Meta AI Image Generation - a user's experience
Meta AI is a free image generator you can use by signing in with Instagram or Facebook. It employs the diffusion model to generate images out of chaos. It was trained using a billion publicly available images on Facebook. I have made about 20k images using Meta AI and have kept the best 4,000 of these. Nearly all are of females, horned females to be precise, ie succubi, such as this one.
Meta is fast - it takes about 10 seconds to generate four images 1280 x 1280 pixels. You can cut that time to virtually zero by running multiple copies of the program. The images are not photo quality, but can be pretty good. They vary from cartoon-like to photo-like, such as this one. The prompt I used for this image was, "horned succubus in filigree red lace short mini, dancing at a ball on a black and white marble pavement outdoors, in bright daylight, aged 34, show full figure in black stockings, show stocking tops, face in golden light, half smiling, jet black hair, holds up the hem with both hands".
Meta is prudish, so that it will (almost) never draw a female nipple and any direct attempt to generate an erotic image will be rejected. It is a challenge - one I enjoy - to make erotic images despite Meta's restrictions. Luckily, Meta is happy to show stocking tops and usually it draws well-shaped legs. It draws generous breasts and almost always shows some cleavage, without being asked to, though the results are rarely risqué. When I asked for a short mini and long boots, Meta drew extremely short minis, some not even covering the crotch. It is as though there are two contradictory tendencies: a censorious watch over words and an image maker that wants to show a lot of skin. You cannot ask for lingerie, but if you specify lace then Meta will clothe the ladies in underwear.
As for the processing of prompts, this is hit and miss. Some things it gets right straight away, others require repeated prompting, or are never accepted or understood. Thus if you say you want the person to hold a glowing crystal, that will work fine. However, asking for bright light on the face never gets understood. You are better off asking that the person hold a candle or lamp. I struggled to get it to draw females in the 25-40 age group, as Meta prefers to draw teenagers. This it does rather well, but was not what I wanted. Even when I specified the age multiple times, it still gave me some teenagers and even children. When I raised the age to 50, it still made some teens, but as if to mock me, it also generated women who looked 90 plus. Another prompt it failed to obey was for the woman to stand in knee deep water - it simply refused to do this, submerging her more than I wanted.
I struck gold when I asked it to draw females standing in a lily pond. It created some spectacular and beautiful lighting effects, with the gold lace lit from behind. A professional photographer might envy these images. Another thing it does exceptionally well is design lace gowns, especially in gold and black. These look gorgeous. I have noticed that the style of the female figure depends on the background. The ones in the lily pond tend to all look alike, a bit wishy-washy, whereas the dancing ones tend to be harsh and cartoon-like, with extreme contrast.
As for faces, these are a mixed bag. A few are lovely, some are pretty, most are plain. The average is so-so. Some of the faces repeat, with tiny variations, so it seems to have a bank of template images that it reuses. It usually defaults to Caucasians, but sometimes it gets into a pattern of repeating Asian faces. It very rarely draws blacks.
Its Achilles heel is drawing fingers, which it often mucks up very badly. Occasionally, it draws a woman with three or even four hands, or three legs, or six fingers. By accident, it made a bare-breasted image, but without nipples. So I added these. Speaking of which, I have been doing a lot of plastic surgery using Photoshop. I remove bizarre ears, 6th fingers, third or fourth arms, and third legs, as well as other blemishes.
Meta is obsessed with wasp waists and figure eight body shapes, with the hips far too wide. So I pad the waists of nearly all the images that I post on my site. However, the image at right is untouched. Meta very rarely pictures over-weight females, though wide thighs do feature sometimes.
At times, it shows a creative spark, adding elements I have not asked for, such as a mythological creature, or a whole lily pond when I asked for just one flower. It is good at generating poses, which vary, as you would want. Occasionally, legs are twisted at impossible angles, but mostly it gets the postures right.
I confess I am addicted to making the succubus images. It is a case of intermittent reward spurring me to generate yet another image, in the hope that it will be an excellent one. Mostly, I get dross, or teenagers. Occasionally, I get an image I like very much, such as this one, which is close to my ideal of beauty. In such cases I am responsible for the creation of something beautiful.
It took me a long time to realise why nearly all the images of standing poses that I like are cut off above the knee. Ones that show the full figure are almost never good because the faces are cartoon-like. I think the reason for this is that in full figure shots, the face is generated from fewer pixels and hence has less detail.
Every now and then, it gives the silly response, "Oops! I can't generate that image." This is either because I have asked for something it thinks it shoudn't do, or it may be due to a random error (eg regenerating an image it has already made previously), or the image generation has been disabled for a while, which happens every now and then. You can tell it is offline if you ask it to draw a dog and you get the Oops message. It is hard to discern a pattern in this. Sometimes it will only let you make a few images before going offline. Other times, it will allow hundreds. Nor is there a set period before it lets you back in again. If you ask Meta about this, it answers with a fib, that a third-party service is experiencing technical difficulties. To get around this problem, I suggest creating additional logins to Facebook or Instagram.
I suspect Meta locks you out when it realises it has drawn bare breasts.
You can see images I generated using Meta AI here.
Tad Boniecki
September 2024