#Tex The Robot

[harbingersecho]

who the fuck is allison

[leahhamato]

Might be a hot take but if the 30s-40s was the golden age of animation then the modern stylized animation of today is definitely the silver age, both are insanely creative and take (or took) so much effort and passion to make

[robotgirlregularly]

Allison (Agent Texas) from Red Vs Blue

The robot girl of the day is Tex from Red vs. Blue!

[gilfhunter069]

Robots from the 80's! They have seen the worst of humanity.

[thehighcommandersignas]

My mom saw me drawing Signas yesterday and wanted me to send her the sketch. I showed her how he canonically looks and she was all "ooh!🎵" LOL

I showed her this particular official art of him:

[grunklemeeg]

kinda crazy how silly Halo series predicted the terrible consequences of AI girlfriends on lonely individuals or whatever

[ay-wants-vodka]

I have so much unposted junk ??

[captainpirateface]

Mood:

[diffidentalice]

Tex Talks Battletech is a youtube series on a niche gaming channel where this guy with an impressive and soothing deep voice goes on multi hour in-universe lectures of the individual robots in his favorite robot series. He talks about the history that led to the robot's production, its performance and reputation, and its variants. He does a good job of tying it in to this sort of in-universe moral lesson.

I'm linking one to get you started.

P.S. also every year when this guy releases one of these he also sets it up as a fundraiser for good medical causes.

my favorite genre of youtube video by far

[harbingersecho]

in my heart this is a pride drawing

[pseudocyan]

*Violently enters room*

What do you call a restaurant for computers and robots?!?!

Techs-Mechs!!!! Because… and the… no? Alright, it was fun, see you guys later…

*Violently exits room*

[bad-star]

I watched the new Tex Talk Battletech and was inspired by this cold line. I love Battletech and would love to do more fan art, but robots are difficult. I put a few hours into this and I don't know if its working.

What do you think? Should I finish it or move on?

[gilfhunter069]

Did I ever tell you I really like robots .

[milesmoraleskin]

Redesigns of some of the side characters for my HB rewrite!

In order is:

Stella & Octavia

Fizz

Verosika

Barbie Wire

Robot-Fizz

Chaz

Tex

Andrealphus

I'm still working on the sins so I'll post them whenever I finish those (but Bee is pictured in Tex's ref sheet!)

[stevebattle]

Peeper (1983) by ShowAmerica Inc., Elmhurst, Illinois. "QUADRACON welcomes PEEPER [right] into the family of celebrity robots from ShowAmerica, Inc. Both models are able to move wirelessly around an exhibit area or across a stage. They are able to shake hands and converse freely with astonished spectators." – The Personal Robot Book, by Texe Marrs.

[deepdreamnights]

Hey there, saw your post re: harassment around artists using gen ai and thought it was great esp with the debunking of data usage myths. Would you share your thoughts regarding concerns that models are being trained to copy specific art styles and thus pose a direct threat to the artists whose art styles are being used?

Well, there's several levels to that.

The main one is that on copyright grounds, styles are explicitly non-copyrightable. Moreover:

No one's style is unique

No one's style is unimitatable by analogue means.

The second point is important, because anyone can go on Fiverr right now and and find someone to replicate any given art style, and every competent draftsperson has to be able to do it to some degree or another. No major animation house, art studio, or comic company has ever hired someone because they couldn't find someone else that could imitate the surface-level aspects of their style.

The first point is just a matter of basic reality. Ex-nihlo creativity either doesn't exist or is so rare as to be a once-in-an-epoch thing. Everyone builds on the influences that they learn from, and if you think someone has a unique style what they really have is a different media diet than you.

For example, Don Bluth. Born 1937, aged 15 in 1952.

Same year Time released this this picture of Burlesque Performer Dale Strong.

Someone made an impression.

Marilyn Monroe was also a national sex symbol when Bluth was a teen, putting some context to most of his other ladies, but especially Goldie Pheasant (or maybe she's more Jayne Mansfield, hard to tell through the bird-ness). His art style has obvious roots with Tex Avery and I would guess he read Mad Magazine a lot as a kid.

