The Gerosha Chronicles, According to an AI

The Gerosha Chronicles, According to an AI is a feature-length slideshow documentary video released in late November of 2022 by Dozerfleet Studios on its Dozerfleet Channel on YouTube.

After the months of October and November of that year were spent compiling attempts to rebuild much of The Gerosha Chronicles using the AI art generator app Wonder, by Codeway Dijital, the results were filtered and put into an Adobe Premiere timeline, to assemble a video showcasing how the AI sought to accompany more traditional machoonist art to build the world of Earth-G7, and retell its tales. The video proved to be Dozerfleet's first truly feature-length video production, given its runtime of more than 2 hours.

Synopsis
The AI art generator app Wonder by Codeway Dijital was put to the test in October and November of 2022, to see if its world-building skills could measure up to the photographs, doctored video game screenshots, and other work assembled by human intelligence over the course of a decade toward making concept art for numerous comic and novel works in progress.

Here, it was specifically tasked with trying to re-create the "Cataclysmic" Gerosha (Earth-G7) timeline of The Gerosha Chronicles within Dozerfleet Comics.

Hopes with this video were that it could inspire other world-builders and writers to augment the use of AI apps in helping draft visual art for their own purposes, to illustrate how AI and human artists can complement one another's goals, rather than view each other as competition.

The cameos of characters with voices were to demonstrate that text-to-speech apps, like Narrator's Voice, are getting better and better.

The 2-hour video that resulted compares the results of the AI's efforts to re-create various Earth-G7 characters with their preexisting renders in Spore, MakeHuman, The Sims 3, The Sims 4, GTA V, Far Cry 5, Adobe Fuse / Mixamo, and other rendering software. Photo backgrounds also appear in some shots, taken from Ciem: Inferno: The Grand Tour and A Very Anarteq Tour of the Soo.

Intro

 * 0:00

Origins

 * 1) Lohtz: 0:22
 * 2) The Battle for Gerosha: 0:35
 * 3) Sorbet: 1:08

Legends

 * 1) The Gray Champion: Freedom's Apparition: 1:18
 * 2) Extirpon: 1:50
 * 3) Extirpon 2: 2:15
 * 4) Pilltar: 2:24
 * 5) Pilltar 2: 2:43
 * 6) Cherinob: 2:56
 * 7) Cherinob 2: 4:23
 * 8) Cherinob 3: 7:11
 * 9) The Horrorday Gang: 8:42

Orient

 * 1) They Call Him...Black Rat: 12:05
 * 2) Little Shanghai Hornet: 12:26
 * 3) The Tale of Plum Bixie: 13:06
 * 4) Corando's "Don't Lose Hope": 15:11

Legacy

 * 1) Purge-Flare: Stickin' It to Pencil: 17:45
 * 2) Blood Over Water (ft. clips from both versions): 18:05
 * 3) Ciem: Inferno: 20:47
 * 4) Sniperbadger: Fall of the Critter Resistance: 36:08
 * 5) Ciem: Ash Cloud: 37:42
 * 6) Ciem: Caldera: 45:17
 * 7) Anarteq: Guardian of the Soo: 53:05
 * 8) Anarteq: Tropic Mercenary: 1:06:11
 * 9) Anarteq: Envoy to Lough Melvin: 1:10:43
 * 10) Phaemer Village Peacekeepers: 1:13:05

Sodality

 * 1) Instigation (Season 1): 1:15:40
 * 2) Adaptation (Season 2): 1:27:20
 * 3) Determination (Season 3): 1:31:36
 * 4) Augmentation (Season 4): 1:35:19
 * 5) Vindication (Season 5): 1:38:18

Swappernetters

 * Swappernetters: 1:55:44

Closing

 * Closing: 2:09:42

Characters
See also: List of characters in The Gerosha Chronicles, According to an AI

The AI re-created a massive cadre of characters from across six different volumes of The Gerosha Chronicles, although it spent a majority of its time on Cherinob, Ciem, Swappernetters, and Anarteq franchise characters.

