Name that AI celebrity: Shoddy Goods 008
4Hey, it’s time for another Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people buy, sell, and make. I’m Jason Toon and I absolutely wrecked my search history looking for the most egregious examples of AI-generated unauthorized celebrity merchandise (you’re welcome). As usual, online marketplaces did not fail to disappoint…
Fake AI-generated images of famous people are ruining everything from politics to news to sex. They’ve infested ecommerce, too. One the one hand, of course they are. On the other hand, why bother? It’s not like selling an AI-generated likeness of a famous person is any more legally defensible than just swiping a photo and reselling that. Eventually the soulless content grinders are bound to catch on and stop wasting the effort. So let’s “enjoy” this Golden Age while it lasts, with this AI-spawned gallery of misbegotten megastars and inhuman icons.
After some struggle, I decided not to encourage this by linking to the product pages. But I assure you every one was available on Temu, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, or Redbubble at the time of writing. And they all included the alleged subject’s name in the product title. I’ve put the names under the images, so if you want to try to guess who they purport to be, scroll slowly. If you want to preserve your sanity, scroll fast, or not at all. You’ve been warned.
Finally, an answer to the question “What if Forrest Gump were played by an emaciated, dead-eyed psychopath instead of Tom Hanks?”
If the idea of a “Pixar-style Michael Jackson” (seller’s words) seems inappropriate, given all the sordid allegations, this proves the reality is even worse.
“Looks like we need to rush out some Kamala Harris stickers.”
“You got it. Kamala means ‘lotus flower’ in Sanskrit, right?”
“If you say so. You need a picture of her?”
“Nah, I’ll just wing it. And I’ll show her four times so everybody can see that we really, really know what she looks like.”
The vacant stare, the foaming at the mouth… call an ambulance! Somebody with a very slight resemblance to Taylor Swift is OD’ing!
I guess I can tell that’s Robert Downey Jr., which makes this print not so much a “who is this?” as “who would ever buy this?”
Ah, yes, Bob Marley, famous for his green sunglasses, vacuous grin, and goatee that overlaps his bottom lip.
You know, they have this thing called Google where you can see tons of pictures of what Beyoncé actually looks like.
Which of the Beatles is which? Trick question: they’re all all of them at the same time!
OK, I think you’ve had enough. Most of these are obviously AI, from the darkest depths of the Uncanny Valley. It’s possible that some others are just bad human-generated art of the non-artificial variety. Who knows? There goes AI, undermining the foundations of objective truth again.
In this divided world, maybe the one single political thing we can all agree on is that AI does not have any idea at all what Kamala Harris looks like. Seen any good AI celebrity fails out there? If you’re a member, you can try your hand at making some all new abominations in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave
Oh, and if you’re just getting hip to the Shoddy Goods scene, check out some of our greatest hits:
LEGO by… Samsonite?!? How the luggage company fumbled the brick
Does Temu creep you out? It’s worse than you think
Why zero-proof beer, wine, and spirits aren’t cheaper than the hard stuff
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Even worse, the weird Beyoncé looks to be ripping off the style of black artist Kehinde Wiley. His works are quite striking and the style is hard to miss. Both of them deserve better.
Go give him some real views, maybe: https://kehindewiley.com/
@cainsley It’s not easy to bungle images of the most famous people on Earth so badly that they’re barely recognizable, but if anybody can do it, AI can! https://bous-revenge.io free.
@cainsley @lanaderay
SPAM
Are we certain that Beyoncé is AI-generated? The internal consistency combined with the sharp differences between the different areas of the pattern (the two parts of the garment plus the background) make me think otherwise. One of AI image generators’ main flaws at present is the tendency for these styles to blend into each other and feel similar.
(Also: I’ve looked at a lot of AI “art” and I dislike nearly all of it aesthetically, while this I find appealing.)
Update: looks like it’s a painting by Heather Perry, aka drunkgirldesigns (website/insta)
Here’s the one in question
While we’re at it, I think the Taylor Swift one is an actual gouache painting you can purchase https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Taylor-Swift-striped-shirt/554198/10866435/view
I’m not certain about that RDJ. I found the creator, but I’m really not sure whether their work involves AI or not. (note: the RedBubble account with this image contains lots of AI content, but they aren’t the originator of this image. There’s a Displate seller who I’m confident is the original uploader, whether or not they actually created the work)
The other ones are 100% AI though, for sure!
@agnesnutter It’s been posited that we are very close to the point where we have AI-generated personalities of the type envisioned as Max Headroom, but Beyoncé as a personality predates AI-generated art and animation. OTOH, there has long been some suspicion that her public-facing appearance is a CGI remap onto a motion-capture matrix.
This was a fun game. I think AI art is a ton of fun to play around with, and can be a huge positive tool for some artists to use either for inspiration, or to help with graphic design projects. As with all technology, there are bad actors, and people who will do malicious things with the technology, but I don’t think that makes the technology itself evil.
About a week ago, when the presidential debate was locked in, I used leonardo.ai to create a joke photo of a debate from a prison visitation room. The ai was able to create a pretty obvious Trump, but it had no idea how to make Harris. This was the closest I could get.
I wrote a quick description of what I wanted, but the Trump figure was too skinny so I said to make him fatter and it just rolled with it.
I find that I want to stay safely away from directing any AI-generation of images of actual persons at the moment.
And after a quick test, I am now confident that the native image generator here has no clue who Peter Sellers was, by way of just one example. (Which is actually a bit authentic, since when asked who was the real Peter Sellers, he replied “There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.”)
@werehatrack Because most of them are scams now?
@pakopako That, too.
A few months back I had the idea of making a meme that referenced an existing meme’s style while being completely AI to address the fact that AI is getting respectfully convincing.