Agreed. From the article:
> Model builders have been mostly focused on correctness, not aesthetics. Researchers have been overly focused on the extra fingers problem.
While that might be true for the foundational models - the author seems to be neglecting the tens of thousands of custom LoRAs to customize the look of an image.
> Users fight the “AI Look” with heavy prompting and even fine-tuning
IMHO it is significantly easier to fix an aesthetic issue than an adherence issue. You can take a poor quality image, use ESRGAN upscalers, img2img using it as a ControlNet, run it through a different model, add LoRAs, etc.
I have done some nominal tests with Krea but mostly around adherence. I'd be curious to know if they've reduced the omnipresent bokeh / shallow depth of field given that it is Flux based.
> Model builders have been mostly focused on correctness, not aesthetics. Researchers have been overly focused on the extra fingers problem.
> While that might be true for the foundational models
Its possibly true [0] of the models from the big public general AI vendors (OpenAI, Google), its defintely not true of MJ (which, if it has an aesthetic bias to what the article describes as “the AI look” it is largely because that was a popular actively sought and prompted for look in early AI image gen to avoid the flatness bias of early models and MJ leaned very hard into biasing toward what was popular aesthetically in that and other areas as it developed. Heck, lots of SD finetunes actively sought to reproduce MJ aesthetics for a while.)
[0] but I doubt it, and I think they have also been actively targeting aesthetics as well as correctness, and the post even hints at at least part of how that reinforced the “AI look” — the focus on aesthetics meant more reliance on the LAION Aesthetics dataset to tune the models understanding of what looked good, transferring the biases of that dataset into models that were trying to focus on aesthetics.
Definitely. It's been a while since I used midjourney, but I imagine that style (and sheer speed) are probably the last remaining use cases of MJ today.