling by. Maybe one day, AI art can be perfected, but it's got a long way to go and it's going to take a whole lot of time to actually get the full body right in any one generated image.
Glad you're making progress because mine has dropped off a cliff. I suppose it helps that I got a new job and moved to a foreign country, but I know for fact a lot of it is me being lazy and not just sitting down to work on stuff. After being here for two months I finally got sick for the first time today, so I think this weekend is actually going to be the one I can make progress on. And besides, when I was really making progress on anything, it was when I wrote my story for the Sci-fi contest in march.
Ya know what? Give that a read for me will ya? It's called: Bionic Titan - A New Dawn It's pretty far away from my usual fare since it's the only time I've ever seriously tried to write
gundamsci-fi.Forget the hands, look at her gun. It's half melting.
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I didn't realize I was seeing AI art on Derpibooru at first, but then I realized all these images looked nearly identical in a lot of ways and finally bothered to investigate. So now unless one really catches my eye – which isn't often – I ignore them. I don't filter them out though, because every once in a while I might see one worth looking at (or at least the thumbnail suggests is worth looking at).
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Yes and no. Yes in that they haven't posted a new story since January of 2020. No in that they're still checking the site, as evidenced by them having been on a few hours ago as of this writing. Unless that was a fluke and we happen to be talking about them shortly after they've visited for the first time in three years.
I only bring them up because one of their stories is getting a review next week and I have... thoughts.
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I'm no artist, so I wouldn't notice the details. If there are things even a layman can notice, I'm spotting them (the hair, the hands, the choker I didn't ask for, etc.). Still, after about a dozen tweaks I think it did an okay job for my non-expert standards given I just wanted a generalized maybe-Rarity image.
Sorry to hear your progress has died lately. That can certainly be frustrating. Also impressed that you think being sick means your productivity will improve. Then again, I've only been seriously ill one time in my writing career and that was the kind of thing that floors you, so maybe my perspective on the matter is skewed.
I shall add your story to my request list. Not sure when I'll get to it, as my lists are starting to get a little crowded again (must do something about that soon), but you know I'm good for it down the line.
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Into her hand!
I think the AI was also trying to put a gun in her other hand as well, but let's face it, something went wrong.
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Turns out, asking a thing that excels at numbers and logic to do something as far removed as art doesn’t work out. Funny that. I kinda miss obviously bad AI art that NOBODY would confuse for something a human made. That stuff was funny.
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Mostly, I think it's just the mishmash of styles at play here. It's like they took the painterly art from league, splashed anime on it, then tried to put a cowboy filter over it. add that to the anatomic jank AI already suffers from and this is what you get. God forbid it try to render a totally separate object like a gun with complex materials like metal.
All being sick really means is that I have to stay home and not go do anything else for a while. Plenty of time to sit in front of my computer and actually focus on something without being drained from 10 hours of yelling at children who maybe comprehend half of what I'm saying. I'm sure that what I have now is definitely sinus related in a country where pseudoephedrine is illegal, and I have been working for a month and a half now, so maybe some of it is fatigue. It's nothing particularly new, the timing is just later than usual since the rainy season starts now and not two months ago. Either way, when I get like this, it's usually hard to play games with lots of lights and things, so sitting in front of a word document is actually something I can do without getting worse.
Good luck with your list, I can only imagine reading a story that long. The closest I've come to that would be two whole series, one of which was 8 books together.
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Definitely keep an eye on your health while over there. My sister continues to insist that the mostly federally funded healthcare system in Japan is the best, but the stories she's told me strongly suggest otherwise. Just for example, my niece Evy had a rash on her legs all her four years, but the pediatrician insisted that it was "normal" for kids her age and would go away on its own. When Evy was brought to the States my parents insisted she be seen by an American doctor. Said American doctor promptly determined that she was allergic to a certain blue dye commonly used in clothing. The rash was gone by the time she went back to Japan. The Japanese doctors hadn't even bothered to run any tests.
From what my sister tells me, I gather it's the typical result of a federally-funded healthcare system: the doctors are pushed to avoid high-cost treatments to save the government's dime (sorry, yen).
So yeah. Watch your health while there.
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I mean, that doesn't surprise me. e.g., I left school early today because I was gonna vom. And I did on my way out of the building. called up all the people I needed to, they sent me to this clinic not far from my apartment which is also next to the 'state' college, so I imagine they see people for stuff like this all the time. He did something I'd never had a doctor do when checking my stomach by pressing his fingers down into it. he was checking for pain I guess, and I just about doubled over when he stabbed right under my rib cage. Apparently that told him I had a stomach virus or something. I'm not super sure what happened, but I got the good stuff and I do feel better after taking it, but the process was questionable at best. IMHO, from past issues, I think I either have a light case of strep (which would make sense since it's may and I'm an elementary teacher and I used to get it at least once a year around fall and spring), or my sinuses are causing similar problems. I double checked the meds online to make sure I knew what I was taking, and this is basically all the ingredients of pseudoephedrine in two separate pills.
