AI-generated imagery has come on in leaps and bounds in just this last year alone! We’ve had
Dalle, Mid Journey, Dalle 2, and now Stable Diffusion -which is kind of an exciting one,
because it’s a free program that you can just download to your PC and use as much
as you like. The internet could go down and you’d still access to this AI-image-generating
program on your own PC, to use forever more. I can’t stress enough how magical this thing
is! It’s been trained on millions of images, and at this point probably knows more about how this
world looks than you do. It knows what 1960’s England looks like. What the stock market looks
like! What I look like -kind of- what Rome looks like, remembers to draw Jupiter’s details without
being prompted to, and can even make an attempt at super-specific, previously unseen things like
drawing a Victorian-style room with lemons on the floor. You can ask for the same thing a
million times, and it will generate a million different images on that particular theme!
It was discovered that it can help to store images far more efficiently than even the best file
formats can. So it could be used to reduce how much mobile data you use, or to shrink the size
of game installs. Like, we’ve barely scratched the uses for this sort of technology. Stored
inside Stable Diffusion’s 4 GB of trained data is pretty much a record of humanity up to this point.
With this being a Counter-Strike channel, I’m going to try and make it about CS:GO by
interrogating this program on what it knows about this game, the community around it,
and then I’ll find ways in which it can serve us to help make Counter-Strike BETTER.
It’s really unfortunate that, while AI-image generation is progressing at breakneck speed,
their ability to generate images of Counter-Strike has -seemingly- hit a wall. I don’t know if it’s
because the game straddles too many generations, or if dust2’s overwhelming success has muddied
literally any image of the game that you try to generate, but AI simply CANNOT render nice
looking images of this game. It’s a shame, because searching for a newer game with a more
unique visual style like ‘Fortnite’ yielded very strong results which were immediately
recognisable as being that game. I suppose that Counter-Strike’s are distinctly Counter-Strikey,
too… just, not in a ‘pretty’ way. So no, AI-generated images of CS:GO
just look bleak, or dull, or downright silly. It’s the floors! The architecture can look very
Counter-Strike-y. It can even look good. But the ground in the image is always this dull,
entirely flat sort of thing with no interesting junk sprawled about or anything like that. I
focused my efforts on trying to get it to draw de_inferno’s banana section of the map,
but it just sprinkled bananas on the ground, or on the wall,
or on the gun model itself… anything but to show me the banana region of the map. Same with dust2,
but without the bananas. So it wasn’t even fun. So I’m keeping this part of the video very short
because, trust me, it’s depressing how little this program knows about Counter-Strike’s maps.
Character models were slightly better- typing in ‘leet krew csgo’ came up with a diverse array of
Counter-Strike-y looking character models, and, surprisingly, even environments. But it was still
too abstract and random to be too impressive, especially when compared with what else I
know this program is capable of generating! When it comes to Counter-Strike, by the time
you’ve described the scene enough to be somewhere you know from the game, it’s typically forgotten
about the CS:GO bit of the prompt and just goes and produces a nice looking image of the jungle,
or bright blue gas mask wearing men or of guys in green jumpsuits in a vaguely middle-eastern
setting. But one thing it DOES always remember to add are the guns. Turns out that AI loves guns. It
doesn’t even know that they are guns, yet it still manages to design some impressive looking weapons
and it puts them in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, complete with a 3D perspective,
sometimes even with a scope of some kind. This one here could almost be the UMP45!
But on the whole, I was disappointed. While it being unable to draw images of CS:GO may sound
like a major inconvenience for this video which is about… using AI to draw images of
CS:GO… it’s not as much of a problem as you might think. Because now we will investigate
how this AI could benefit YOU, and other people involved in the Counter-Strike scene.
As a player of CS:GO, you stand to benefit the least from this image-generation
technology. But you could still use it to generate a cool looking profile picture,
or that poster of ‘Pasha Biceps picking up that tree’ that you’ve always wanted. Really,
the sky’s the limit. You could generate a picture about literally ANYTHING.
…apart from Counter-strike maps, it seems.
And this level of freedom made my mind go completely blank and
I couldn’t think of anything to show as an example! Like, where to even begin?
