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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Maybe it's part of the prompt but the lighting on these is awful. They look like plastic action figures. Or like they're covered in vegetable oil and standing in front of a really harsh fluorescent light.

The "AI sheen" is frighteningly distinct. If you go onto NSFW imageboards, you'll notice it even in thumbnails. I hate how omnipresent it seems to be with AI images, I normally love seeing those kinds of lighting highlights in art, but I hate it now and it's kind of made me hate AI art in recent times. The associative negativity heaped onto AI art worked on me, I guess.

It's obnoxious if you're trying to get (mainstream) models to do anything without using style transfer or similar, since even if you want that sort of lighting highlights Gemini/Bard/Midjourney almost never get them right -- in this example, the rest of the shadows are too diffuse, but it's just as prone to have the highlights themselves be inconsistent.

I'm not sure if it's a result of ingested data (whether Pixar, a particular art style, or just ingest transcoding), or an upscaler involved somewhere on output, or what. Some of the furry models are better at avoiding it (esp if they don't have an NAI leak in their history), which just makes it weirder that it's so present for normal stuff.

Maybe the dataset on 17th century kings is a bunch of paintings, so it gave a strange faux-painted look. But yeah, weird it added a bright white light reflecting off their shiny skin. Like just out of frame are a bunch of fluorescent bulbs.

And for some reason it gave them all a smarmy grin.

Alternate timeline where Edward the Black Prince ascended to the throne.

Oooh this is good trolling. The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.

This is ahistorical. Back then they didn't have seedless watermelons.

Yeah, back a few centuries ago lots of foods were barely recognizable. Watermelons especially so.

https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-giovanni-stanchi-watermelons-peaches-pears-a-5765893/?