Dragon Ball Z characters were cute babies
AI-generated art is a new form of art that many artists are trying out. You might like it or you might not. People are making interesting works of art with the help of artificial intelligence and software that uses it. They plug in descriptive words and references to get finished works of art. This new way of making art is spreading to many different fandoms, like anime and video games. Recently, an Instagram artist named benmornin decided to see what AI could do when asked to draw popular characters from the Dragon Ball Z series as cute babies. The results are mostly cute, but as is usually the case with AI at the moment, some things can be a little scary to see.
Fans of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball franchise, which includes the original Dragon Ball, which came out on December 3, 1984, its sequel Dragon Ball Z, which came out in 1984, Dragon Ball GT, and the current Dragon Ball Super series, have seen the franchise's most popular characters at different ages and in many different ways. In the first Dragon Ball series, Goku was a 12-year-old boy, but we have seen flashbacks of him as a newborn baby over the years. So, people who know the series have a good idea of what some of these characters looked like when they were young. But it's interesting to see what AI thinks these characters should have looked like when they were babies.
A series made with the help of Midjourney
In recent months, the artist benmornin has been working on a project called "Toddler Series." In this series, popular intellectual properties (IPs) are put into an AI art program called Midjourney, and the best results of each baby photo are shared. Benmornin says that if the results are way off, they will add pictures of these characters to give the AI a better idea of what they look like. When this is done for Dragon Ball Z characters, a lot of very interesting art is made.
Faces from Dragon Ball Z like the main character Goku, his rival Vegeta, and his best friend Krillin look cute here, and the artists did a great job capturing their personalities and traits. Baby Goku is all smiles and happy to be there, but toddler Vegeta is grumpy and looking straight at the camera. Some of the characters, like Frieza, Super Saiyan Broly, and Bulma, are a bit scarier. Their likenesses are pretty close to what we know these characters to look like, but they kind of look like those old Treasure Troll dolls. On the funny side, baby Master Roshi has his full old man beard and sunglasses, while baby Piccolo looks a little more like something from Lord of the Rings.
A Vietnamese artist used AI to make versions of Capcom's Street Fighter characters that were very realistic. Most of the results were nice to look at, but, as we've seen with AI art so far, you might not want to look at some of them too closely. Benmornin hasn't just made their Toddler Series out of Dragon Ball. On Instagram, you can find baby versions of characters from House of the Dragon, South Park, Wednesday (the Netflix TV show coming out in 2022), Family Guy, Stranger Things, and a lot of other big franchises.
Selena Mattei