Locations
See also: List of locations in The Gerosha Chronicles, According to an AI

The AI by itself often struggled to give characters a distinct sense of real-world place. That being said, numerous locations not created with the AI were either fudged in The Sims 4 or Grand Theft Auto V or Far Cry 5, or else they were derived from a plethora of different locations from photographs.

Inspiration
The idea to use Wonder for anything at all came from a random ad on Instagram in early October. Impressed with how well it could render Cherinob, the Dozerfleet founder continued using the app, to see how much of the Dozerfleet Megaverse could be re-created with AI, and how well the results compared with Sims and other software render art previously made as conceptual art for those same projects. It was decided that character AI renders would be primarily divided into three camps: Cataclysmic Gerosha characters, Eccentriaverse characters, and Dromedeverse characters, with a video planned to showcase each of these universes.

Renders would initially be filtered, edited if need be, and uploaded to DeviantArt, before the results deemed most safe for YouTube would be compiled into videos. Results not deemed entirely YouTube-safe were sometimes allowed on DeviantArt anyway, but usually with content filter flags applied.

Experiments and results
Wonder was the main app used, though a few others were experimented on. Cherinob renders became the gold standard, as the Apthalan species could set the upper levels for how supernatural beings in general were depicted. However, convincing the AI to render Apthalans proved tricky. The dataset didn't recognize an "Apthalan" was being much of anything. However, most Apthalans don't actually have wings when their Humanoid Manifest Constructs are employed. Simply describing them as "angels" or "demons" almost always resulted in them being forced to have wings, even where it didn't make sense for them to have wings, even when "wingless" was entered as a prompt!

Instead, achieving the looks of most characters required several tries, as well as prompts describing their physical features with almost pornographic levels of detail. This complicated matters for some images, as Wonder in particular didn't shy away from nudity. Therefore, it often rendered many characters in the nude - even in situations where they shouldn't have been. Unusable nude image results were either kept on DeviantArt exclusively, or were deleted. Some images of partially-obscured nudity were edited in post, such as the scene in Cherinob 2 in which Cherinob reconstructs her HMC from mud not far from Brookings, SD. Cherinob specifically never manifests "naughty bits" where they are within line of sight of human eyes, so showing her at minimum manifest a green bikini should have been a priority for the AI. Yet, the initial render had her covering up her frontal private regions by hiding them behind her right arm, while sitting in the sand and looking upwards. Some quick XGimp and Photoshop Elements editing was able to correct this, giving her a bikini bottom to make her more consistently modest.

To achieve the looks of non-armored HMCs of Apthalan species characters in the Cherinob series, facial and ethnic details were key. Maurice was described as   Cherinob was described as a

Candi Flippo was usually a variation of  though one render gave her a curly Afro instead, and looked more like Meagan Amez. That render was later repurposed for Meagan. Miriam Flippo's Detroit Tigers hat had to be edited in post, as the AI got confused when trying to render the "D" logo. Similarly, her black T-shirt is absent of its Snakes on a Plane logo in the AI.

Achieving Krampus involved cheating the prompts to give him his proper Dozerfleet form, prompts along the lines of   Simply entering "Krampus" by name into the prompts led to the AI getting confused, and defaulting to depicting him with more traditional takes on his appearance, as it couldn't separate the original Austrian folklore from the idea of Adolphus Kraus.

The app did seem intent on not rendering Krampus according to the film by Michael Doughtery. Similarly, Luftmädchen's masked photo's top was cropped off, refusing to show her head with her mask on, as it couldn't comprehend the plague mask that she typically wears. The AI was able to get some characters pretty close to how they were supposed to look. Plum Bixie, for example was almost perfect on the very first render. Any character invoking style information inspired by a preexisting video game was fairly easy to imitate for the AI. The Twirlflame Trio, for example, had three panels rendered in which they looked like they were actually in the city of Glass from Mirror's Edge Catalyst, since there was plenty of data on that game available for Wonder's data set. (In an unrelated experiment, Wonder successfully put Faith Connors from Mirror's Edge inside of worlds that resembled Hope County from both Far Cry 5 and Far Cry New Dawn, thus demonstrating its clear understanding of those video games' existence and art styles.

