Kelly image revamp and status report (where I talk about AI bullshit)

I've included the original image. Hopefully it's obvious which one is the old one.

I mean seriously, there are still a number of Flin/Kelly images in LLRR where Flin's hair is black. These primarily show up in the very first achievable sex scene with Kelly ("Smoking makes your kisses taste terrible, you know"), so it's easy to miss them if you're not on an ascension run. But those have been in desperate need of a revamp for a while now, so I'm gonna chip away at that while working on the sound update.

Anyway, it's the end of the month/year, so I thought I'd give you all a status report in regards to what I've been doing. A fair amount of it involved researching...the fascinating and terrifying world of AI writing and AI art.

AI Writing

I'd like to talk about something that's been kinda taking the internet by storm this past month (or months), and that's all this AI writing and AI art stuff.
Specifically, most recently, Chat GPT. For those who don't know, there's an advanced AI writer that was recently made available to people to interact with for free. And it's pretty damn impressive.

After I was introduced to it, I became fascinated with how I could try to use it to help me with LLRR. You're not supposed to write erotica with it, and if you trick it into writing that stuff anyway then you get a content warning flag. Hasn't stopped me 😂. Here's a small sample of something written entirely by it:
"As Flin and Julie lay on the forest floor, their labored breathing and soft moans fill the air. Flin's strong arms wrap around Julie's body, pulling her close as he continues to thrust into her. Julie's fingers dig into the dirt beneath them, trying to anchor herself as waves of pleasure wash over her.

The sound of their bodies slapping together echoes through the trees, adding to the sense of intimacy and secrecy surrounding their tryst."

But okay, I can also ask it for somewhat less explicit help. I asked it to come up with contrived reasons for why two people might wind up alone together given X and Y circumstances. I tried copy-pasting build-up scenes from LLRR into it and asking it to "continue writing this, but have it culminate in them kissing" (kissing is allowed, fortunately). And it came up with some pretty good dialogue between the characters and everything. In some regards, I'm very impressed.

But the content filters are annoying. There are other AI writers that lack these content filters, but they simply don't hold a candle to Chat GPT. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say, I haven't found a reasonable competitor on the market that lets you write erotica. Some of them are good at writing sex scenes specifically, but once you get out of that and try to hold some sort of cohesive storyline, they fall apart.
Also, Chat GPT itself can get really hung up on weird, repetitive wording and focuses on stuff you don't necessarily care to focus on. None of it is perfect. I'm also probably gonna get banned if I keep tricking it into writing erotica 😅.

You know the "cabin in the woods" scene with Flin and Kelly? I spent like 4 hours just trying to come up with the sequence of events that would lead those two to being alone in that house for the night. If an AI writer can help me skip those kinds of obstacles by giving me ideas that I then put into my own words, I think that's cool as shit. If it can come up with a different, decent way to say "he fucked her really hard," that's also pretty cool.

So my verdict, for the time being, is that AI writing can make writing a lot more fun if you use it to help solve shit that you're hung up on. But you should still be doing most of the writing yourself, and you really need to be okay with saying "actually AI bot, that's a terrible idea, I'll figure it out myself."

But AI Art, though.

Oh boy. AI art is steeped in controversy, namely the ethical concerns that come with sampling other artists' artwork without their permission (which is how it makes literally anything). I don't think this particular concern applies to AI writing in quite the same way (as I understand it, recent AI writing isn't taking these exact 3 words this person wrote and these 4 words this person wrote and putting them together. It's a lot more complicated than that, to say nothing of how words and languages are different from visual art), but both have their own share of concerns.

That aside, AI Art is also fucking weird a lot of the time, or soulless, or just "not quite right."
Nonetheless, I decided to try running Stable Diffusion on my computer with the infamous AnythingV3 module for generating prime anime waifus.

I'm gonna cut to the chase on this one. I wanted to see what Flin, Amy, Julie, and Kelly might potentially look like as high-quality anime characters, because that was always the goal. And these are a few of my favorite images from what I got:

PRETTY FUCKING COOL, RIGHT?
Julie's eyes should be green, but I get the feeling you didn't notice that.

Don't worry. I'm not about to go down this road.
Even with the ethical concerns aside, there are a lot of issues with trying to use AI art to make a visual novel. You need a bunch of different poses and scenes with the same character wearing the same clothes. That alone is daunting and nigh-impossible without the artistic skills to edit the renders yourself.
But also, rendering two or more people in the same image is also a huge pain, and getting them to have sex? It's...rough, man. The AI does not handle bodies pressing against each other well at all. It's hard to even get two characters to kiss the lightest kiss. The art style is also subtly different between some of the above images. Amy's skin is shinier than Julie's, for example.

And all THAT aside, there's just a lot less of "you" being put into the art when you do this. And that might not seem like a big deal when you say "yeah, but I suck at art, so who cares if it lacks my shitty input?" But when there isn't that sense of cohesion, it's almost like an uncanny valley of art direction. You might approximate it, but since it's a little off, it feels really weird. If you've checked out any AI art visual novels, I think you know what I mean.

BUT STILL, PRETTY FUCKING COOL, RIGHT?

My verdict on AI Art is that the above images can serve as awesome references for whenever I get around to a style revamp for my next project. I can model a new Flin myself that uses the above shot as a direction to try to move in. It's not gonna be exactly the same, but it's nice to have a proof-of-concept of the general idea in my head for how I'm imagining a character to look.

It may feel like a shame that it only took me a few minutes to generate those four gorgeous images while it took like two hours to make the much lower-quality Flin x Kelly image up top. But I defy you to AI generate a coherent, high-quality version of Flin grabbing Kelly's breast and pressing up against her and kissing her like that. Good. Fucking. Luck.

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With all that aside, I'll admit December was a slow development month, but I implemented the new sex song into Kelly's entire 3-day sequence and some of Julie's, so that's something. I'll finish out Julie's soon, and get to work on the second sex song (because believe me, the current sex song's shtick gets a little old after a while. I think having a second song will do wonders for keeping all the lovemaking scenes varied and interesting).

Phew! Hope everyone had a happy buncha holidays, and a happy new year!

And seriously, thanks so much for all your support this year. Don't quote me on this, but my new year's resolution is to fully finish LLRR by the end of 2023! Don't quote me on this.