What if you’re so attention deprived that you want to pretend you’re a beautiful woman? It’s
sad to see that these results are all so scantily clad. It says a thing or two about
today’s society, doesn’t it. So let’s search for ‘handsome man’ to level the playing field.
See! They’re all wearing more clothes. It isn’t fair is it? And they’re all WHITE. So,
totally in the name of fairness, I also got it to generate topless pictures of
handsome black men. Purely in the name of science, of course.
Much better.
So with justice restored to the universe, let’s investigate other sorts of profile pictures.
Say you’re a hacker and you’re looking to update your picture
to a new anime character. Stable Diffusion can do that for you.
And now let’s experiment with cute innocent little anthromorphic dog profile pictures that I see
everywhere. And it’s here that Stable Diffusion comes into its own. Its outputs can be… variable
in their quality, so it’s great that the program is completely free so that you can churn out
picture after picture after picture after picture until you find one that looks like you want it to.
You can even change its style by typing something like ‘cartoon’ at the end of the prompt. Like
I said, the sky’s the limit. And I’ve utterly squandered that freedom by wallowing in filth.
Oh I know! Let’s get it to draw ME!
This is as good an opportunity as I’m ever going to get to rant about this: From time to time,
over on twitter I get linked to a picture of somebody that people think looks like me,
and without fail, it doesn’t look like me. And right now it’s always Sebastian Vettel.
YES. Big lips. Ginger beard. White male. I get it. But the first impression I get from these
pictures is completely wrong. Unlike THIS person, who I was linked to 15 years ago,
and who I still think really does look like me! A younger version of me now. But yeah- my point is,
Stable Diffusion’s renditions of me aren’t familiar enough to trigger that uncomfortable
response I get from seeing somebody who actually looks like me. They are, at best,
pound shop versions of myself. And at worst, they’re Thorin.
But it’s not just me. If I showed you these pictures, I don’t think
you’d immediately say they were the Warowl. They’re MEANT to be, but they’re clearly not.
Trying to generate portraits of pro CS:GO players like Simple and Dupreeh just… well, it just didn’t
work. Though if I’m honest I was expecting worse from a request like ‘simple csgo player profile
picture’. And this is apparently Get Right. Compared with those, Olofmeister’s images
were a work of art! …yet I think it still falls into the same realm as my own profile pictures,
where it gets the broad strokes, like a white, hipster-y male with a ginger beard,
but it fails to get all the little touches that make olofmeister so special <3
As the people get more famous, their faces are generated slightly better, presumably because the
algorithm found more examples of these people to train itself on- Pewdiepie’s features and
hair look slightly more like the real thing, for instance, though not always in a flattering way.
The most satisfying results I had were with putting celebrities into famous movies. I
found these to be very well visualised and it successfully integrated whoever I
wanted into them, often in surprising or refreshingly imaginative ways.
But I know that generating real people with AI is a very controversial topic- right now it’s brushed
off by mainstream media as being a novelty, but it could be that in a few years’ time,
what I’m doing in this video could even be considered criminal! I was informed about an
AI-generated version of my voice which was used on another video on youtube recently.
‘WHO ELSE DOES THIS HAPPEN TO EVERY DAY ON YOUR FIRST RAID’
My stance on it is that pandora’s box has already been opened. And rather than to
pretend that it hasn’t been, then to act all shocked when malicious actors still use it,
I think it’s much better just to publicly show what it can do, which will get people ready for
the whole can of political worms that are about to be dropped on everybody’s plates! A point
I feel is my duty to convey, no matter how many pictures of Boris Johnson in Mad Max it may take!
But yeah, you can just leave the request blank, which lets the AI create something
from its own choosing. I’ll warn you though: its mind is a sinister place.
I could talk about AI-generated images all day. In fact, I pretty much have,
and always do. But returning to Counter-Strike, let’s see if I can find other uses for it in-game.
