megaman AI box art
there’s a pretty big discussion around AI art, it seems i’m not super-familiar with The Discourse but if my programming experience has taught me anything it’s that random generation has to springboard off of something (usually called a seed), and you have to feed stuff in to an AI to get material to build off of that springboard so i’ve got several big goddamn questions as to where t f these guys would get their seeds and material from
but me being me, the first thing on my mind is “can you draw megaman with it?” so i decided to insert in "megaman box art" to a handful of different ones, see what happens
first off is a place called Nightcafe Studio, which allows you to pick one of three styles to make art in: cosmic, matte, and cyberpunk. nacho cheese and cool ranch were out, sorry.
this is "megaman box art" as done in its cosmic style and it certainly looks cosmic megaman got a nose guard to defend against space pollen, i guess and either his arm got detached and is floating down there or he's got a vacuum cleaner attached to his shins but it sure is cosmic
6/10, pretty colors but not very megaman
next style was matte, and
this actually looks pretty fucking cool! you've got a rad cityscape in the background, lighting’s really neat, and background to the MGA AIN MGATAN logo as sponsored by pepsi is cool
i guess that's kind of sort of Model ZX aile if you squint and tilt your head, but she’s the main part that turns the entire thing sinister. did you know that when you’re dealing with the fae shapeshifted as a human, you should count the features to make sure everything’s accurate? count the knuckles, count the fingers, count the shadows... oops, six fingers hah hah hah hah hhhhhhhhhhhh this is not Model ZX aile, this is not your friend.
7/10 you’re not stealing my goddamn teeth today, oberon
last to go is cyberpunk style and
holy shit this is a fucking WWE poster roman reigns dressed in pink and got a fucking beam tonfa??? or something a very distorted vince mcmahon puts on a power glove while brock lesnar looks disappointed to the side, and fiery font tells us that the meemen meeaiiaininaihiniahin is gonna happen at 2 / F' / 20 i could imagine you could probably print this out, put it through photoshop for edits, and then try to pass it off as an official poster for a synthwave megaman reboot. if you were a moron who wanted to get fired, i mean. fantastic way to commit career suicide.
1/10 coolest shit i've ever seen but very bad megaman art tbh
still, i'll give cyberpunk another shot. maybe it was confused, thinking it was going to have men that were mega, rather than megaman
HOLY SHIT
fuckin AXE DADY megaman over here this has it all it's got the dictator cam, looking up like it's hitler it's got the stance, holding a black vylon slinky to the side while he contemplates shooting above it it's got the logo sleekness, i've never seen MEEMN AXE DADY rendered so well it's got the color contrast, bright blue city in the left while a goddamn laser rips through time and space on the right and it's got a cool robot that actually kind of has a buster arm, though the computer is clearly confused as to what megaman’s buster actually looks like maybe should’ve let an artist handle that?
10/10, great megaman art, fucking amazing, would play, would watch, would let axe dady shoot things
next up is deepai's Machine Learning Model doesn’t seem to have any parameters, just put in a text box and go, so i did
thanks i've been wondering how it would be possible to turn megaman into a horror icon i didn't think hollowing his face out and replacing it with a fucking skull would be the answer but this is a pretty handy way to ensure my insomnia persists through the night
0/10 i
fucking
hate it
hastily getting the fuck away from that abomination unto both god and man, next up is dream.ai it seems to be a service mostly for developing and providing NFTs, but it's actually completely free with a little finagling so i don’t get where the value is supposed to come from
anyway, there's a lot of different options to provide a customized art style for the prompt, and you can even see it with different things it's got a lot of options too many to safely delve into, in fact, so i'm going to do the game journalist thing and generate maybe a handful of things and judge it entirely off that
first off is a comic art style generated without a seed
and at first glance this looks partially like the megaman 1 box art characters decided to pvp with each other at second glance as you look closer, though, you can clearly tell it's an i don't know what the fuck
4/10 colors look cool at least
maybe weird shit is the best part of it, though maybe weird shit is what it specializes in so let's try psychadelic
well, that's psychadelic all right i guess the dude in the middle is kind of sort of vaguely megaman but i don't know what the fuck else there is, there's actually less sensible shit going on here
2/10 i like listening to shpongle too, dude
but it's safe to say this system needs a bit of help let's go back to comic style and feed in some nice art from existing megaman
in my opinion, this poster is the peak megaman experience. it’s the quintessential representation. this pretty clearly dictates what megaman's about guy in blue shooting things robots getting shot at ominous shitbag in the background castlevania for some reason
favorite promo art, hands down. so let’s see how the AI works with this.