Some characters, it struggled to make them unique, and not resemble others. Li'Ban, for example, in spite being Irish, wound up looking very similar to Cherinob, whose HMC is supposed to look Australian. Jerry Emberton and Belay also began to look very similar, in spite one being a Christian post-grunge rock band singer and the other being a literal demon once worshiped as a Canaanite god.

Text-to-speech
The only voice to not feature as the result of a text-to-speech generation, is a sound clip of Kyle Mayer, voicing Kyle Tugrass, in the original Blood Over Water miniseries. Whenever possible, AI clips for the Blood Over Water remake comic were compared with clips of actors from the miniseries, to drive home the point that both the AI render and the Sim of a character in that instance were loosely based on some actual alum's 2009-era original flesh and blood student film presence.

Meanwhile, the phone app Narrator's Voice TTS on the Google Play Store was utilized to provide voices for several characters.

Music by Kevin MacLeod

 * Notes:

&dagger; As featured in the soundtrack and trailers to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

&dagger;&dagger;, to invoke a similar feeling to "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath, used in the trailers for Marvel's ''Iron Man.

&dagger;&dagger;&dagger; Since there wasn't a recording available of the actual "Don't Lose Hope" song to insert.

&dagger;&dagger;&dagger;&dagger; Whose other song "Warning Call" featured in Mirror's Edge: Catalyst - a game with visuals (alongside those of The Sims 3: Into the Future) that helped inform the look for Chrome Kite Little Rock in Swappernetters.

Music by other artists

 * Notes:

&dagger; Chosen because it was unexpectedly the perfect track of royalty-free pirate adventure music that felt like it could have happened in the time of Royal Hawaii.

&dagger;&dagger; This song perfectly sets the desired angsty tone of crossed Yuletide monsters and North Dakota families driven over the edge by a desire to exact revenge on a corrupt sheriff and his posse of sleazebag CPS agents. It's also one of the best royalty-free Krampusnacht themes available anywhere.

&dagger;&dagger;&dagger; Chosen due to "The Pyre" by Kevin MacLeod becoming overused on other YouTube videos.

Editing
Upon export from the app, images were stored in Android folders on a Google Pixel 4A 5G phone. Some were immediately edited with XGimp for Mobile and Adobe Lightroom for Mobile, while others were exported to Sta.sh as they were. They were later downloaded from Sta.sh to Dozerfleet Main running Windows 10, and edited with Photoshop Elements 2019. Results were often sent to DeviantArt first. When the time came for a Gerosha-themed video of results to be made, Premiere Elements 2020 was the video editing software of choice.

Omissions
For all the characters and story works in progress that feature, there were a few that didn't make the cut, due to lack of renders / time, or due to difficulty getting the AI to comprehend the characters.


 * While Stephanie Barrin was easy for the AI, Seth Lambrelli wasn't.


 * Pilltar only features his Sims art, given how difficult he was for the AI to grasp.
 * Likewise, Strawberry only features as Sims art in the video.


 * No one from The Tragedy of Lord Zeras nor Feud of Three Worlds features in the Origins-related sections of the video.**
 * Only Inukpak features from Experiments and Offspring.


 * Only John Domeck himself features from Of Angels and Icicles.
 * Kicked Deer renders came out too late in production, to say nothing of Shrouded Entity or any others.


 * Only Stan and Shalia made it into The Battle for Gerosha's section.
 * Fantisk, Luddin, and any other supporting characters were absent.