Mapping is really hard work- especially for Source, for reasons you’ll understand
if you’ve seen my latest videos on the topic. To make maps these days, ideally,
you need to get your own textures, which means going outside, finding things and trying to take
pictures of them with neutral lighting. But with Stable Diffusion, I just have
to request ‘Grass Texture from above’ and it will give me infinite variations of grass textures from
above. And some of them can be pretty good! Some of the brick, rock and even the WATER textures
I requested looked absolutely stunning. Here’s a map I made earlier- all of these
are AI-generated textures, with the only change that I’ve made to them being to
run them through a tiling feature to make the textures repeat less distractingly by hiding
where the edges of the textures are. All things considered, this is really rather impressive,
given I haven’t hand-adjusted anything, nor taken the time to give the materials bump maps
or anything else which could help make them look better. The water isn’t even made of water. This
really is just AI-generated textures, placed into a very primitive map to show that it can
actually be done, without requiring any sort of artistic ability. You don’t even have to leave
your house! Whether mappers will make textures this way remains to be seen, since a texture now
needs a lot of accompanying information to go along with it, like normal and roughness maps
which are the things which help the surfaces in Source 2 to look so convincing, and bumpy,
and… slimy. But still, what a great resource for mappers to use for coming up with placeholder
textures or to help visualise their concepts. Speaking of which, how about using AI to try and
generate… level layouts? I didn’t get quite so much success in this regard. I tried generating
images of csgo map layouts, csgo maps from above, top down level layouts, csgo radar images and so
on, but it was fixated on generating what looked to be images of existing maps from a kind of
high-up perspective. Some of them were pretty cool, but it wasn’t what I wanted. But then, I
don’t believe you CAN design a map on a 2D image, because it’s the height variations and intricately
designed corners which make a map special. But this gave me another idea! Say you’re a
mapper, and you’re working on… I dunno, a snowy map with a church and stuff. And no
matter what you do with it, you’re still not happy with an area of the map. All you have
to do is to describe that rough area, and AI MAY possibly give you some inspiration!
As you can
see, I generated… a few examples from this. Most looked really pretty,
with dramatic sunsets and looming church structures. But very few had what I could
consider to be valid ideas for Counter-Strike levels. But that’s the beauty of this program;
if you’re not happy with it, you just keep generating more until you are. And more and
more and more. Because why not. It’s a free country. If I want to spend my
whole day generating countless images of snowy graveyards then you can’t stop me!
…and of course, after this I realised that a different prompt could have done it better.
But that’s part of the journey, isn’t it. Just be sure to experiment with different prompts,
with different amounts of input, before you commit to generating hundreds of images of something.
I could go on and try to think up new use-cases… I haven’t even touched weapon
skin designs. But I feel like it would be similar to AI’s usage in mapping.
AI is GREAT on the brief overview level, and at a very specific level, but the bit in the middle is
still best left to human intuition. For instance: say you’re starting out on a new map, or weapon
skin, and you need some inspiration, or something to point your ideas in the right direction. Say
I want to make a blue, translucent-looking weapon skin, and need to quickly see how that might look
in practice. AI’s great for that! Just ask it to reel off 20 prompts and one of them may be a
great starting-point for you to build on further. But leave the specifics to yourself to decide.
Or say I have an idea for a map set in an asbestos mine. How could that
look? AI-generated imagery might help set the lighting, the style,
or the… general feel of it. In this case, it suggested that it could be set outside,
or in a more structured setting than I was imagining. I was picturing the sort of mine
found in Morrowind. So using the AI program gave me new variations on my idea to consider!
You could then use AI to generate placeholder textures or materials, or simply to stand
in until later on in development when they could be swapped out for more suitable ones.
Here are some blue, plastic-y textures with minor scratches,
which could at some scale, be applied to a weapon model.
AI is new, scary, and already very powerful, but some parts of the process are still best
left to the human imagination. But the winners of tomorrow will be the ones who find ways to
augment their work with AI-generated content. And who know how best to bend it to their will.
Because the technology’s only going to get better. And you can ignore it all you like.
You can argue it isn’t ‘real’ art. But that isn’t going to stop your entry from being beaten by one
that’s been -at least partially- AI generated. It's coming for all of us. Creeping into every
aspect of our lives. There’s no escape! And even when you’re trying to hide away from it all,
sitting there on CS:GO’s main menu, listening to your favourite music kit… how can you
know for sure that they weren’t just AI generated as well? And, if you can’t tell…
‘DOES IT EVEN MATTER?’