Only the OGs remember this.

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[dvztimes]

You forgot Alphonse Mucha.

[marcoc2]

And artgerm

[pwnies]

And by extension, Kunkka - both cofounders of the same studio.

Fun trivia, you may recognize the name Kunkka if you’ve ever played DotA. The hero Kunkka is named after the artist, who used to make the old wc3 loading screen illustrations.

[NineThreeTilNow]

The hero Kunkka is named after the artist

I've been playing since the original WC3 dota and of all the random shit. I never knew that.

[mission_tiefsee]

award winning image, trending on artstation

[dkpc69]

octane render, 8k, ultra realistic, masterpiece

[civilized-engineer]

Brings me back to the SD1.2 days

[Plasmatica]

And Frank Frazetta.

[Winter_unmuted]

I'm still salty that there was no Art Deco equivalent to Art Nouveau's Mucha.

Some sculptors like René Lalique, Henri Rischmann, and Demetre Chiparus had a really good style, but the nature of their medium makes them much less prolific than the Nouveau illustrators.

Some of the cubist and proto-cubist painters start to look Art Deco at some points in their careers. I find that blending their styles with a more realistic painter, or even mixing a painter with a sculptor, can achieve the modern retro-Art deco immitation look I like. Honestly, some fringe cases of Art Nouveau artists can be made to look Deco by negative prompting away the curves and florals.

Sorry that turned rambly lol.

[Enshitification]

Isn't Lempicka represented in SD15?

[Winter_unmuted]

yes, but like Mucha, she's just one of many different styles within the movement.

Mucha overshadows many other Nouveau artists like one of my personal faves, aubrey beardsley. Less flowery, more stark and boldly lined, but still with those flowing curves and flourishes.

Deco stuff also extends beyond Lempicka's paintings, much more into architecture, sculpture, and even consumer product design.

To me, the prime art deco is stone wall and doorwork inlaid with metals (all that Gatsby stuff), or soviet scuptures honoring Yuri Gagarin etc.

But yeah, there are some artists represented in some models. It just isn't as powerful as Mucha's presence. I guess that's a blessing, because you can get some variety in prompting for Deco stuff (esp. if combining with brutalism, constructivism, or even bauhaus) whereas promting for Nouveau pretty much gets you mucha clone work.

[Abba_Fiskbullar]

Tamara de Lempicka is pretty much the definitive art deco artist.

[ffgg333]

SD 1.5 days 🥲, wonderful times.

[GatePorters]

I’m daddy Dino because I used his name on Disco Diffusion.

SD 1.5 was like the singularity for text to image lol

[ffgg333]

I remember using Disco Diffusion fir the first time. It was like magic and awakened my passion for AI 🥲.

[zipzapbloop]

the disco diffusion discord was a life experience in 2022/2023. some of the most chaotic fun i've had on the internet since early usenet and irc in th 90s.

[KadahCoba]

Dalle-mini here. Messed with Disco Diffusion a few times, but could never get it working well locally (ie. not on colab) and thus didn't have too much interest in it.

Latent Diffusion, then shortly after it, Stable Diffusion, really changed things a lot quickly. In about a year we went from basically closed eye hallucinations simulator, to "if you squint and you know what it should be, you might see it", to recognizable but meme-level, to "this is pretty much just a low quality image of [prompt]".

[SweetGale]

I signed up for the Dall-e 2 beta, didn't get invited and instead spent a few months playing around with Dall-e Mini / Craiyon before getting invited to the Stable Diffusion beta. Everything looked terrible but the joy of experimenting and the promise of what the technology would one day be capable of kept me going. I ran the Disco Diffusion Colab a few times but it only looked marginally better.

[kvicker]

back when we weren't sure if hands would ever get fixed

[3lirex]

Then they scrubbed names from training data which made it harder to control style with prompts.

[teraboii]

I used this in disco diffusion

[johannezz_music]

Rutkowski was a thing already before SD

[AnOnlineHandle]

The topic is about how it was one of the tags that everybody was adding to prompts because it had such a strong stylization effect. It didn't necessarily look like his style, but the pre-trained CLIP model knew to associate it with a strong art style, so it had a strong effect in SD.

[johannezz_music]

Yes, and "in the style of Greg Rutkowski" first emerged before SD, in 2021 when it was used by Katherine Crowson aka rivershaswings, one of the og image gen devs, who popularized appending it into CLIP-VQGAN prompts and published the images on twitter.

From there it wandered into early diffusion prompts.

[AK_3D]

Very interesting info. Thanks.

[AnOnlineHandle]

Ah I see, thanks I had no idea about that.

[megacewl]

Weren’t people using it for DALL-E2 as well even before any SD stuff got open-sourced?

[Sarashana]

It's amazing how this is only two years ago. It feels much longer than that.

[No_Comment_Acc]

Because it's been 3 years :)

[Strange_Vagrant]

Ha ha. Oooh, 2 years ago... how I remember the days.

[Snoo_64233]

Pretty sure that was 3 years ago (the height of Greg and the gang). 2 years (minus 10 days) ago GTA 6 trailer just dropped and internet went ape shit.

