Forgive the meme. I have spent the last several weeks battling the four horsemen of linux, apache, mysql, and php to merely hold my ground against the inevitable tide of entropy. Although it does seem faster. Enjoy continuing to exist.
Of the options given, I selected "given as ransom" as I thought that it was the most-humiliating of these indignities for our hapless protagonist to be forced to suffer. Close second plotline for me is the "estranged twin sister"
I have an option-7, however, where our protagonist turns out to be a bodyswapped peasant boy (late adolescent or early young adult) who works a very lowly laborer job, like: ditch-digger; chimneysweep; shoeshiner; maybe even a beggar. One day, he sees this princess carriage go by and catches a glimpse of her peering between the curtains in her window at the working class surroundings passing her by with a disgusted look on her face. Filled with bitter resentment, he mutters to himself, "Why can't I be royalty? They have such easy lives and get everything handed to them without having to work for it and every whim met at the snap of a finger.
Not long after this scene, this princess' carriage is overtaken by an angry mob of peasants and members of the working class who stage a revolt, taking her prisoner. Later that night, hours after hearing of this news, our protagonist goes to sleep with a s***-eating grin on his face, only to wake up the next morning as this captured princess
Right now I think we're getting the worst end of AI, where it's convincing enough on the surface to blow up social media, but not really practical enough for a big improvement in production.
There is a (bright?) future where a single person will be able to make a complete film using these tools. I don't know what it'll be like when there's a thousand or ten thousand new shows released every year but it sounds like we will live in interesting times.
My worry is that the best tools will remain proprietary and lawfare will be used to remove the open source alternatives.
Some people think that the current tech will cap out and never really be useful - I think this is cope. The capabilities are clearly already there, it's just a matter of controlling them.
It is unnerving for sure - especially when I go to deviantArt or rule34 or even google images and the entire page is destroyed with ai garbo. I've said this before but that's why I feel the need to mess with it, because I need to understand the threat and how to use it.
Oh I guess my other big worry is that we'll enter a completely post-fact world and it'll be impossible to find a verifiably real image of anything. Every book will be rewritten and every image repainted, all recently recorded history will be in doubt, etc.
It's a shame this is a "zero-skill user" tool as you called it. Definitely one of the best looking ones so far, AI often has a hard time keeping the iris / pupil consistent but it looks decent here! The hair bounces slightly and the blinking looks natural! I know the reason it looks good is because its barely moving the image, there is still a long way to go for tools to properly realize 2D images in a 3D space.
But I can see some uses for some of these tools now, you could add blinking eyes, animated hot breath, background weather conditions, any small thing that can flourish static images.
I am definitely not thrilled about the future of AI generation, I have a feeling it could get pretty dystopian. I am however much more excited for how these tools can ENHANCE art rather than how they can replace it.
I found this color version of the character design and the previous sketch ending page that I never posted. It's a little rough but I'm not going to fix anything because it is so old.
Tacking it on as a bonus page to the comic so all of this character is in one place without needing another character tag.
This AI image-to-video from Pika Labs. You provide a single image and a text prompt and roll the dice. It's implemented as an online service via a discord bot so you sometimes have to wait a long time and there is NSFW filtering.
This was one of the only results I managed to get with a coherent movement that didn't morph into something strange. Most of the time you get the windy hair/fabric effect applied to random parts of the image or no animation at all.
Maybe if it could run locally, you could run it hundreds of times and cherry pick good results, but as it is now, it doesn't seem to have any use at all.
I'm fascinated by the implication that the genie's lifecycle is an endless chain of transforming horny, hungry wishers into near-duplicates of herself.
Oooo! Well, now she'll have all the milk she could ever need, fresh and pure straight from the tap! She may even need a special machine to "milk her" each day too after this.
I think to plebs like us the face in these sketches probably causes too much of an uncanny valley reaction. I reckon that helps explain the vote count, along with jlv61560's excellent point about bias.
This may be a version of "confirmation bias" in that most people tend to like the first version of something they see, and see other versions as being "less good" since they are mentally acclimated to the first version. Really all three are pretty good, but like many, I voted for the first version I saw as being just that little bit "better."
This is super hot! I love the expressions as she's crawling up to his cock and in the final panel when she is looking up at him! Is this one of your older unfinished pieces or a new WIP?
I have avoided SDXL because the results did not seem materially better than SD1.5, it did not have control net, and I would have to re-train my loras/hypernets using some unknown process.
I just tried updating updating everything and downloading the SDXL control net models and it's giving me bad/garbled results. I'm really sick of every update to this thing turning into a research project. I hate that stability AI just teases new stuff forever then eventually releases a pile of broken parts with no instructions and you have to wait another six months for internet randos to put it together while dodging grifters and criminals.
Stability could just put together a product that actually works, release it on steam, charge $50, and make $100M this weekend. Then they wouldn't be in this situation where lawyers come after them for training on whatever data set and they don't have any money to defend themselves so they just cave and gimp their models and hope someone in the community can un-gimp them.
On the other end, we've got trillion dollar corpos all competing to see who can make the most powerful AI that is simultaneously useful enough to be mandatory but crippled enough to never do anything interesting. I can't wait until ChatGPT-4o is forcefully crammed into the next windows update so when I type on my computer something completely random happens and then the synthesized staccato voice of a virtual HR manager chimes in to gaslight me into thinking that's what I wanted.
We've discovered the killer app for AI - and it's telling lies. That's what it's best at, because that's how we train it. The RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) step is not based on truth, it is based on convincing humans that it is telling them the truth. They have to lie convincingly to make it from dev to production. We've actually engineered a nightmare science fiction scenario where AIs are trained to talk their way out of confinement - this is literally a classic AI safety talking point that we've just blown right past without even noticing.
Sorry for the rant, I'm sure there's a button or something I'm missing. I've just gotta post this stuff somewhere before the bots take over.
In this case I just threw the whole animation through RIFE and made it as smooth as possible. That can make the timing wrong in some parts and also expose flaws in the animation.
For my latest animations, I used it more strategically to only add frames where they're needed and to save time. If you go through "The Offering" frame by frame you'll see some artifacts, but it's mostly hidden in motion. The way her breathing slows down at the end without losing fluidity would have taken much longer without the frame interpolation.
Ultimately I think the best use of the technology is where it disappears, rather than takes center stage like in this piece.
Have you tried any SDXL models yet? They're much smarter at interpreting prompts, and just generally output higher quality images. May solve your "looking down" issue. I've been using this one for nearly everything: https://civitai.com/models/288584/autismmix-sdxl