Art generated by AI is proving a very contentious issue, raising enormous amounts of concern among artists about their potential replacement by machine learning, let alone the ethical questions about whether an algorithm studying thousands of other people’s creations is fair to the original creators. But put all that aside for a moment, because this one does Pokémon.
Replicate is a tool that allows people to create their own machine learning models, then run them in the cloud. Some might use this for evil, but Lambda Labs has turned it toward the betterment of humankind, and lets you generate a Pokémon based on any old keyword. Using “Fine Tuning Stable Diffusion,” which I’m not even going to pretend to understand, it allows recognizable keywords to define the nature of the Pokémon produced. Or to put that in words I understand: you can put in some famous person’s name and get a monstrosity to match. Here, for example, is Kotaku!
It’s very simple. Stick in the words, wait about 56 seconds, and you get a frighteningly apposite pocket monster to make Nintendo’s lawyers even angrier than normal. For instance, because I’m a terrible person who doesn’t deserve love, I first tried “Boris Johnson.” (Before noticing that, hideously, so did Lambda in one of their examples.) People, I present, Bojojo:
And because you probably did something to deserve it, here’s Donald Trump:
What else is a terrible idea? Ooh, I know, Babadook! That’s basically a Pokémon name already.
No! That’s far too adorable. And oh my, I wish it were a real one now.
Then I thought, where “thought” is an over-strong word for the situation, it would a good idea to stick in my boss’s name. Here I present you Patricia Hernandez’s Pokémon form, that I’m calling Patridez:
OMG it’s perfect. It’s her! (Please don’t fire me.)
It’s important to have Pokémon to battle with, so I figured I should create some rivals. Here’s The Verge:
And Rock Paper Shotgun:
Don’t think either of those stand a chance.
What about some video game characters? First up, “Super Mario.” I’m calling it Smario:
“Lara Croft” appeared to create an instant Legendary. Croftlala as she must now be known:
And best of all, “Master Chief.”
Oh, and before I carry on doing this all day even though I’ve finished writing this post, what if we give it some actual Pokémon names? Even turning the guidance_scale down a bit, this was the result for Pikachu:
However, poor old “Snorlax” appears to get brutally and inexplicably melded with a Blastoise.
Lastly, I thought I’d test the veracity of the 2019 documentary, Detective Pikachu, and see what Ryan Reynolds would actually look like if turned into a Pokémon. It turns out nothing like a Pikachu at all! It was all lies.
Clearly there is only one thing to do today: Fill the comments with your own creations. Just head here and enter the first word that comes into your head.
Thanks JDune for the find!