So, does anyone have any suggestions for image hosts other than imgur that I can upload images to for free and use when posting on fimfiction?

--Sweetie Belle

7836547
I think Postimages works well, if memory serves.

7836551
Just testing it out with a random image.

Imgur doesn't seem like it's been working with anything I post for a few days on fimfiction, and I'm not really counting on anything that goes wrong with fimfiction being fixed at this point...

--Sweetie Belle

7836553
Looks okay to me

7836554
And I'm seeing it, too, so I'll try that out for a while. Thanks!

I used to have a few other image hosting sites around, but it's been a bit, and image hosting pages tend to die after a while...

--Sweetie Belle

7836555
Happy to help!

7836553
such a cutie

7836547 Testing https://imgbb.com/

7836560
That shows up, so seems like imgbb works, too. Given a bunch of policy changes went into effect yesterday at imgur, I suspect that it's something on their side. They were blocking fimfiction at one point, then knighty implemented a workaround. I think they probably did something that broke the workaround.

7836559
Definitely! Though I probably should specify that's an ai generated pony. I've been testing out a new neat controlnet thing called "reference only", and that was one of the pictures that came out.

--Sweetie Belle

7836560
Just to test imgbb, I fed controlnet's "reference only" mode your picture, with a prompt of "safe tentacle pony" and a negative prompt of "bad_quality boring_e621 EasyNegative":

(The middle two on the bottom row are probably the best ones...)

--Sweetie Belle

7836567 They're great, but could use more tentacles. Maybe AI should learn from more sources. Here are more pictures of Tenty OC:

7836568
This mode is pretty much one image at a time. Here's each of the three in turn, though.

It might help if I removed "safe" from the prompt, but that's pretty likely to generate things that I wouldn't be able to post. You can imagine what most pictures it already knows involving ponies and tentacles look like...

This should give you a pretty good idea what "reference only" is doing, in any case. There are also two other new reference options, but this is all basically stuff coming out this week. (And, yeah, I was planning on doing a post in the usual place about it when I get a chance...)

--Sweetie Belle

7836577 They're amazing.

However, I suspect that AI equates 'pony' too much with mane and tail. I hope that someday it will learn that tentacles make for a great mane and tail as well.

7836578
It'd probably actually need some training for that, but that's the sort of thing where you put together a few dozen tentacle pony pictures cropped and scaled to 512x512 or 768x768, matching text files for each with good descriptions of the picture, give it hours to train, and then spend a bunch of time fiddling with it.

Reference mode is neat in that you don't need any of that! Hand it a picture and a prompt, and it tries to make things like that picture. I've seen videos where they feed it a picture of a real person or, say, an anime girl, and it comes out with similar pictures that look like they are of the same or very similar character!

There are a buncha other options to fiddle with on it, too. Controlnet just continues to be amazing. (And before this, they added a bunch of lineart options in it where it can color things for you...)

--Sweetie Belle

7836579 It's amazing how fast we came to this. Just a few years ago we all believed that AI will never replace artists, and look at the jobless bums now.

However, there are already like thousands of different AI models. You basically have to devote your life to it to stay on top of things. I wonder if we'll see an AI that will be smart enough to use other AIs. Then, for most uses, people could just use that one AI that would provide decent results about everything.

7836581
There will still be artists. At the very least, someone needs to tell the ai's what to do, and the ones that can do that best are people that know how to do art. (Also, keep in mind how much stuff I had to do to coax that cover art out of an ai. Getting specific things without a lot of issues can take a bunch of work!)

There are general models, but they tend not to do specific things well.

(And people already do things to convince ChatGPT to write image prompts for them...)

--Sweetie Belle

I went ahead and posted an ai controlnet reference thread, btw:
https://www.fimfiction.net/group/216589/ai-art-group/thread/516936/controlnets-new-reference-methods

This thread can go back to being about image hosts now.

--Sweetie Belle

7836553

Unrelated to image hosts, but I just wanted to take a moment to say that image is adorable!

7836657
Believe it or not, that's what came out as one of the pictures when I tried that controlnet reference mode I was talking about on that picture of Sweetie Belle with a knife I've posted a few times!

I think it concentrated on the cuteness and style and not the knife.

I do actually quite like that picture. It actually does look like the type of thing I'd draw.

--Sweetie Belle

7836657
7836559
I decided it'd be fun to trace over the lines a bit and try redrawing the picture.

This version's drawn totally by me, though obviously a bunch of the lines are the same...

(OTOH, I did mess with a fair amount, too, including colors.)

--Sweetie Belle

7836547 Sadly, I don't think I can much help. The images you put up are no longer showing. All I'm seeing is Upsteam Error.

7836701

The changes are definitely an improvement! Not that the other one was bad, this one is just better!