Art Breeder: AI-Generated PC / NPC Portraits

If you have ever run a tabletop RPG campaign, you have probably dug through the deepest recesses of the Internet to find illustrations capable of giving body to the protagonists of your story. An arduous task: illustrations rarely match your vision of the characters, and they are just as rarely free of usage rights. And I am not even talking about consistency issues, when your depictions come from various sources.

An interesting solution came to me a week ago, while I was testing AI Dungeon, a random scenario generator based on natural language processing. I was stunned to discover that the site offered avatars from a certain Art Breeder, with the mention "Select your AI generated avatar". AI-generated avatars? And yet these portraits looked good!

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Art Breeder is a recent platform, as evidenced by its ever-improving interface and its new features implemented day by day. Its goal is to allow the crossbreeding of images, so as to generate "procedurally powered" art. While the platform is not limited to portraits, the fact remains that this is its biggest asset and its best-working branch.

The interface takes a little time to get used to, even though you quickly reach interesting results. Art Breeder lets you either start from a "fresh" base by composing an image on the fly, or upload an image of your choice, which you can then modify at will.

Once the image is created, you can modify it at will, either by selecting proposals generated by AI Breeder, by crossbreeding it with another image, or by tweaking the values directly. The possibilities are practically endless, even though it is sometimes necessary to go through several intermediate images before reaching the desired destination. Every step is kept in memory by Art Breeder, with the aim of establishing your image's family tree.

Below, a quick sample of some of my creations. You may recognize Joseph Matula, whose features I always imagined for Lémon, brother of the infamous Kafey, or Mr Creosote (The Meaning of Life), who served as the basis for Hugh "Huge" Bloom. Gunther, for his part, almost has a little Popeye side to him: how fitting, for a sailor.

The miracle is such that with enough perseverance, it is possible to achieve convincing results from a mediocre base. My most striking examples come from old L5R V1 images, literally resurrected to be adapted for the V5 I plan to play soon. I hesitate to post them here for copyright reasons: for personal use, it is probably not an issue, but publishing them would surely invite litigation.

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For better and for worse, a few limitations remain to be noted. First off, the interpretation of some uploaded images leaves something to be desired. A blurry image is rarely a problem: with enough crossbreeding, one quite easily manages to reconstruct a sharp face that retains the essential features of the original. On the other hand, some images are very badly understood by Art Breeder and become downright unusable (or at least not for the intended purpose, in the example below).

Another problem: the framing is really very close to the face. Out of the question to see a dwarf's beard reach down to the chest, or to admire a truly elaborate hairstyle soaring to the heavens. Incidentally, hairstyles desperately lack inventiveness, unless of course you upload your own image and fight at every modification to keep its little curls.

Along the same lines, jewelry, tattoos and other cosmetic details that are sometimes important for a character's physical characterization are simply not handled (for the time being, at any rate), since the "earring" slider is... at best very random, if not completely useless. If you upload the portrait of a character with facial jewelry, the system will interpret it as parts of their face. In short: if your character stands out through a detail of this kind, you will despite everything have to go through the Photoshop box to rework your portrait.

Ultimately, faced with such apparently convincing results, one could easily wonder whether artists still have a role to play. Reassure yourself right away: besides the fact that Art Breeder feeds on pre-existing illustrations (indeed, after a good hundred portraits, the patterns end up repeating, and creativity suffers badly), the quality of its creations often remains well below what the strokes of a true artist offer: limited to 1600 x 1600 pixels (for now), the images very quickly betray an annoying "Photoshop" effect. I cannot say whether the problem comes from the images used to build the artificial intelligence's learning database, or whether it is a flaw inherent to the process. Even so, these little portraits will be more than enough to illustrate characters in a scenario of your own making (even semi-professional), and creations born from Art Breeder can serve as interesting bases for genuine artistic productions.