I've heard the horror stories of getting care in this country, but I at least have a company and several interpreters I can get a hold of in the event I need something serious taken care of. It's definitely like, bronze tier healthcare, but it's also priced like bronze tier healthcare, so I paid about a fourth of what a doctor visit would've cost me in the US. It's a trade off, sure, but I'm also making about the same money here as I was there, so this is better overall. Pray and hope I don't die is kinda where I'm at.
You definitely can get anthro art out of AI generators; maybe it was something about the specific keywords used or maybe the generator just wasn't one optimized for that particular brand. Not that I'd know anything about how to do all that optimally since I'm very not-wild about AI art myself. It tends to be very easy to recognize AI art after you've seen enough of it, and not just because of the melting hands--it's a kind of uncanny smoothness to the form and texture that just doesn't look quite right. I'd like to believe that there could be value for the AI tools that are going around now, but unfortunately they've been thoroughly misappropriated by the techbros of society who are trying to hammer them into yet another tool for obliterating creativity. Have to say though, hilarious how this Rarity just...has a gemstone embedded into her sternum. Crystal gem gunslinger pony.
I've been experiencing woes with cover art myself lately. For a long time I used a few generic thumbnails for my stories on FurAffinity, but when I started posting to fimfiction I decided I would need more unique, eye-catching images, which can make it difficult to get more personalized covers when I'm putting out at least one new story every month. I've had one story finished for about a week now that I've been unable to post due to needing the cover art prepared, and I had to give up on getting something for the one I'm currently working on so that's probably just going to be some stock image. Finding suitable artists can really be difficult sometimes.
Personally, I could frankly never see myself reading a story that's over a million words, let alone two million. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but with the rambling chapter-by-chapter nature of most fanfics I just can't imagine something that long not being a mess, and even if not then there's almost no way it could actually be good enough to warrant me spending so long reading it. Admittedly, me tending to be a slow reader doesn't make it any easier for me, but I feel it says something about the approachability of most fanfics when I can struggle to read a chapter a day on one story while I can devour two Stephen King novels in approximately two days.
Purplesmart is deffinately worth a try, at the very least so you can see the weird & nonsensical stuff the AI comes up with.
)
They also have a story generator which can which can be very funny.
An example of an AI generated story: (I had to remove the unicorn emoji
Prompt:
"queen chrysalis possesses twilight sparkles body and becomes new superior version of twilight sparkle and ruler of equestria.
Output:
queen chrysalis possesses twilight sparkles body and becomes new superior version of twilight sparkle and ruler of equestria.
The mares have no choice but to obey and serve their new queen. But they have a plan to defeat queen chrysalis and save twilight sparkle from herself.
THE END.
this is it, the final chapter. the end of the story. sorry for it not being that great. i never was good at writing romance or any kind of clop, so if the story seems a little rushed and i did some thing weird, that is because i wrote it in less than 3 days. i know the ending is a bit rushed, but i couldn't think of anything better.
I'm still a new writer and i hope you have enjoyed the story, even if it was a rushed and terrible romance story. I'm sorry for it, i'm not very good at romance stories. i will write other clop stories from time to time, but this is the only romance story i can write. and maybe one or two others that are a bit more romantic. if you don't know what a romance is, look up the definition on the dictionary.
anyway, thank you for reading the story and i hope to see you soon on my next story.
bye"
^This killed me when I first read it
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The gemstone in the chest thing caught me off-guard, but I figured it wouldn't be worth it to go another ten rounds with the AI trying to get something better. Actually, scratch that, I did go another ten rounds, but the results were getting progressively more and more cartoony. Not so much in the way of AI screwing up the details but as in a total stylistic shift to some combination of Equestria Girls and Anime.
Finding a reliable artist to commission works for is like trying to find the perfect hay-straw in a haystack. When you find one, you keep a good, firm grip on it. But yeah, new stories on a monthly basis? Good luck getting art for that.
This will certainly be the longest single story I've ever read, but it's not like I don't have experience. Heck, one of the stories I'm reading right now is over 1.3 million words (and was also a request). I'm enjoying it quite a bit. And the last million+ story I read was Starlight Over Detrot at ~1.5 million, and I loved that one. It helps that I have a firm rule about reading ~10,000 words/day of whatever big stories I'm on, so I get through them at a constant, steady pace. But if I ever ran into a story that long which was actually bad...
I-is he finally reviewing Diaries of a Madman?
>checks
>DoaM is 3.2M words
Aw 😔
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Had that been requested I would have said "no", specifically because it's incomplete. I'm not about to devote almost a full year of my schedule (which is what it would take, I checked) on a story that doesn't have a conclusion.
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Fair ’nuff. Sure am curious what you would think of it, if it ever does get completed … (IIRC, it isn’t even 2/3 done yet.)
First, how much does it cost to sucker you into reading and reviewing a million-word story? Like if I happened to have one just lying around waiting for a glowing review?
