Ai illustrations....

[Imperial Dave]

Nicks ai thread got me thinking about illustrations. A quick look and a play with a random graphic ai site gave some interesting results. Only a few sentences are required but the more you describe the more accurate the depiction becomes.

Example below

[Imperial Dave]

This is using a site called nightmare. It's not great but took me a minute...

[Imperial Dave]

Before you ask it's supposed to be saxons vs romano british!

[Erpingham]

Before you ask it's supposed to be saxons vs romano british!

Ah, I thought Early Byzantine. I think the general "tone" on this is pretty good. When you look at the detail, you start to see the mistakes - the leather armour, the mail pteruges, the helmets, the boots.  How have they shredded their clothes so badly? Also, a curious thing about AI images is the story can be hard to fathom.They seem to be crowding round two men fighting, one bare handed, the other with a big knife. Did you program it to show this?

[Imperial Dave]

No it was basic instructions but if you add detailed instructions s the theory is the accuracy improves

In theory...

[RichT]

My experience is that the accuracy (in terms of correct equipment, weapons, clothing etc) doesn't improve very much. Image generating AI that I have played with seems to have drawn its ideas of what Greeks (for eg) looked like largely from Xena, Hercules, Troy etc. Lots of leather, vambraces, and brown clothes, pretty hopeless as actual depictions of ancient warriors.

Civilian clothing fares slightly better, but I've also struggled to get it to show actual ancient settings. Greek temples for example are invariably ruins, as presumably the AI doesn't have any reference to non-ruined temples to work with. No doubt it is improving all the time, but on the other hand its references are increasingly polluted by the rubbish it generates.

[Erpingham]

It is interesting to consider in light of this current news story. These are commercial AI.  Extremely realistic and dressed with actual clothes from the advertiser's range. I suspect you could make very high quality AI illustrations of ancient troop types using real equipment examples this way. But look too at the workload and cost, which no wargames-grade publishing company could afford.

[Imperial Dave]

Blimey...

[Imperial Dave]

The site i used is night cafe. There are others. One consequence I can see is that potentially illustrators and artists are going to feel squeezed out by this and it's only going to get better/worse depending on your viewpoint

[Jim Webster]

Ironically artists tend to be paid for book covers before the book is ever published, writers after, if there are any sales etc

[Imperial Dave]

I never knew that Jim

[Jim Webster]

I never knew that Jim

certainly with self published stuff, the writer carries all the costs and speculates that the book will sell enough to cover them.
This is why I use only the finest artists.
Who are all dead and out of copyright  You cannot view this attachment.

[Imperial Dave]

Wise words 

[RichT]

It is interesting to consider in light of this current news story. These are commercial AI.  Extremely realistic and dressed with actual clothes from the advertiser's range. I suspect you could make very high quality AI illustrations of ancient troop types using real equipment examples this way. But look too at the workload and cost, which no wargames-grade publishing company could afford.

Well AI (I wish there was something to call it other than AI - it's really a form of CGI) has always been good at creating realistic images of attractive young (white) women - it's probably 90% of its use case...

You can train an AI with specific images, as presumably this agency did with the clothing range. I have experimented with training one with images of hoplite reenactors. The results were still not great - the images were very obviously composites of bits and pieces taken from the various reference images, not a coherent whole. But then I spent a few minutes on it, not weeks.

[Denis Grey]

The Yarkshire Gamer has been posting on Facebook about the AI-generated covers of recent editions of Wargames Illustrated, perhaps most notably the Roman legionaries disembarking from what looks very like a Viking longship.