For the past three months or so, I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion on and off, experimenting with different settings and generally entertaining myself with silly things. At one point I tweeted out something about having a bad day and ending with, “Fuck it. Stable Diffusion, give me 100 images of Disney princesses masturbating by a beautiful summer lake.” And the thing is, Stable Diffusion can do that.
(No, I’m not going to share anything I generate; I know it’s crap, and I know the databases are probably stolen as much as everything on Tumblr not posted by the original artists was stolen, and people mourn the death of Tumblr much more than they will the unlikely end of Stable Diffusion.)
One of the things I’ve found, though, is that “real person” Stable Diffusion is really unsatisfying. Even when there’s a very good plug-in model of that person, using AI illustration to make more of what that person did doesn’t really have much of an impact.
I was in my 30s and 40s through the era when names like Chloe Vevrier, Renata Daninsky, Aria Giovanni, Erica Campbell, Veronika Zemanova were all over the adult corners of the internet, and there have since then been plenty of quite good plug-ins that will do a decent job of rendering these women in whatever phase of their careers that you like.
Even so, I discovered that while I’m still highly entertained with the idea of “render Rapunzel as an Aztec warrior,” I quickly lost interest in renderings of real people, even real porn stars, in the same way.
I think the reason is simply that we develop a parasocial understanding of real people, being really photographed, in a way that doesn’t carry over. For all that it’s fantasty, Zemanova really did hold a shotgut and really did fire it and really was filmed by a high-speed camera that captured every delightful movement of her prodigious bosom. Monroe Rhys and Katya Clover really did masturbate (or at least seem to) for the camera while wearing Apple watches that depicted the rise and fall of their heartbeats.
But no matter how “realistic” Stable Diffusion can make an image, those images it produces did not happen. We couldn’t have been there, we could never have actually seen those events happen in real time and in real life. I could wish that Monroe Rhys made more than three films, and I could wish Aria Giovanni and London Andrews never got any older, but they’re human beings and they get tired of the job or they just get older and more tired in general and… that’s what being human is about.
Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFF) is a sub-category on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own. RPFF puts words into the mouths of real people, often silly or horny or just revealing of what the writer wishes or believes the person being depicted should or would say. The writer is putting a lot of mental energy into maintaining and depicting the parasocial relationship they and their readers have with that person, and the strength of any given story comes from the resonance that writer can elicit from it.
Real Person Stable Diffusion, at least in the still image category, doesn’t have the same energy. Stable Diffusion is rummaging through a bag of eight billion tiny image shards and word relationships with those shards and assembling a collection of kaliedescopic images that, through the magic of alegebra and pareidolia, we hope looks like the prompt thet user typed in. It lacks even the illusion of verisimilitude: it doesn’t pretend to be true or possible or evidentiary or interesting. It’s just… pretty.
Pretty can sustain interest for awhile, but it’s not the basis for any kind of long-term relationship. Even animated films have the attention and interest of the artists behind them. CGI-heavy Marvel films work when we care about the characters, not the roller coaster ride of visual CGI. We want a story written by people, about people, for people. Real Person Stable Diffusion, no matter how “realistic” it can approach as a photographic simulation, sits deep in the uncanny valley where we know we are being fooled by a photograph of something that never happened.
(No, I’m not going to share anything I generate; I know it’s crap, and I know the databases are probably stolen as much as everything on Tumblr not posted by the original artists was stolen, and people mourn the death of Tumblr much more than they will the unlikely end of Stable Diffusion.)
One of the things I’ve found, though, is that “real person” Stable Diffusion is really unsatisfying. Even when there’s a very good plug-in model of that person, using AI illustration to make more of what that person did doesn’t really have much of an impact.
I was in my 30s and 40s through the era when names like Chloe Vevrier, Renata Daninsky, Aria Giovanni, Erica Campbell, Veronika Zemanova were all over the adult corners of the internet, and there have since then been plenty of quite good plug-ins that will do a decent job of rendering these women in whatever phase of their careers that you like.
Even so, I discovered that while I’m still highly entertained with the idea of “render Rapunzel as an Aztec warrior,” I quickly lost interest in renderings of real people, even real porn stars, in the same way.
I think the reason is simply that we develop a parasocial understanding of real people, being really photographed, in a way that doesn’t carry over. For all that it’s fantasty, Zemanova really did hold a shotgut and really did fire it and really was filmed by a high-speed camera that captured every delightful movement of her prodigious bosom. Monroe Rhys and Katya Clover really did masturbate (or at least seem to) for the camera while wearing Apple watches that depicted the rise and fall of their heartbeats.
But no matter how “realistic” Stable Diffusion can make an image, those images it produces did not happen. We couldn’t have been there, we could never have actually seen those events happen in real time and in real life. I could wish that Monroe Rhys made more than three films, and I could wish Aria Giovanni and London Andrews never got any older, but they’re human beings and they get tired of the job or they just get older and more tired in general and… that’s what being human is about.
Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFF) is a sub-category on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own. RPFF puts words into the mouths of real people, often silly or horny or just revealing of what the writer wishes or believes the person being depicted should or would say. The writer is putting a lot of mental energy into maintaining and depicting the parasocial relationship they and their readers have with that person, and the strength of any given story comes from the resonance that writer can elicit from it.
Real Person Stable Diffusion, at least in the still image category, doesn’t have the same energy. Stable Diffusion is rummaging through a bag of eight billion tiny image shards and word relationships with those shards and assembling a collection of kaliedescopic images that, through the magic of alegebra and pareidolia, we hope looks like the prompt thet user typed in. It lacks even the illusion of verisimilitude: it doesn’t pretend to be true or possible or evidentiary or interesting. It’s just… pretty.
Pretty can sustain interest for awhile, but it’s not the basis for any kind of long-term relationship. Even animated films have the attention and interest of the artists behind them. CGI-heavy Marvel films work when we care about the characters, not the roller coaster ride of visual CGI. We want a story written by people, about people, for people. Real Person Stable Diffusion, no matter how “realistic” it can approach as a photographic simulation, sits deep in the uncanny valley where we know we are being fooled by a photograph of something that never happened.
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