A common complaint about AI generated scenes is the "uncanny valley" effect, where the scene is almost, but not quite, right, and it throws the viewer off slightly. TBH I expect this will get better - look at how far things have come in just the last two years - but comparing even the best AI pics and videos with actual human shot material, there's a huge gulf yet to cross. I'm interested in, and partly working in, the AI art field, but from my own POV I've found the most satisfying AI images are not near-realistic photos, but rather sumulated paintings, actual "art", that you might find hanging on the walls of a WAM-friendly stately home, or WAM-themed fine art gallery. Because paintings aren't meant to be photographs, things that look "odd" in AI photos aren't anything like as noticable in AI paintings.

My own favourite classic art period is the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite movement, artists like Edward Burne-Jones and his contemporaries, beautiful images full of detail, allegory, and visual storytelling. Of course in the 19th century painters didn't usually show women in overalls or tracksuits taking mudbaths in gothic bathing chambers, but by the powers of AI, I can now create those kinds of images, in something approximating the Pre-Raphaelite style. I've added a few of my favourite creations below.

Could this be an entirely new genre of WAM art, alongside WAM stories, as opposed to replacing human-produced scenes?

(for anyone who wants to experiment, the images below were procuced using PromptusAI's "Pre-Raphaelite-Art" microsite https://pre-raphaelite-art.promptus.ai/)

Also, I've not set the synthetic flag on this post as it's about non-photorealistic AI images - I'm interested to see what everyone thinks of this use of AI.

Very smart idea and comes a lot closer to being satisfactory to me. The lack of humanity therein is still somewhat gross, and not the fun sort of gross, especially when so much of your own work is all the better for the humanity involved.

It does open up the prospect for some fun jokes that I wouldn't have the talent to execute otherwise though, like a splosh remix of Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, this time from the inside out.

WAM cartoons and comic strips have been a thing since the beginning.

But whatever the style, it's all a computer facsimile, and in a sense it's all a cartoon, regardless of how realistic it is. It's the representation of the situation that turns me on, and the representation has to be "good enough". Maybe some stylised 'anime style' stuff could work for me. A few years ago a couple of people were making some CGI animations and a couple of those were "good enough".

There are some 'non-realistic' images in the "a place to post ai content" megathread in the AI WAM group https://umd.net/groups/a-place-to-post-ai-content

Is John Everett Millais' Ophelia against TOS?

Don't worry, we are not going to be replacing modelled scenes with AI ones, Saturation Hall and Langstonedale will always be 100% real humans in our for-sale content. We might add some AI images of the house, estate, historic events aluded to in our backstory (if I ever have time to redevelop the sites), as decoration, just like how we have some random country house clip-art scattered about the place just now. But never for actual WAM scenes - if we ever did get into that, we'd create an all-new brand and sites for it, and make very clear which was which. But no plans to even think about that at the moment - still very much filming live, plus the huge stockpile we run with, also all live.


I remember reading somewhere years back about someone who'd created a very effective BDSM computer simulation that only showed triangles - but the story round it was sufficiently compelling it "worked" for the people it was aimed at. Any form of erotica is basically just about making brain suggestions - which is partly why there's such a huge range of WAM niches, and why almost anything will work for someone, somewhere, if it happens to triggers their specific receptors.


I'd forgotten about that, but yes, there are painting-style images there too.


The model was 19 when it was painted so I think that would be OK. I know she took ill after the lamps that were meant to warm the bath went out and Millais didn't notice, and she didn't complain so as not to spoil his work - but I gather she made a full recovery.

I was thinking more that it's a representation of someone dying.