This AI image generator makes cursed Pokemon art, but it's weirdly obsessed with butterflies

gamesradar.com:

A new AI image generator lets you conjure imaginary Pokemon based on a prompt of your choice, but it seems biased towards one bug-type in particular.

Lambdal (opens in new tab) is an AI image generator created by developer Justin Pinkney. Much like Dall-E, which shot to prominence with its surreal (if blurry) images earlier this year, the tool takes a written prompt, and generates a unique picture. Pinkney took that tool, and trained it on captioned images. Those captions weren't perfect, as they were also generated by a separate AI, but they helped give Pinkney and Lambdal a baseline of almost 1,000 images to work with.

Plugged into the system, the images can now be used to create AI-generated Pokemon. Pinkney's initial suggestions include a leafy version of Yoda, several unsettling politician-themed 'mons, and a collection of adorable Totoros, but the possibilities are pretty much endless.

Fine tuning #stablediffusion to make Pokemon!I wrote a quick guide on fine tuning your own Stable Diffusion: https://t.co/hLWrOjEPTmI also released my Pokemon model, you can try it out on Replicate: https://t.co/3sVQrk54wZor with this Notebook: https://t.co/nRU5EQt3WC pic.twitter.com/d1FIAp49nOSeptember 20, 2022

That said, Lambdal does appear to favour a specific design. I've been playing around with it for a while, and I've noticed a pattern based on Vivillon, a butterfly Pokemon introduced in Pokemon X and Y that comes in a number of forms all with a noticeable pixel-art style. Echoes of that style have shown up a whole bunch of times, based on prompts ranging from my boss' Twitter handle to Darth Vader. It's a phenomenon reminiscent of Carcinisation, a term used to outline the way in which multiple species throughout evolutionary