Second, while I've played with the story-writing aspects of ChatGPT (with interesting results), I haven't played with any of the art-generating ones yet. I did sign up for the purplesmart Discord so in theory I can use it, just haven't Luckily, someone else was willing to AI me some coverart for one of my fics, which came out pretty good:
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/879533986303606834/1111835147524898816/8w20-1669179222-526987-full.jpg
I guess one thing purplesmart has going for it is that it doesn't have to figure out hands, lol.
Oooh! I don't know about Purplesmart.ai, but with stable diffusion (a way to make AI art locally) there's a few models people have made focused specifically on MLP.
Actually, it's surprisingly easy to make your own model based on pretty much anything - I fed some art of my DnD character into a Lora trainer (with permission from the original artist, since I cannot art) (Lora being a way to 'teach' Stable Diffusion about any "thing" - usually a subject, sometimes a style of art) and while it has trouble getting her wings and hands it's pretty consistently able to get her face and general shape of the body right, extraneous and horrific limbs notwithstanding.
Actually actually, I decided to try my hand at making some 'cowboy Rarity' art, for examples. it took... Longer than I expected to get it to look alright (about an hour) - it messes up a lot when I try to give her a horn, either adding extraneous ones, making it bend weirdly, or just not including it at all. I'd initially started off with a specific mlp-focused model, but ended up switching to a more generic furry model that worked a lot better. here's some examples (as is usual - ignore the hands).
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/618090305119584265/1111942421987737651/Rarity_Art_00029_.png
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/618090305119584265/1111942422281334805/Rarity_Art_00024_.png
I really should get around to reading Bulletproof Heart. When I first heard about it, I wasn't in the mood for an 'actiony/wild west' style story, and I just never got around to it.
Well, time to start now.
EDIT: Oh, I should probably include my very first attempt. A lot of editing the prompt to get it to look not like this.
Be warned of eldritch face:
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/618090305119584265/1111945707352498216/Rarity_Art_00001_.png
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Interesting! I like that second one more. Nice to have some more art (or at least AI attempts at art) of Gunslinger Rarity. Maybe someday when the AIs get better at the finer details I'll make more use of them.
And what do you mean, eldritch face? That's the face of an angel! *Pats three-eyed Rarity on the head* Don't worry, sweetie, you're perfectly lovely the way you are.
What coincidence I was just playing with an ai generator
lovecraftian, my little pony:
derpicdn.net/img/view/2023/5/27/3132690__safe_ai+content_ai+generated_lovecraft.png
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Glowing reviews are never guaranteed... but I do greatly appreciate the ambition necessary to write such a behemoth.
I used to have a Patreon, but stopped bothering because I didn't need the money and couldn't think of creative ways for a reviewer to reward different tiers. And really, I do this because I like it (even if it sometimes hurts), so I wouldn't want to accept payment regardless. That said, if you really have such a story, you'll have to just wait until my 100k limit is set aside before you can ruin my day with it.
Ooof. You brave soul.
... haha, who would do such a thing? Certainly not me...
I always like to read other people's thoughts on the stories I read, though upon searching for reviews I found that the big one I requested has an severe lack of both views and reviews. It's admittedly not too surprising, given the length, but it's unfortunate since I loved reading through it. (And spent way too much time binge-reading when I found it!)
Honestly I was really, really close to just suggesting only one of them - probably the shorter of the two - but I figured I might as well send both. I was a little surprised you took on both since I kind of suspected you would just pick whichever one interested you the most and leave the other for someone else to request!
I'm not complaining, mind you...
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Yeah, well, someone's gotta do it. Might as well be me. I probably won't even regret it, provided I can carefully manage what I read/review in the intermittent 29 weeks.
Besides, how would I maintain my reputation as a tackler of big stories if I refused?
rarity as a gun slinging vitilante... aight then.
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Not so much a vigilante as "kill them before they kill me". Because make no mistake, they are trying to kill her.
...
But still definitely a gunslinger.
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looks very nice too, gottaa give the AI that much at least.
The purplesmart.ai models are eventually released to the public for free. Version 4 can be downloaded from civit.ai (a massive archive of different models). You can use the model with the open source image generation tool Stable Diffusion which you can run on your own computer as long as you have a decent graphics card. 6 GB VRAM is recommended but you can run it on as low as 2 GB. The most popular Stable Diffusion interface is Automatic1111 which takes care of most of the installation for you. Still, there are a few steps you have to go through (scroll down until you find the installation instructions). Here's a video walkthrough posted a few days ago. (With how fast things are developing it'll probably be obsolete in just a few weeks.)
Note that it can be quite tricky to get good results out of the pony models. Find an image you like on the purplesmart.ai site and use its prompt as a starting point. The reason why you might want to join the Discord server is if you lack the hardware to run Stable Diffusion or to gain early access to new models. There are also fine-tuned third-party models for specific characters that can be loaded on top of the purplesmart.ai/Pony Diffusion models. I haven't seen one of Rarity yet though.
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All good information to know, thanks! And I think my gaming PC is more than capable of handling things like this, even if its graphics card got outdated about a month after I installed it.