My beautiful-eyed world came crashing down around me when WOMBO upgraded Dream and Wombot from Stable Diffusion 1.4 to Stable Diffusion 2. I was wary of the change. I had read tales of artist styles being nerfed somehow, particularly those of contemporary artists like my beloved Ilya Kuvshinov. 

But I had also seen the insane quality improvement in Stable Diffusion 2. This new version didn’t just cross the Uncanny Valley, it jumped the chasm like Evel Knievel in a jet car.

Eyes in medium and wide shots were still a bit of an issue in the preview images I saw, but they looked much much better in closeups, and everything else looked amazing. Besides, I had the secret weapon against ocular unsightliness. Or so I thought.

To test out the new, more powerful Wombot, I wrote a bare-bones prompt:
“Close-up shot, beautiful eyes by Ilya Kuvshinov, beautiful face, pixie cut brown hair, beautiful happy woman.”
This was the result:

Simply gorgeous eyes. Absolutely stunning. But why was she so… umm… youthful? Why did my “happy woman” look like a 15-year-old girl? As someone who has created an underdressed porcelain cyborg or two with variations on that eye prompt, I was a bit freaked out at the possibility that my next work of art could make Chris Hansen ask me to “take a seat over there.”

So I experimented. Was Wombot’s new Stable Diffusion 2-based engine misinterpreting the “pixie” in “pixie cut hair?” Nope – she looked almost exactly the same without any mention of hair at all, and giving her long hair somehow made her look even younger. 

Maybe the three “beautiful”s being so close together was confusing Wombot, or it thought only children could be “happy?”

Again, no – an unbeautiful, non-happy woman had brown eyes and about half the makeup, but was just as young.

As the creator of everyone’s favorite sociopathic coke fiend detective once wrote, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.” I deleted “eyes by Ilya Kuvshinov, thinking (hoping?) that it would have the same non-effect as the other changes. But this time, the “Close up shot, pixie cut hair, woman” was actually a woman.

I tried giving her back her beauty and happiness, which re-applied her makeup and turned her eyes blue again. Still a perfectly safe face for, say, a three-breasted woman made of slime. (Which, I feel I must stress, is *not* the same thing as a slimegirl. Different thing altogether.) 

But why was this happening? How could mentioning an artist who drew cyberpunk anime cops cause women to magically lose half their age? I asked some of the Prompt Master experts, and they had also noticed the “Kuvshinov Effect” happening with other artists, like WLOP and Ross “Rossdraws” Tran. I hadn’t used those artists because of my new “no living artists except for Ilya Kuvshinov, with full acknowledgement of how hypocritical it is to make that exception purely because I need nice eyes, so please shut up Voices In My Head” rule, so I did some quick experiments. 

As the author of everyone’s favorite womanizing alcoholic secret agent wrote, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” With the overwhelming evidence of these three unscientific tests, we came to the only logical conclusion: to discourage people from using artist styles in Stable Diffusion 2, its cruel genius developers had come up with a bizarre punishment: they would make anyone who used them look like a pedophile.

I became increasingly paranoid. When I noticed that even prompts using long dead artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau seemed to affected by the Kuvshinov Effect, I stopped using artist styles for my eyes entirely. Instead, I came up with increasingly convoluted prompts like “beautiful piercing eyes, hidrocharme lenses, contacts, irises.” Other prompters I knew came up with similarly elaborate methods to counteract the Kuvshinov Effect: one advised me to put “adult woman, mature lady, fashion model, cover model” at the beginning of all my prompts. These solutions work, but they both burn through tokens like crazy.

WTF Is a Token?

Stable Diffusion’s 77-token limit

and what awaits those who break it,

explained in less than 10 minutes.

Also, a handsome man wearing pants

(maybe)

I avoided eyes when possible. I made people kissing with their eyes closed. And porcelain robots with inhuman eyes. And porcelain robots kissing with their inhuman eyes closed. 

For complicated shots, I gave up on eyes entirely, hiding them behind sunglasses or goggles.

Around this time, HaveIBeenTrained.com opened for general use. Created shortly after the launch of Stable Diffusion by a group of artists and engineers called Spawning AI, Have I Been Trained started as a service open only to artists. They could upload a picture of one of their artworks to see if it was in the LAION-5B database of images that had been used to train Stable Diffusion. This year, to make it easier for artists to find all of their “stolen” artwork at once, and to give them a central place to opt out of having that work be used to train Stable Diffusion 3, Spawning turned Have I Been Trained? into a full search engine website. And because the creators of HIBT care about the prompters that love Stable Diffusion as much as the artists who fear it, they let everyone use the search engine, not just artists.

The search site makes it dead simple to find out what an artist style will look like in Stable Diffusion and things like Wombot that use it. Just look up “art by xxxxx,” and you get to see all of their artwork that Stable Diffusion knows. Each artist could have dozens of pictures in the database – quite an improvement from the two examples in the partial artist sample I had downloaded months before. So I looked up Ilya Kuvshinov, expecting to find lots of Ghost in the Shell character studies and similarly mature anime fare. Instead, I found this: 

Ohhhh. Huh. Guess that explains it, then. 

Out of the over 250 images Stable Diffusion associated with “art by Ilya Kuvshinov” (many of them copies of the same image scraped from different sites), there were three from Ghost in the Shell: the picture I had seen, a wider version of the picture I had seen, and a landscape-cropped version of the picture I had seen.

There were also two or three other tough-looking, gun-toting, over-eighteen women, and around a dozen other pictures of women who looked like they could legally order a drink.

The rest were all young girls with stunning eyes.  

So anytime I had told Wombot I wanted someone or something topless with eyes “in the style of Ilya Kuvshinov,” it had quite reasonably assumed that I was a complete and total pervert who wanted pictures of beautiful-eyed preteens. Which it was more than happy to provide. Wombot doesn’t judge me. That’s one of the reasons I love it.

I feel a need to be perfectly clear that I did not want pictures of any preteens, no matter how amazing their eyes looked. I just wanted nice eyes for my pictures of Bettie Page kissing Betty Crocker. You know, like a normal pervert. 

The moral of this story: stealing artist’s styles is bad, and you should feel bad for doing it. 

Until you have thoroughly researched which of their artworks are part of your AI’s training data.

Start your research here:

Don’t steal styles

(without checking here first)

Top 5 Sites for Artist Styles

Then,

How do you fix those horrid eyes without Ilya Kuvshinov?

The magic word is “hidrocharme.”

Top Ten Best Eye Prompts

for Stable Diffusion, Dream by WOMBO, and Wombot

And soon: Is “in the style of Greg Rutkowski” the G.O.A.T. prompt?

NO.

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