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Artists vs. (and for) AI

The Guardian published (another) piece about artists vs. AI, which I found interesting for two reasons.

First, they speak to near-legendary artist/illustrator Chris Foss who, after initially being unimpressed with images generated in his style (“people who really know my work would instantly recognise these are not by me”), goes on to say:

“I’ve got to deliver about 80 paintings [for a forthcoming exhibition]. I have to solve all sorts of problems with lighting and composition and things like this. And I’m looking at these [AI] things, thinking, you know what, I can download those, play with those, and I’ve got a bloody good painting. They’ve already solved all the problems for me.”

Foss has spotted an opportunity that AI presents to artists but which often goes un-remarked upon and unreported.

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Is Firefly 2 a first-class image generation model?

Adobe just released the second version of Firefly, its image generation model. While models such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are the market leaders in terms of result quality, the uncertainty (warranted or otherwise) about the datasets they’ve used in their training means that it’s important to have strong rivals that are trained on licensed data.

I had high hopes for Firefly when it was released, but unfortunately it fell short in many areas. So is Firefly 2 any better? In short, yes. But is it good enough to be a viable contender? Well, let’s take a look.

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Be weird to diversify Midjourney images

We know that the data used to train foundational AI models perpetuates bias, and in Midjourney that most clearly manifests1 in results involving people; unless explicitly instructed otherwise, the people in generated images tend to look beautiful.

To show you what I mean here’s a prompt I wrote, with the resulting generated images below it:

candid photograph, close-up, a young Korean woman with bleached blonde hair, bright natural light, happy, joyful --style raw

The results look great, but clearly fall squarely within conventional standards of beauty. Not everybody looks this beautiful (myself included), and we should reflect that.

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How popular are Roblox branded experiences?

This year lots of brands launched experiences on Roblox; some to catch the ‘metaverse’ hype, some for experimentation, and some with a genuine desire to engage a young audience in playful social spaces.

Roblox publicly records the number or visits to each experience, which can give you some idea of popularity, although it doesn’t list unique visits. However, some experiences reward every user with a badge for visiting for the first time, so we can use that, where available, to record unique visits.

Gucci Town’s Welcome badge shows how many users entered for the first time

I looked at a number of branded experiences to find those with a first-time user award, and you can see their relative popularity in the chart below. It’s not a fair like-for-like as some have been online for longer than others, but I still think it’s worthwhile to take a look. The chart shows total visit numbers, in millions, with unique visits recorded in a darker shade.

Data gathered on 15/12/2022

In absolute numbers, NARS Color Quest is the most popular experience to date, with almost 42 million visits (it also has the highest user approval rating, 86%, of all the experiences in the chart). But Gucci Town and Nikeland have the joint-highest number of unique visitors: 11.6 million apiece. Considering Roblox states 58.8 million daily active users, that’s good going.

Working from the total visits and unique visitors we can get a record of how many times each user returned, on average. This is shown in the chart below (note that I’ve excluded some of the least-visited experiences as their results seemed skewed):

Data gathered on 15/12/2022

NARS Color Quest might not have had the highest number of unique visitors, but it has by far the highest number of total visits, as each of its users returned over three times, on average. Gucci Town and Nikeland have had an equal number of unique visitors, but Gucci ranks much higher in return visits, with 2.26 to Nikeland’s 1.45. Note also here that Spotify Island and iHeartLand Music Tycoon do well in returning visitors. Visitors to Walmart Land have only came back for an average of 0.5 visits (and it has a user approval rating of just 58%).

There are a lot of conclusions that can be inferred from this small study, but I need to explore them in more detail and with more scientific rigour when I have more time. In the meantime, if you’re wondering how well some of these branded experiences do, perhaps this will help.

And if you come across a branded experience which has a welcome / first-time badge but which I haven’t included here, be sure to let me know.


NB I updated the title of this post after publishing; it was originally “How Successful are Roblox Branded Experiences?”, but we can’t really measure success without knowing goals, so “popular” fits better.