AI Generated Elves and Dwarves

 Although my GPU has cranked out an excess of high fantasy images spun directly from human imagination, I wanted to see how the new fangled AI generators would fare. After the disappointing showing from Rings of Power where the elves neither behaved nor or looked like elves, I wondered what the current machine bias was towards elves. I guess all the fan art it fed on thinks elves are pointy eared pointy chinned pretty boys. I would give Stable Diffusion an A+ for understanding the visuals of elves.

AI sees elves as pouty pretty boys

Actually if I had to come up with a description for the drawing, I would settle on "elf twins who specialize in the long lost arcane art of natural hair dying". 

 I used the below seed image to generate a dozen elf pairs. My very first elf twin image popped out when I typed in "All elves in Tolkien should have long hair" into Stable Diffusion.  (I don't really think that and I'm more annoyed that Rings of Power didn't judiciously use short hair as a signifier, perhaps give only Celebrimbor and the craftsman short hair to denote their more forward thinking pragmatic ways. )  And from that first seed image, I've generated dozens all with very different faces.  I probably would not have been able to tell the difference from something from DeviantArt, no doubt part of the fodder of ML. 

You don't have to check their ears to know...

A few came out malformed as Siamese twins, weirdly conjoined at the shoulders with matching fused armors to boot. Some pairs had grotesque flesh appendages in weird locations, but all in all the AI popped out no shortage of diverse elf pairs.

Unlike the pretty boys of machine learned elfdom, the AI goes the other way with dwarves. The weather beaten faces on these dwarves denotes a harsher life lacking a proper daily skincare regiment. 

Dwarves get the shaft...

AI only knows what humans feed it...

I tried for a bit to see if I could generate handsome dwarves but AI does not quite understand the beauty of solid masculinity donning a braided beard.  Still, I cannot deny I was impressed by the creativity of the generated imagery. I have a lot of mixed thoughts about the power of this technology and I'll use it more to see where it takes me.   

* All images generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4