all right, finally, we're getting somewhere. guess this AI just needed to copy from someone else’s homework first. wow, that brings up a lot of questions about the nature of the materials AI art generators use to build their random images. well, that’s goddamn horrifying to contemplate. am i a monster unwittingly contributing to a system of artistic exploitation for the sake of making a shitpost on a megaman shitpost blog? fucked up.
anyway, we got a robot dude, he's got a gun, he's even got a little strut i like this guy a lot, he's got moxie and a rad face-visor thing
all right, i'm feeling generous 6/10 you fucked up but now you're getting better
let's go once more for comic style and
all right, holy shit, you're learning fast yeah this is undeniably megaman he's even got the weird helmet and weird boots and everything
there's a cool cityscape, a sci-fi sky, and he's trying to give the underside of a ship the highest of fives he doesn't look like he's standing very well on his taco bowl of destiny, though but i can't fault him with his dildo leg, must be difficult to stand on and judging by his pants, he's got trouble with testicles the size of texas growing in after kicking wily's ass 69 times understandable problem, really, after you go through 10 games that’s when you turn from a mega boy to a real mega man
9/10, good box art
you know, i'm feeling confident, i think dream's got a good idea as to what's going on with megaman let's take a risk and go for a different art style synthwave looks good, it's all about that retro shit and megaman's a retro series
this doesn't look like a new picture that just looks like you took the original picture and put a shitty smear on it
god fucking damn it
0/10, apply yourself, pick up a goddamn pencil and then see me after class
getting away from that, next up is stable diffusion, apparently a state-of-the-art AI generator hosted by Hugging Face, which i hope is a legitimate company and not a front for xenomorphs
and HOLY SHIT
on the first go we have some actual fucking box art good background, very clear, we've got a skyline with a forcefield pyramid in the background i guess wily's a space egyptian now? rad.
napalm bomb megaman's doing some fucking pelvic thrusts ready to spread war crimes all about bit distressing for our sweet friendly superhero boy but i'll admit i'd react the same way after getting a fucking napalm gun for an arm.
we've even got a rating on the bottom right, indicating that it's suitable for ages Video Game and up got a clearly-defined line for letting the publishers rub their dick all over, filling it with logos or titles or other corporate information
i feel confident about this, i like our MEAAN game, shit's looking pretty good
10/10, good box art. real good box art. little timmy would probably be confused seeing it on the shelf but this strikes me as something Bob Capcom would reasonably okay after five lagers and an existential crisis.
getting a little concerned here, looks like crisis on infinite megamans
i don’t want to imagine how many official variants of rock there are, especially if you count all the fangame/indie game knockoffs, but having them all collide together into a single Enter the Megaverse sounds like it'd be effectively impossible to handle do you want to play megaman, megaman x, megaman volnutt, megaman.exe, star force, zx, x over flavored? dos-flavored? bad box art flavored? captain n flavored? pachinko-flavored?
NGL though if rockman taisen ends up being some sort of dumb megaman battle royale then i would actually punch a cactus out to be able to play as ruby spears megaman frankly, huge missed opportunity that they're not even in X Dive the tagline even writes itself, "I knew you'd pull for Mr. Lincoln!"
oh yeah i was rating the cover uhhhhhhhh i dunno, there's dudes i don't know, they're doing poses, ominous guy in the background i guess it's serviceable? this doesn’t really tell me anything about the game, there’s just guys.
6/10 i'd pass it over and look at something else
holy shit are you okay? either he's (she's? they're?) taking a dump and all their lower intestines got caught in it, or something is burning out in the thinkpan and won’t be coming back
that dead-eyed glare is actually legitimately haunting this is the expression someone makes in anime after they realize you stabbed them and you were never their friend i've only seen that gaze in my life twice before and let me tell you, you remember things
1/10 someone call the police
all right, i’m moving away from that before i bring up more questionable ground our final contestant for the night is hotpot.ai, a website for general purpose game asset AI generation. they’ve got AI-handled copywrite, too, which strikes me as risky ground. if i can’t trust a machine with megaman, can i trust a machine to legally cover my ass? i would never trust a machine with my pants, ass or no. we’ve already firmly established that robot masters are always a pants-on debacle.
anyway, let’s give this a shot
aaaaaand hit “Generate”, and
EXCU
NOPE
FUCK THIS
I’M DONE