And Not to hang the guy out to dry alone, I was a teenager in the 1990s, and most of my sexy fictional ladies are 9/10 some combination of Dana Scully, Peg Bundy, and Rhonda Shear.

The point being that style isn't something you create intentionally so much as an accumulation of influences, drawn from the commons. Attempting to claim ownership of such a thing is by itself an act of theft in my view, and allowing them to be protected under the law would mean a judge being shown exactly how many pieces of prior art the Walt Disney Corporation owns that your work superficially resembles. Why, they'll even run it through a style recognizing AI to make sure they catch them all.

But let's talk about style matching.

It just takes one image now, and doesn't require training.

Which I'm sure sounds frightening, but this has been the situation since February for Midjourney, and it was available in the Stable Diffusion ecosystem long before that. If the threat were as pronounced as feared, we'd have seen the impact by now. And we haven't, and we're unlikely to, for several reasons, several of them listed above.

The largest is that style isn't even close to the be all/end all of what an artist brings to a given project. And the kinds of execs who are making a 'replace 'em with a robot' kinda decision aren't the kinds of people who care about art style beyond how much it looks like the most recent successful thing. And nobody's ever needed a robot to ride coattails.

But the next largest part is that AI style imitations aren't really accurate because the robot doesn't see style in the same way we do. It's all just math to the robot, and it prioritizes what it notices, not what we do.

I'll demonstrate.

Jack Kirby will be my example, for several reasons.

He has a bold and identifiable style, he's arguably the most famous artist in western comics history, and he has many analogue imitators and homagers.

Using Midjourney and prompting "an illustration of dana scully by jack kirby, 1968, in the style of 1960s marvel comics --ar 3:4 --s 15"

Using the base model, on the first roll we get three complete style mismatches and one that's kinda close, though I'd say that's way more Sal Buscema or John Byrne.

Kirby's women had a certain, difficult to describe oddness about their faces that the robot doesn't seem to grok, and it doesn't touch on the kinds of wild patterns and bold black/white swatches that make Jack's work feel 'jack'.

Tom Scioli's take on Kirby is a sort of lovingly flanderized parody, but it captures the spirit of Jack's art much more directly even if a lot of individual details aren't period-accurate. He draws Kirby the way you remember Kirby from your childhood, but I don't question whether the page above is trying to be a Jack Kirby homage or one to Sal Buscema.

But Midjourney has style reference, so we can inject the Kirby right in. Using the picture of Sersei dancing from above with the same prompt, we get:

Well, the work is more convincingly period, but again, we're not terribly close to being on-point. In fact, they're not very consistent between each other. Top left is any 80s marvel fill-in artist. Top right is maybe Kirby-esq. Bottom Left is flat out Jim Lee, bottom right is very Byrne-y.

Using three reference images to give the best shot, I'm also moving to using images of a similar color style, and all with a woman as the central focus. I have included the infamous Crystal pin-up shot because as I said, Kirby women have a certain oddness to them (fondly).

Results (MJ 6.1 on the left, Niji 6 on the right):

It all says 60s-70s Marvel, but I don't think Kirby would be the first guess for any of them. Maaaaaaybe the lower-left Dana in image #2 if you squint.

And that's Jack Kirby. Massively popular and prolific with a career spanning decades. If anyone in the comics space should be impersonatable by this thing, its him.

I'm sure you could train a LORA to get closer, and sure, the tech is only going to get better from here, but by the nature of how the system works no generation pulls just from what is referenced. Every generation is both blended with other concepts and emphasizes only what the machine catalogs as relevant, not what we might.

There's not much to stop someone from imitating your style with a machine, but there was nothing stopping them from doing the same with an underpaid freelancer. The results are likely to miss the mark regardless.

If the client wants you, they'll try and get you. If they just want something kinda like you, they've always had an avenue to that.

Fortunately, you're more than your style, and whatever anyone can do with the machine, you can do better because you've got access to both.