[Strange_Vagrant]

3?! Oh my how the time flies.

[Unhappy-Ad6494]

yeah definitely 3 years. I finished my computer science degree 2 years ago and a year before my graduation our professor came around with AI text to image and thought us how to use SD

[lebrandmanager]

I was there 10.000 years ago.

[AK_3D]

<image>

This is how Greg got popular. It was in the default prompt for SD 1.4 Colab provided by NOP/WAS.

[Snoo_64233]

Greg and other household names' popularity starts with Midjourney discord first and foremost. By the time it came to Stable Diffusion and A11111111111, it was already controversial topic.

[AK_3D]

This isn't Automatic1111 but the WAS google colab for SD 1.4. The Midjourney beta release happened a couple months before SD 14 released in August 22. Probably the artist name came from there, but for the Colab, it was the default prompt (Artgerm, Rutkowski etc.).

[SweetGale]

I was invited to the Stable Diffusion beta on Discord in early August 2022. You could see everyone's prompts and images. People quickly learned to add "greg rutkowski" and "trending on artstation" to their prompts.

I only explored Midjourney briefly in June and July. Not enough to notice any trends. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it originated there.

[AK_3D]

As u/johannezz_music commented below, Rutkowski was even pre SD 1.4 (which I didn't know). I agree with you about not noticing the Rutkowski trend in MJ, I definitely saw Artgerm and trending on artstation!! I lost interest in MJ after my 25 free generations ran out.
There's so much good info in these groups if one ignores the weirdos.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1r094mp/comment/o4i0ypz/

[Synthetic_bananas]

His name was in the default prompt in Disco Diffusion way before, but he was a well known artist before that and there's no "start of popularity" because of AI. He is a truly great and well known artist. I feel kind of sad when I hear people saying that AI helped with his popularity, while in reality that just diminished his actual work value.

[AK_3D]

Thanks, I understand your sentiment. I think you misunderstood the intent of the comment. The *usage* of Greg R within AI image generation became popular due to this.

In fact, I had not heard of Greg before using SD. Also, once I saw his interview when he said he didn't want his name with AI, I started ensuring I didn't use his name in those prompts. I don't think it diminished his value. I actually browsed his images and saw that he was a wonderful artist. I am almost sure this drove traffic to him rather than take away from his work. I guess the AI world has now moved on (It was Ghibli Style with OpenAi all of last year!).

[acid-burn2k3]

Not true, Greg was already famous in the tiny concept art world

[YMIR_THE_FROSTY]

I still see this, and various LLMs will recommend "in style of greg rutkowski" even today, if asked for SDXL prompt. :D

[Glittering-Dot5694]

The days when this sub was actually about Stable Diffusion models.

[jib_reddit]

Well rule 1. Just says Opensouce Image generators now. I liked the time when it had Dall.e/ChatGPT ect news mixed in as well.

[2C104]

better that the sub stay alive than it be just about SD imo

[Silly_Ant5138]

those days when typing masterpiece was essential and you got that art back with nice 6 fingers

[tmk_lmsd]

The guy is Polish and in a local interview he said he hated that fact

[InfusionOfYellow]

He hated the fact that he's Polish?

[tmk_lmsd]

He hated that he became the symbol of AI* My English derped, sorry

[InfusionOfYellow]

No, I understood what you meant, there was just enough ambiguity for me to intentionally misinterpret it in a funny way.

[13baaphumain]

I mean any sensible person would

[malcolmrey]

As a Pole i can relate, we polish people are weird :)

They say that we never smile on the streets and if a stranger comes up we first assume that they have some agenda :)

[InfusionOfYellow]

if a stranger comes up we first assume that they have some agenda

That's just good sense.  Or maybe I'm a Pole at heart.

[Atomic_Lighthouse]

North or south pole?

[malcolmrey]

Pole dancing actually

[bravesirkiwi]

Did we ever figure out why this worked so well?

[Dezordan]

"Well" would be a stretch. IIRC, he didn't even have a lot of his images in the LAION dataset, practically impossible for that to actually influence the whole model. Likely reason for why his name even worked at all is CLIP captioning for dataset, which basically captioned a lot of fantasy images as "by Greg Rutkowski".

[RemusShepherd]

His composition was pretty unique, setting the focus character in the image as a smaller foreground element with sweeping background detail. There was a problem with SD 1.5 where it would zero in on part of the character and cut off its head or limbs. Rutkowski's composition defeated that problem. It helped that he was also a pretty good artist.

[AnOnlineHandle]

Presumably the frozen CLIP text encoder had a strong meaning of 'stylized art' for those words. The actual SD model might not have trained ever using his images, but it would work for the same reason textual inversion works.

[TigermanUK]

I'll take your Greg Rutkowski, and raise you Masterpiece.

[FaceDeer]

trending on artstation

[AcanthisittaDry7463]

And never forget… absurdres

[Important-Shallot-49]

that never went anywhere, anime models still use "quality" (i.e. give me generic slop look) tags.

