Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson

AI art has been a hot topic in the world of video games lately, with those in favour arguing that it can save time and help smaller development teams take on big projects, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, such works have been criticised for lacking nuance or soul.

We're not sure this latest example of AI art is going to do much to convince the doubters, but it's rather entertaining all the same. Colin Williamson – who worked as lead artist on 17-Bit's Song In The Smoke and has previously been employed at the likes of Square Enix and Shinra Technologies – decided to feed the cast of Sega's Virtua Fighter into Stable Diffusion, a deep learning AI model created by StabilityAI.

You can view the full thread here, but we've pulled together some highlights:

Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson
Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson
Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson
Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson
Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson
Virtua Fighter AI
Image: Colin Williamson

As you can see, the results vary wildly in quality. Williamson says he tried the same procedure on characters from Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Fighter 3 but says "it's way funnier when the source material is more abstract."

He adds that: "I feel like we're maybe 10 years away from doing this kind of stuff in realtime on old games. The future is gonna be WEIRD."

[source twitter.com]