30 Times AI Didn’t Understand The Assignment And Ended Up Creating Hilariously Weird Images (New Pics) (2024)

Fails, Funny

Artificial intelligence has been seriously blowing up, including within the creative industry. Teams behind image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have vowed to transform the way we conceptualize and produce visual content.

But as the results of their work are getting better, they're also growing weirder. The combination of people's creativity and (temporary) technological shortcomings often leads to unexpected and amusing outputs, flooding the internet with a plethora of hilariously absurd pictures.

Thankfully, the Facebook group 'Cursed AI' is ready to save them. It unites 754K members who are constantly sharing their own creations as well as the most memorable ones they find online, giving us all a glimpse of fluffy, happy snakes and SpongeBob's part-time job at a carwash.

More info: cursedai.wtf | Facebook

To gain a better understanding of 'Cursed AI,' we reached out to the people running the group, and they agreed to have a little chat about it.

"The group is very active and receives about 2,000 posts a day," Justin Garbett told Bored Panda. "Edgier posts tend to garner a lot of engagement, so people are always testing our rules, which sometimes just feels like a 'who can be the edgiest' competition."

"We receive everything: explicit content, culture war posts, and a lot of complaints about our moderation. The group isn't about any of that, so the six of us mods have to constantly monitor it," Garbett said, adding that around 200 posts are removed every day.

His colleague Matthew Haggett agrees that the group requires attention to ensure it stays in line with Facebook's standards.

"A few of the most common issues we deal with are harmless-but-off-topic posts asking about apps, various requests, and the sharing of stuff that's not in line with the 'Cursed AI' theme, like random memes."

"The most challenging issue is sticking to this 'cursed' theme that is somewhat ambiguous and tends towards edgy content, without allowing the group to become a toxic cesspool," Haggett explained to Bored Panda, saying that some people mistakenly interpret 'cursed' as meaning hateful, bigoted, sexually graphic, politically inflammatory, extremely gory, etc. "It is a challenge to walk the fine line of keeping 'cursed' content at the forefront while removing stuff that steps over the line."

In our first publication on the Facebook group 'Cursed AI,' we talked about how image generators' training sometimes makes them get things wrong.

Haggett said these platforms still have trouble with virtually everything, and "that's really at the heart of the group — unintentionally weird outputs that are unsettling, funny, or often both."

According to him, hands and text have been what generators have really struggled with. "One of my favorite current 'cursed' problems is how Bing / DALL-E 3 tries to do comics. DALL-E 3 is way ahead with rendering this kind of content, but it still comes up with hysterically weird and random results."

"We've progressed from 'AI can't draw hands' to 'AI can't write text' and now to 'AI can't spell,'" Justin Garbett added.

"AI has stepped up its game and can actually draw hands and write text now, but the spelling and grammar tend to go off the rails. A popular trend in our group right now involves crafting comics with captions that are deliberately nonsensical, playing into the AI's textual anomalies for comedic effect," the administrator highlighted.

"I love how our community gets creative with the tech hiccups."

"There's an ongoing debate about AI in the art industry: some argue that it revolutionizes creativity, providing new tools and possibilities, while others express concerns about the potential loss of human touch and the ethical implications of AI-generated art.

But Garbett thinks 'it’s going to broadly and fundamentally change the way we create and think about art' as a whole.

"We're at the stage where your average person can’t tell the difference between a good AI image and a real painting or photo, and the tech is moving insanely fast," he said.

"Professional creatives are already using the new tools, and I don't see that changing," the administrator of 'Cursed AI' said. "The genie can't be put back in the bottle; AI art is here to stay."

Because of how easy it is for anybody to get fairly good results, Garbett believes the definition of "good" art will shift as well. "I see so much AI art, and when someone does something different, it really stands out. The posts I love the most are entire series where the author creatively crafts a full narrative around a crazy concept or invents a whole new coherent uncanny world."

"I think like any medium, there will always be some who are better at using it than others," he said.

His colleague Matthew Haggett shares the sentiment. "There [is] no question that AI-generated art is going to be a seismic change across all areas of art and design. We already see it shifting focus away from technical skill and onto idea generation — if you can have a good idea, you can make a compelling image with minimal effort."

"In some senses, AI will be a tool like many others," he suggested. "But it is unlike any other tool we've had before, and there is no avoiding the fact that it will be disruptive to the current state of the industry. Not just in image making, where the 'Cursed AI' group is focused but also in writing, video, music, and design."

Whatever the future might be, it's hard to imagine their Facebook group dying any time soon. In fact, Haggett said that 'Cursed AI' as a community has reached a point where it develops trends that take on a life of their own.

"In the 11 months of the group's existence, there have been a bunch of these weird inside jokes that generate thousands of posts, becoming highly self-referential, and developing into their own semiotic systems where a single word or visual reference has a whole host of new meanings," he explained.

"One of my favorites is the 'Kandahar 1923' trend from summer. After a post of the 'Kandahar Giant circa 1923' went viral, the group posted literally thousands of weird 'Kandahar 1923' images that became a strange mythology of sepia-tinted pseudo-history. It is fascinating seeing these trends rise and fall and build from one to the next."

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