We are clearly living in the early days of Skynet's rise to power as technology continues to reach new heights and give the every day human the ability to do all manner of things, from super imposing a celebrity's face onto theirs to making static images move, talk, and sing. One of the latest trends sees folks prompting artificial intelligence to create artwork based on a handful of words that any user could type in, and the results range from absolutely meme-worthy posts to terrifying, grizzly depictions of the end of the world.
So, what would happen if we asked an AI art generator to show us what characters, attacks, and even the final boss of Street Fighter 6 would look like? What we found on the other end of this experiment was both interesting and frankly, unsettling.
For this experiment, we used an AI art generator program online called NightCafe. Using its free tier, you get a handful of opportunities to type something in and see what it makes, so we decided to make our tests themed around Capcom's upcoming major fighting game, Street Fighter 6, to see what happens.
The first thing we tried was a fighter who is already announced as a playable character and one we've seen a lot of, Chun-Li. Simply typing "Chun-Li in Street Fighter 6" brought up a figure that certainly has some flavors of Chun in there, but looks more like a Mortal Kombat character art piece from the early 2000s.
For some reason, one of Chun-Li's arms and hands came out as a garbled, deformed limb, and things being distorted like that seems to be a regular occurrence when having an AI create art pieces. We definitely see more of it in the other tests we ran.
Next up, we decided to try a character who isn't yet in Street Fighter 6: Akuma. The AI clearly has some idea of who the demon is, as we see a shirtless warrior with karate gi pants on, spikey red hair, and an angry scowl on his face standing in front of what appears to be some kind of temple.
There also appears to be some kind of mass of souls behind him, which lends itself to the evil theme Akuma is known for. Still, this art piece looks more like the type of artwork you might find in an old school Killer Instinct instruction booklet.
Where things start to take a terrifying turn, though, is when we asked the generator what Street Fighter 6's boss character looks like. The result was a psychedelic acid trip depicting an eight-toed Evil Ryu with souls coming out of his chest.
Just... woah. Honestly, if Capcom went in an made a crazy, scary, and super powerful final boss with colorful ink and paint splatter flying all over the place that looked like this, it would certainly make for an interesting final fight.
We worked our way through asking the program to create pieces for Cammy, Juri, Dee Jay, and even Hobo Ken, but we also decided to throw the software a couple of curveballs to see what it might do.
Inputting "G's Role in Street Fighter 6" gave us an image of an individual standing in a cyberpunk-esque city with a strange blob of light at the center, while simply typing "Hadoken" in brought forth a painting of the parting seas with some very odd entity at the center of it.
Best of all, though, might be what we got when we asked it to illustrate "You must defeat Ryu's Shoryuken to stand a chance."
Check out the image gallery below to see all of the AI generated art pieces for Street Fighter 6 and beyond. Let us know just how unsettling these images are in the comments below!
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