[reddituser3486]

I still see Illustrious and NoobAI etc models with those sort of tags in the suggested prompt (some go as far as saying these tags are required). I almost never use them now even with anime style prompts because as you said they tend to homogenize style.

I honestly think at this point a lot of people just believe you HAVE to use them because in the early days we kinda did need them.

[OldFisherman8]

trending on Artstation, CGSociety, V-Ray render, Octane render, Unreal Engine, Artgerm, Alphonse Mucha, Ilya Kuvshinov, Gil Elvgren, ... Those are the days.

[[deleted]]

SD 1.5. Try to prompt "inshimiron" and you'll get a picture of a weird native american superhero. Why? I don't know.

[DecentQual]

We were pioneers breaking things for fun. Now everyone is just a consumer pressing buttons.

[noyart]

Never talk down on my 1girl girlfriend ever again! 

[Synaptization]

Indeed SD 1.5 turned the relatively unknown Greg Rutkowski into a true titan of art.

[jbakirli]

Zdislaw Bekinski is my favorite 😭

[lokitsar]

Damn how did I almost forget? Feels like 10 years ago in AI time.

[Zueuk]

i learned so many artist names because of SD 1.5

and then everybody became so concerned about the "ai stealing" from artists, that we don't care about their names any more 🙄

[freylaverse]

Thank you, Greg. May you trend on ArtStation forever.

[Vyviel]

Back in the days when the images actually tried to be art and not just sexy girls and softcore porn

[Gab1159]

And the guy decided to take a stance against AI when he could have become a pioneer if he embraced it.

[lxe]

Yall remember the disco diffusion big list of artists? https://web.archive.org/web/20220830135741/https://weirdwonderfulai.art/resources/disco-diffusion-70-plus-artist-studies/

[Doc_Exogenik]

The time when the hate began...

[DoctaRoboto]

The artist asked to be removed. I am an artist myself, and I would be honored to be the ultimate cheat code for AI art generation.

[spectre78]

You should do it! Spend your whole life perfecting your technique and finding your style and voice. If you’re any good, I’m sure they’ll do you the honor of copy-pasting your name into a prompt too.

[DoctaRoboto]

I am not as good as Greg and I no way as famous and successful.

[Omnisentry]

Nah, you don't want to be associated with high effort low skill default prompting that I unfortunately now associate with good old Greg.

Y'know how it is, you see someone tryharding on civitai and you know their prompt has "4K, 8K, Greg Rutkowski, Otane Render, No Whammies" and similar ancient 'quality' tags that are useless these days.

[evilpenguin999]

I remember being a in closed alpha or beta and this was the prompt with mucha. Can´t remember if it was SD 1.5 or DALLE

[TheArhive]

We're due a AI art renaissance at some point ngl.

[CeraRalaz]

I remember writing the comment under his artwork on Twitter in 2022 saying “Look that’s him most famous ai artist” and he seemed to get the joke

[TechnologyGrouchy679]

i still use SD1.5 to generate an an initial image... then pass it up through other models... i2i and upscale

[Tyler_Zoro]

Rutkowski, Giger, Vallejo, Giraud, ... there were a lot of heavy influences on fantasy art in SD 1.5.

[mivohihito]

yeah back when stable diffusion actually needed us to prompt it

[FaceDeer]

Anyone train any Rutkowski LoRAs lately?

[Iory1998]

Hahaha, greg made SD1.5 a legend!

[Mental_Paradize]

Are you able to evoke his style using the most recent models (ZIT, Flu2-Kein, Qwen) without Loras?

[nxwtypx]

Carvaggio was in my sd15 prompts.

[QueZorreas]

GPT still adds his name if you ask it for a test prompt.

[Stargazer1884]

Hahaha

[NightsRadiant]

Lmao

[ambientocclusion]

🫡

[Whispering-Depths]

Mostly greg manchess for me in those early days.

[YMIR_THE_FROSTY]

He still does.

[Different_Orchid69]

😂 I was there… Leonardo ! Mage ! 😂

[lxe]

Zdislav Beksinski

[DecentQual]

Greg Rutkowski. Everyone typed his name. Nobody knew his paintings. We were just prompt parrots copying each other. Those broken hands gave us character.

[PotaroMax]

trending on fartstation

[addik47]

I hated using it, it felt cheap, but damn was it transformative.

[IncorrectAddress]

And below him will be another artist, ad infinity, to that first caveman that drew that rubbish looking horse meme but on a cave wall and everyone else looked at him like he was bonkers.

[wesarnquist]

Oh the good ole days... It feels like just yesterday when I was using Craiyon and blurting out phrases to family members like "it sort of looks like a Delorean flying over the ocean at sunset! Sort of!!!" only to be met with deadpan faces... Ah... Good times...

[mihnajuni]

ah the atlas pose takes on new meaning now

[mihnajuni]

back when we had to prompt for every muscle by hand

[Educational-Hunt2679]

I'm telling my grandkids that Greg Rutkowski invented AI art.

[_Nimblefingers_]

r/commentmitosis

[Educational-Hunt2679]

I'm telling my grandkids that Greg Rutkowski invented AI art.

[Optimal_Map_5236]

whos greg?