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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

You're not alone. Currently "AI art" competes with the bottom tier of artists, if at that. Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation) and controlled, it's basically just clip art for situations where you need an image and the contents barely matter.

Until AI art can become massively more consistent (iow, not completely change the whole image for every variation)

To some extent, that's present now. At the most trivial level, holding seed and settings constant, while making small changes to a prompt, can maintain layout and theme. At extremes, people have managed to make short animated gifs by transitioning from one seed to another, or from one prompt weighting to another.

At more serious levels, artists can use img2img and have greater control of the final appearance's layout, or 'rerolling' individual parts of an image or apply a prompt only to that section of an image using inpainting. There are some limits to these techniques -- getting readable text out is basically random and very rare chance, even conditional prompting still makes it hard to apply adjectives (and sometimes even nouns) to only one part of an image -- but there is more than filling in text and hitting the random button a hundred times.

Now, there's a difference from consistency to control.