Different Dimension Me, an anime-style AI art generator developed by Tencent, has recently hit the Chinese internet, not with its advanced algorithms or rich art styles, but its wild and unexpected image recognition problems.
Different Dimension Me runs fine, most of the time. Although DDM can’t generate artwork based on given keywords like other popular AI generators, the app can transform people's selfies into images of beautified anime characters in approximate color tones and genders efficiently.
However, DDM’s proper functioning very much depends on the given photographs. Pics must have clear enough human features and body shapes without too many people or other animals involved, or the recognition mechanism will go wildly astray.
Once there are elements that prevent the AI from recognizing human body shapes and features, the generator will automatically start to turn people in the pics into other mysterious creatures with similar shapes and, in most situations, weird animals.
Another incorrect recognition made by DDM, but it perfectly matched the theme of the manga Chainsawman and the personality of its character Denji.
After understanding the basics of this limited AI, people on social media began to pick photos that could easily confuse the AI and generate funny pictures.
The funny thing is, this affects not only Tencent; another Chinese AI art generator called YiJian AI has the same problem. Some have suggested that both AI’s development processes may have made the AI overly obsessed with recognizing certain shapes saved in the database in a given image, causing the results we see. Below are some of their masterpieces.
Others have reversed the trend, using photos of animals to generate weird human anime images.
This could have been considered furry already
What’s more, after thorough use of DDM, people have found that due to the fact that most characters shown in Japanese anime have relativity light skin, this AI generator cannot recognize dark skin very well and often mistakes dark-skinned people or those wearing dark clothes as animals or other objects.
Anime-style art often showcases a limited set of body shapes and people. Making AI trained on it limited by the tropes of anime characters, DDM suffers from this especially. Some users suspect that this AI uses a less complicated algorithm than others, simply converting any human faces it recognizes into a very typical anime style.