A Review of Four AI Art Generators

Artificial Intelligence generated art is a hot new tech right now. It is despised by many artists. Well I'd love to personally commission some artists to create things for me, but I don't have the budget for that. It's been awhile since I've done an article on Red Sonja, my favorite comic book character, I decided to see what images I could make of her. The AI art that I hear about most is Midjourney A.I., and I could get good results with that, but that one costs money and again, no budget here. So here are some results from four AI art websites with free options.

NightCafe

A prompt I tried with all the sites was "Alison Brie as Red Sonja." NightCafe gave me this result, which looks pretty cool, but also doesn't really look like Alison Brie.

The other prompt I tried for all the sites was "Red Sonja fighting an octopus" and yeah, this result from NightCafe is garbage.

Hotpot

These are two results from Hotpot, first when I just ran it on the default and then on the photorealistic setting. And it does look like Alison Brie, though not a terribly flattering version of her, it's like they aged her up. Also the images from the free version of Hotpot are small, just 256x256.

Hotpot delivered an image of Red Sonja fighting an octopus, though it's as if the image has been badly cropped and we're missing half the scene.

starryai

Unprompted starrayi gave 4 versions of Alison Brie as Red Sonja. The quality is mixed but some of them are presentable. This site was by far the slowest though.

For the octopus version I selected the "Caspar David Friedrich" filter, because why not. I'm not really sure what's going on in the picture. The site says images can take up to 2 minutes to generate, but this actually took hours, so you won't see anything else from this site in the article.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face also produces 4 images unprompted. The bodies look pretty good but the faces only somewhat resemble Alison Brie and sometimes are weirdly distorted.

Some interesting results for Red Sonja fighting an octopus. It's not always clear what is Red Sonja and what is the octopus. Also there was a fourth image I had to leave off because it displayed a barbie smooth genital area.

So then I wanted to see what else I could do. NightCafe has the most options to play with. Here's an attempt with their style transfer. I uploaded this photo:

And asked NightCafe to redo it in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.

And the result was this:

The results are not the worst, but it doesn't really capture the pop art style I was hoping for.

NightCafe can also create AI art off a reference photo. The banner photo for this article is actually based off this image. So now I tried uploading an image of Alison Brie, this one to be exact:

And simply gave the prompt "Red Sonja" the results were this:

This is perhaps the most accurate Red Sonja outfit of any of the images but it still doesn't really look like Alison Brie and her left hand is distorted. I decided to try a different celb and uploaded this image of Jessica Nigri:

And the results were:

Which looks pretty good, but alas, does not really look like Jessica Nigri. I decided to give the other sites a chance to recreate Miss Nigri:

Yeah, that's a pretty good version of Jessica Nigri as Red Sonja. It's not Hotpot's fault that Nigri loves to make derp faces.

Hugging Face gave images that kind of looks Nigri and kind of looks like the stuff of nightmares.

What about locations? I decided to see what would happen if I asked for Red Sonja in St. Louis, and to make it interesting I selected the fantasy filter.

That's a pretty good version of Red Sonja in a Thomas Kinkade painting but there's no hint of St. Louis present. I took off the fantasy filter and tried again.

And we're back to total garbage from NightCafe. Trying from Hotpot:

Nope. Let's specify that I want Red Sonja in front of the St. Louis Arch.

Well that went completely off the rails. Apparently Hotpot thinks visiting the world's tallest arch gives you a third arm. Here was Hugging Face's attempt:

There's something arch like in a modern city in the background, which makes this the best attempt at Red Sonja going to St. Louis.

I started browsing through galleries of other people's creations on NightCafe and found that people were getting amazing results by putting in long detailed descriptions. Hence I tried "A detailed, hyper realistic sketch of Red Sonja fighting an eldritch monster in 1861 Virginia" and this was the result I got:

Dumpster fire. Admittedly my prompt was a bit of a mad lib. Let's see how the other sites did though. I gave Hotpot the same prompt with the Japanese Art filter on.

Hey now! It did not come with that black bar. So its worth knowing that Hotpot will give you NSFW images even if you're not trying for them. Here was Hugging Face's results:

Feels like Hugging Face made a real effort to try to meet my crazy request. Good effort buddy.

Overall thoughts on these sites:

NightCafe: Has the most options to play with. Can produce very good results but frequently produces nonsense. Can do faces, but can't get celebrity faces right. Limited number of free images can be produced daily.

Hotpot: Can produce very good results. Probably best at producing faces of celebrities. No limits on production. Will make nudity unprompted. However the images it does make are very small.

starrayi: Results can be respectable but the site is unbearably slow.

Hugging Face: Produces multiple results, can make faces that resemble celebrities but more likely to produce grotesquely distorted ones. Interesting results when given a story to tell.