By some estimates there are about one trillion species of bacteria on our planet. A scant few have been selected for the high honor of being represented as a plushie. That is right. There is a company, Giant Microbes, that makes plush dolls of microbes (and a few other things). As befits a plushy, they're on the cute side. I've amassed quite a collection (but less than a third of what's available). After making AI art of several bacteria genera (see here and here for the successes; for the failures, see here, here, and here), I wanted to see what the AI would make if asked to draw a giant plush microbe.
At first I was quite astonished with the results. These didn't look like giant plushy microbes at all! But I liked what I was seeing, so I kept generating more variations. I played around with the prompt, too, leaving out giant, plush, or both. The results still surprised me. Eventually I realized that I had inadvertently left on a style ("Euphoric"). Once I turned it off I started getting results that made sense.
First, I'll show you the results I got while the "Euphoric" style was turned on:
Euphoric Microbes
Euphoric Plush Microbes
Euphoric Giant Microbes
Euphoric Plush Giant Microbes
Just for fun, I tried adding Cthulhu to the prompts. Here are the results in the same order:
Euphoric Plush / Giant / Microbe Cthulhu
While trying to figure out what was going on, I tried a different Stable Diffusion model. Here are the results for that, including one Cthulhu:
Euphoric Plush / Giant / Microbe / Cthulhu
Okay. Now here's what I got when I turned off the "Euphoric" style (they weren't as interesting, so I didn't generate as many):
Non-Euphoric Microbes
Non-Euphoric Plush Microbes
Non-Euphoric Giant Microbes
Non-Euphoric Plush Giant Microbes
Only the last one looks anything like the real plush microbes. Anyway, as before, I tried adding Cthulhu to the prompts. Here are the results in the same order:
These illustrations were drawn using Stable Diffusion 2.1.
