Oekaki Process
Summerโ
call to adventureโ
I discuss Oekaki with haikuโ
Soooo. A looong time ago leancup pilled me on stable diffusion in milady village, it was very early still in AI art, a new anime model just released, we didn't even have .safetensors files. People used hypernetworks and textual inversions to train stuff locally, so the technology was very kinda early (think sd 1.4-1.5 at that time).
I've became a friend of haiku, we released a tiny lil Ghiblady side collection (strawberry juice) that financed me getting a solid GPU and Back then AI projects were just simple img2img and hand curation (if you were not lazy, we were and still are obsessive about curation), but I wanted something else. Those hand-curated projects where essentially 1/1s, but I am interested in generative art, so I thought, what if we make a generative pfp project that recombines prompt-traits and drawn traits for a truly generative NFT? A synthesis of artist and AI.
Thats when I found a nifty lil textual inversion on some 4chan ai thread (chan sites often are the most early on exploring new cool things), which is now lost to time. I was prompt engineering a lot, and I disliked the super-slick semi-realism goonercore AI gens that are still prevalent to this day, so I developed the idea to create an generative AI project that doesn't look like AI gens at that point in time and dmed Haiku the fateful words:
"btw h8 we also could do neo-oekaki miladies"
Supernatural aidโ
We onboard The Gangโ
Back then, I planned another project, which I never saw thru though. I trained a hypernet on balljoint-dolls and wanted to do bjd miladies. Ina was part of that group that was interested in making the project and Ina was also a friend of haiku, having worked with him before. So we onboarded Ina (bambina) because i also knew it would be a big hit under her aesthetic vision.
Leancup and Tubydart were both team members of Ghiblady, so Haiku got both of them in the team too. We also got some assistance of Atticus/Egrevore from Pixelady for a couple traits.
Shoutout to the old and original chatgpt, back then before the release of 4, honestly chatgpt was sooooo good it didn't yap or moralize and it could actually solve coding problems tf is OAI cooking fr. We used it often to ask it questions and back then it did seem like they were incrementally making it dumber (censoring it) as it got more popular.
Autumnโ
thresholdโ
Work beginsโ
So the Big Work begins. The Gang starts to create Assets and the Generator, I fiddled around with the Automatic1111 SD webui API and cobbled together a generator in Python, the rest created the hand-drawn assets. Haiku took a managerial role, working with me on the generator, creating a ton of assets (including hair) himself and directing work to the other members (big shoutout to Haiku).