 * Apart from Pam Marcones herself, no one else relevant and new to Extirpon 2 features.
 * Spoliat didn't get featured.
 * Similarly, for the first Extirpon, only the man himself got renders. Nematode didn't get one in time.


 * While it would have been nice to include them, Greg Travin and Detective Hallower from Cherinob 2 as AI renders didn't make it to the final cut of the showcase.


 * In the Legends portion, no renders were exported for anything from the following works:
 * The Gray Champion: Chillingworth's Revenge (even though Chillingworth and Mapacha are mentioned later in the video.)
 * The Gray Champion: Shaken Dust (even though its events, as well as Brackett and Hibbins, are later referenced.)
 * Extirpon 3
 * Pilltar 3
 * Navyrope
 * Navyrope 2 (even though the Navyropes are mentioned later on.)


 * The Orient section skipped Mukade: Reinvention entirely, even though Charlotte is referenced later on in the Legacy and Sodality sections.


 * The Legacy section merged parts of Ciem / Anarteq: Kahoopiliana with Ciem: Ash Cloud and Anarteq: Tropic Mercenary.
 * It skipped Path of the Ming-Cho entirely.


 * Sodality was long and ambitious, so a great many characters never got their renders.
 * Meerkat, for example, never got a proper AI render.


 * Swappernetters ran into similar issues as Sodality, though a lot of major characters still found a way in.

Notable display fonts
Several custom typefaces were employed to create narration text and logos for the different stories being showcased and previewed.

Distribution
On Sunday, ‎November ‎27th of 2022 at 6:48:13 PM EST, the film was converted from Adobe Premiere into an MP4 file on Dozerfleet Main. It was then promptly uploaded to YouTube, and assigned a blog post to discuss its arrival, before later being given a showcase theater page on the Dozerfleet Studios section of the blog.

Reception
In three week's time, it received over 20 views, and was favorited one time. On December 22nd of 2022, a link to promote it was posted to the Facebook fan group "AI-Generated Art."

Trivia

 * This video was not endorsed nor paid for by Codeway Dijital at the time of production.
 * In fact, given the ads viewed, and money paid to stop the ads from showing ($25), it could be argued that Dozerfleet Studios overall lost money on the experiment.


 * Photographs of Cincinnati were taken in early March of 2021, from a Honda Odyssey minivan driving down I-75.


 * Photographs of Boonville and Evansville are from Ciem: Inferno: The Grand Tour, from July of 2019.


 * Photographs of Sault Ste. Marie are from A Very Anarteq Tour of the Soo, from September of 2019.


 * The alternate monster demon forms for Belay and Astirnah were made in Spore.


 * The Dozerfleet founder's one niece once got a Ciem shirt for Christmas of 2019.
 * She didn't understand the concept of Ciem, nor Centhuen Prototypes, nor Gerosha mythos. She only thought the centipede chest insignia vaguely resembled a spider, and thought he got her an orange "Spider-Gwen" shirt from Spirit Halloween.  (She was pretty young that year.)
 * Because of this, Ciem suits were increasingly later designed to look more and more like Sam Fisher outfits in the Splinter Cell games, to clarify that Ciem is NOT Spider-Man.
 * Yet, because children with small reference pools tend to believe that all bug-themed heroes are Spider-Man, this inspired many of the joke characters in the video.


 * For Ciem: Inferno and Sniperbadger: Fall of the Critter Resistance, Candi's potential probation officer, Terry McIntyre, is a virtual clone of Tobey Maguire, to capitalize on the Bully Maguire meme popularized by editors such as YouTube's "The Human Spider."
 * The clumsy janitor that bumps into Candi, similarly, was made to look like Tom Holland.
 * The bailiff at Candi's court hearing was made to look like Andrew Garfield.
 * In essense, the legacy of Spider-Man won't leave Candi alone, was the ongoing joke.


