These AI-generated Overwatch fusions are beautiful and terrifying

pcgamer.com:

I've gone back and forth on AI art being cool and scary, but I can't deny that these Overwatch hero fusion renders(opens in new tab) I saw on Reddit last week are pretty sweet. It is fascinating that we can now ask an AI's opinion of what Soldier 76 and Mei would look like smooshed together, and it can spit out a shockingly cool, arguably original character design.

That's what author Drew Harrison did when he became one of the few thousand with access to Stable Diffusion(opens in new tab), an AI image model similar to other popular tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. Harrison started by feeding the AI simple instructions like «make a fusion portrait of Mercy from Overwatch and Junkrat from Overwatch» and in some cases took more direct control over artistic influences with tags like 4K, highly detailed, cinematic lighting. Having only messed around with the DALL-E Mini online tool for a bit, I wasn't aware you can get so specific with instructions.

The results are striking:

I'm particularly intrigued/unnerved by the glare of Mercy x Junkrat (Mercrat) and the arm-mounted belly on Moira x Roadhog's (Moidhog) arm. You often can't expect an AI to spit out a fridge-worthy sketch on its first try. Harrison told me that AI art is often a process of trial and error.

«You try a prompt, see what comes back, revise, rerun, and repeat until you get the desired image,» Harrison said. Speed is why Harrison currently favors Stable Diffusion over other AI art tools. He describes Stable Diffusion as «lightning quick and lightweight,» two major advantages when your only creative bottleneck is render time and VRAM.

Stable Diffusion is also the biggest AI art tool in the process of going open-source, though it sounds like you'll need a pretty