If it do not steal or plagiarizeGenerative AI is improving rapidly. Images that used to look spooky now appear more natural and humanly imperfect. But it still struggles with many things. Apparently video game controllers are one of them. Someone asked Midjourney for simple pictures of someone enjoying video games and got back some beautiful abominations.
A generative AI enthusiast reached out to the midjourney community for help this week when a simple command prompt brought back some nightmares. “Mj seems to have a really hard time playing video games,” they said posted on the project’s subreddit. “Any ideas how I could improve this? Prompt: Influencer relaxes while gaming on PlayStation 5 and has a blast”
While Midjourney managed to render a human with the right number of fingers, the controllers in her hands and the way she held them looked like something out of a Cronenberg movie. The gamepads are cluttered with random buttons, triggers, and sticks, and not in a cool way. Microsoft’s adaptive controller looks elegant. Midjourney’s version hurts just to look at.
As many commenters have suggested, one reason could be that the prompt is too wide. While “playing” is intuitive to the average person, it’s vague when compared to what a search for it might reveal. The bigger culprit, however, is probably that there just aren’t many pictures of the backs of controllers compared to all the front-facing promotional shots that companies put out to sell them.
In that regard, the failed experiment potentially reinforces one of generative AI’s greatest weaknesses: it’s great at giving you variations on what already exists, but struggles to fill in the gaps in what’s missing. Or it borrows from existing sources in the wrong way. Some of you may still remember those infamous grip meme, and it certainly looks like Midjourney is recreating that in the fourth picture. Turns out the fake AI gamer girl is actually extreme hardcore Armored Core Fan.
