AI Gives Some Dark Souls Characters Kinda Normal Human Faces

While last week we saw a bunch of Street Fighter characters given realistic human faces, this week the same AI is being turned on a game that’s seemingly even less likely to give us functional results: Dark Souls.

Inspired by the same Corridor Crew that led to the Street Fighter faces, illusory wall has grabbed a whole bunch of Dark Souls characters and tested out what the AI can product through all those hats and sadness.

Of course, monsters are off the cards, which places limits on what can and can’t be done with the game. The AI isn’t magic; it relies on being able to pinpoint certain characteristics of the human face and then improving them, and so anything with a distinctly inhuman face, or a face that’s covered by stuff, can’t product results.

So that narrows us down to the game’s humanoid NPCs and enemies, and boy, the results here are even more impressive than they were with Street Fighter. Maybe because these models are simpler, or because they’re presented in less dynamic poses than the stylised Street Fighter art, but the more conventional characters here look great.

Like this!

And this!

And, uh, the Egg Burdened!

You can see the full video here, which dwells mostly on NPCs, but has time at the end to try out some bad guys as well:

The artifical intelligence used here is called StyleCLIP, which is probably best described as “Photoshop driven by text, with all the good, bad, and chaos that entails”. StyleCLIP can do all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff with images, but the specific thing that folks have really been into lately—as these last two videos we’ve shared show—has been feeding it pictures of fictional characters and seeing real human faces spat out the other end.