Text-to-Pokémon is a fun little AI art widget that allows you to enter whatever name or description you like and (you guessed it) generates a pokémon that matches your prompt.
The model’s output isn’t perfect, but it’s tremendously amusing. You may try typing in the names of celebrities or politicians (as shown in the picture above with “Boris Johnson” and “Vladimir Putin”), or simply broad descriptions of the kind of pokémon that interest you (the one below is my “skeleton priest”).
(A quick suggestion for getting the most out of the tool: pick “4” from the “num outputs” drop-down option to receive four photos for each question rather than just one.)
Justin Pinkney, a machine learning researcher who has created a variety of visual AI tools and resources, created the model. Notably, this model is based on a much larger and more sophisticated AI art generator called Stable Diffusion. While competing programs such as DALL-E and Mid journey are restricted, Stable Diffusion is open source, allowing others to experiment with its output. Pinkney achieved precisely that, fine-tuning the technique using a database of Pokémon to produce this handy tool.
A simple Twitter search reveals that individuals have been utilizing Text-to-Pokémon to create a wide range of mash-ups, including Goku, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Jesus Christ himself.
This is a significant advantage of publishing open-source AI models like Stable Diffusion: people create amusing small tools like this.
