Most AI-generated images with photorealistic and 3D elements have obvious defects, but I’m curious if anyone’s done some analysis on the flat cartoon-style AI images. Cartoons, comics, and 2D artwork usually aren’t meant to be photorealistic, but I can tell something is off at a glance. What exactly is it?
Generative LLM and so on is just pattern recognition and generation. It may do this several levels deep, but it doesn’t break free of this fundamental limitation.
You are noticing that it is just doing patterns and noticing them yourself. Lines flow a bit oddly. Real objects have recognizable textures but are missing parts of the coherent whole. Comic panels that would be copy + paste for an artist are actually “redrawn” by the generative algorithms and that feels odd. Context changes oddly - e.g. the backgrounds.
It’s mostly just parlor tricks. Entertaining but rarely actually that useful.
For me at least it’s that the perspective is off. When someone is learning to draw or is just a shitty artist and the perspective isn’t very good you can immediately identify it. It looks like someone drew “front” eyes on the side of the head or something like that. When AI makes an image, the perspective is off, just in a different ways. The eye doesn’t look like a “front” eye or a “side” eye or a “top” eye. It looks like all of them and none of them. It makes the entire thing unsettling.
So I have a latex fetish. A lot of the AI art i am exposed to is latex art for that reason and, sadly, people who make AI art like to make shiny/latex art because it actually simplifies the image and makes the generation superficially better.
The problem is, the lighting is always all fucked up. The most important part is all fucked up and wrong, the angles are random and bad and there are random light sources, backlights and nonsensical shadows everywhere. It’s terrible to look at, feels wrong.
To me, this effect is also present on other generated images and i have kinda learned to recognize it now. Comes in handy.
But yea, what I just said about lighting and shadow you can say about every other aspect of the art as well. Too many details, details in weird places, things merging together. it’s just gibberish in the form of a picture.
And when it comes to comic,s aka art with more then one panel that is supposed to have a recognizable style and design to each aspect, this is absolute poison. A character with a robotic arm will just have a human hand in the 3rd depiction because that is how the generation went and the cretin writing the prompts didn’t care. No one in the chain knows anything about the art from and so it is bad.
