Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Over the past week, at least two venerable American newspapers--the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer--published a 56-page insert of summer content that was in large part produced by A.I. The most glaring evidence was a now-notorious "summer reading list," which recommended 15 books, five of them real, 10 of them imaginary, with summaries of fake titles like Isabel Allende's Tidewater Dreams, Min Jin Lee's Nightshade Market, Rebecca Makkai's Boiling Point, and Percival Everett's The Rainmakers. The authors exist; the books do not. The rest of the section, which included anodyne listicles about summer activities, barbecuing, and photography, soon attracted additional scrutiny.

This project report summarizes our journey to perform stable diffusion fine-tuning on a dataset containing Calvin and Hobbes comics. The purpose is to convert any given input image into the comic style of Calvin and Hobbes, essentially performing style transfer. We train stable-diffusion-v1.5 using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to efficiently speed up the fine-tuning process. The diffusion itself is handled by a Variational Autoencoder (VAE), which is a U-net. Our results were visually appealing for the amount of training time and the quality of input data that went into training.

Case in point: Researchers at Google parent company Alphabet's DeepMind recently revealed in an academic paper that they'd developed a system capable of segmenting CT scans with "near-human performance." Now, scientists at the University of Potsdam in Germany have developed an AI segmentation tool for a slightly more cartoony medium: comics. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org During tests involving a dataset containing speech bubbles with "wiggly tails" and "curved corners," it achieved an F1 score (a measure of a test's accuracy) of 0.94, which the researchers claim is state-of-the-art. "Speech balloons usually consist of a carrier, [a symbolic device used to hold the text,] and a tail connecting the carrier to its root character from which the text emerges. Both tails and carriers come in a variety of shapes, outlines, and degrees of wiggliness," the researchers explain.