Deformed AI Art Cats is Beyond 'Louis Wain Like' Nightmare Fuel

A TET Cat generated by Leonardo.ai.

You may be familiar with the English Artist, Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939), who is known for his illustrations of anthropomorphic cats that became more patterned and psychedelic in his later years as his mental health declined (at least according to speculation by psychiatrist, Walter Maclay in 1939).

Six examples of Louis Wain's
cat art supposedly suggesting
the decline of the artist's
mental health but the date
of each work is unspecified.

Previously I've written about my attempts to train an AI art generator to mimic my own cat art style without much success.

While I was able to generate a 'cat art' that was definitely influenced by my own style I could not say, without a doubt, the art looked like something I would have painted.

TET's Cats AI generated art
trained on my own art style.

Recently I switched form Open AI's text to image model to Leonardo.ai who allow you to train one model on anything completely for free (where as Open AI will only hold onto your trained models for a minimal monthly fee).

Using the same set of my own cat artwork images I trained Leonardo on my TET Cat style. Unsurprisingly the images produced from this model, that most resemble something I could have painted, look like I must be on some kind of mental decline of far steeper proportions than Louis Wain's later in his life.

Admittedly I have not seriously studied how to get the best out of my trained TET Cats model on Leonardo. However it's kind of scary that the nightmare fuel images I've casually produced so far really look like something I could have painted myself.

A selection of TET Cats AI image generations created with
Leonardo.ai. If some of these look like cat mermaids that's
what I was going for. It was a trend... apparently. None of
these images are usable... they're more 'Nightmare fuel'.

When I get back to seriously training an AI on my art again I hope I can improve drastically on my outputs so far. It may just be that my quirky cat style of limbs and tails flailing everywhere is just too confusing for an AI to make sense of?

Or maybe I'll just have to become a little 'twisted' with my cat artwork in my later years so that some psychiatrist in the future can decide I must have floated into madness like Louis Wain... or maybe I just drove an AI mad because it couldn't paint cats quite like me?

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