 * Furthermore, Judge Richard Deckinson was deliberately prompted to look like JK Simmons, yet has an apathetic attitude about learning Candi is Ciem.
 * This is a subversion of his role as Jameson, and what we'd normally expect to come of that.


 * The attorneys James Lonsil and Lionel Tiver are made to resemble Mario and Luigi, just to further drive home that Candi finds the entire justice system to have become a joke.


 * The officer that escorts Miriam to court, complaining how she wanted to play a mermaid but "it didn't end well," was intentionally a jab at Disney over the Halle Bailey Ariel casting hullabaloo for their remake of The Little Mermaid.
 * Hence why that nameless officer was deliberately prompted to resemble Halle Bailey.


 * As if all the above-mentioned Spider-Man references to taunt Candi with weren't enough, she is written to develop a mild crush on a corrections officer named Paul Driveway by the Kahoopiliana timeline.
 * Paul Driveway was deliberately prompted to resemble Yuri Lowenthal, in both Wonder and The Sims 4.
 * His "Goatgruff" alternate form references the "spider goat" throwaway line in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
 * However, any similarity of Ash Cloud-era Cincinnati to NYC during the final stages of Spider-Man PS4 is purely coincidental, as that aesthetic for the ash cloud-covered Cincinnati was decided two years before Spider-Man PS4 hit the market.
 * If anything, the look of it was more informed by the 2016 film Suicide Squad.
 * Notably, however, Korsicht fires red mystical beams into the ground, rather than a blue laser into the sky.


 * Time Capsule resembling Jack Black is also deliberate. Jack Black was the inspiration for Evan Manicotti's appearance when he was first rendered in The Sims 3 back in 2014.


 * Bolte Chipotle isn't modeled directly on chili peppers, but to resemble the Southwest Chipotle sauce from Subway.


 * Titus Rahmerthal as "the Socratic" is based on a miniature plastic statue of Socrates, designed to resemble a larger marble statue of Socrates.


 * Keet Kabo is modeled after a parakeet that the Dozerfleet founder's mother used to have.
 * Basically, she's Gamora merged with a blue budgie.


 * Flintirah being a bully was inspired by the character Kody from the 2014 Jared Cohn film Jailbait.
 * The idea was that she tried to play that character's role, but it was brutally subverted; because Candi refused to play the role of Anna Nix.
 * The joke is that Amirah vs. Candi would be like Kody trying to bully Anna, but accidentally picking on Spider-Gwen instead, and getting promptly humiliated.
 * Jailbait is more directly parodied in the "17 and Amphibious" 2-parter in Camelorum Adventures, where the Kody parody in that story gets humiliated by Lemon Witch - who's even more insufferable than Ciem.
 * Flintirah's backstory is similar to that of El Diablo from Suicide Squad, but re-tailored to make sense for a teenage delinquent girl living close to downtown Evansville.


 * Grapey the Wonder Ball began as a joke on Girls Incarcerated Wiki on Fandom, regarding the purple exercise / stress ball in the timeout room.
 * Namely, in one scene, the purple ball in the corner was able to command audience attention better than Paige McAtee herself could.


 * Tanya Woven is an homage to Taryn Twine.
 * Taryn herself was unsure what to think of that, other than to laugh about it.


 * Bruce Almin is also a joke character, oddly enough.
 * His name references the film Bruce Almighty, yet he looks like Michael Caine, who played Alfred, Bruce Wayne's butler.
 * His actually being willing to care for the lives of the girls, rather than lie to them and fill them with false hope, is a jab at Caine's more cynical character from The Cider House Rules.


 * Drop-In, in spite similarities to Green Goblin and Vulture, has a face modeled after that of Brett Dalton, whom some might remember playing Grant Ward on Agents of SHIELD.
 * Drop-In's alter ego, Lonny Factor, is named that way as a joke.
 * "Lonny" as in loan, versus grant.
 * And "factor" as in "benefactor," rather than "ward" (beneficiary.)