An example of how to use https://www.mage.space/
It's free to use and online (there are some AI that you can just use on your computer but you need strong CPU and strong GPU that i don't have)
It is using the StableDiffusion AI that is open source.
You'll need to login to have access to the Advanced Mode features, it's free don't worry.
First as i have roughly an idea of what i want it to generate (some guy in heroic fantasy setting wearing some kind of leather vest), i'll create an image guide on an image editing/painting program based on color shapes :
as you can see something super simple with no artistic effort at all
save it as jpg or png it does not matter as the mage website version of StableDiffusion can read both format
Then on the mage website, i click on the little icon right next to the arrow on the end of the Prompt line, upload my quickly made guide image and set that image "Prompt Strength" to 0.7
The image prompt strength will influence how much the AI will be constrained to the picture (when you set a low prompt strength) or be less constrained by it (higher value) to follow a bit more what you have typed in the prompt.
Now back to the prompt, as i want something in the style of Boris Vallejo (one of my favorite artist of heroic fantasy of old) , i'll type
painting of a man wearing a leather armor in a summer weather, detailled, masterpiece, art by Boris Vallejo
Then i enable the Advanced Mode and in the negative prompt i add, as many people do :
the negative prompt is supposed to be about things you don't want the AI to do, it's useful to limit how badly it will make things sometime.lowres, text, error, cropped, worst quality, low quality, jpeg artifacts, ugly, duplicate, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, poorly drawn hands, deformed, blurry, bad anatomy, bad proportions, extra limbs, cloned face, gross proportions, malformed limbs, missing arms, missing legs, extra arms, extra legs, fused fingers, too many fingers, long neck, face out frame, head out frame, body out frame, out of focus, out of frame
Anyways, i run (i click on the arrow next to the Prompt line) and after a few seconds i obtain
Not bad at all, usually i need to re-run a few times until i get something i feel has potential, here the potential is there it's just the background that is crap, perfect for the next step :
I save (button Download) the generated picture and at the Image Guide i clear the one i had and upload this new one instead.
Still at the image guide, on the bottom at "Inpainting" i click on Custom, i setup the brush size and paint over the whole area around the character , that masking is supposed to tell where we want the AI to rework things, any area not inpainted should then be kept as is on the next run.
I setup the Prompt Strenght to 0.6 as i want the Ai to be more constrained so the result should still keep the feeling of what i wanted.
As it will work only in the surrounding landscape, i can change the prompt, and will do now :
Then i run the prompt, and obtainforest and mountain landscape in a summer weather, detailled, masterpiece, art by Boris Vallejo
quite nice for something that required nearly no effort.
and with some tweak in the prompt, artist style, or image guide you can get a wide variety of results
(Frank Frazetta then Luis Royo for the artist style on those, some old favorites artists of mine too)
Take note that it may need a bunch of Re-run to generate something good, so don't despair if after 2 or 3 re-run it's still not satisfying, you may just need more luck (and maybe some more prompt , slider or/and image tweaking).
I wonder what kind of fun you can have with some Daggerfall screenshot and turn them into cool artwork in the style of various artists
Some useful links :
https://haveibeentrained.com/
This to search for a keyword, artist name, etc... to see what kind of image the AI has been trained with, it's useful because sometime some keyword or artist name may not lead to what you think it should, the kind of image it was trained with can explain those annoyances.
http://lexica.art/
This one is to search for some kind of image and see what was used as a prompt to generate them, useful to learn how to make a prompt that have more chance to generate what you want instead of random bizarre deformed oddities
But all is not all fun and giggle, there are legit concerns that are starting to appear
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/0 ... -about-it/
and recently you had that happening too :
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-art- ... ?r=US&IR=T
One can start to imagine what will happen when those AI algorithm will have improved much more as it's been only a few years in and you can see what those AI can do already.