Ai Wallpapers have been an absolute disaster for the ricing community

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

Is it Ai free? Even some of the top ones look suspect

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Existing-Tough-6517@reddit

I sincerely doubt your ability to spot AI vs other Artificial artwork

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Linux is solution, windows is not what it was before, it is spyware tool for microsoft, unless you dont change installation and kick out spyware and bloatware fully, and set to work without annoying crap that it is put to be there, linux is future, linux is now, and it is solution!

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

I have probably overcorrected sometimes but AI really does have a particular style to it.

https://wallhaven.cc/w/lyw26r

There is an artist referenced so I don't think it's ai but if there were no watermark, I would have assumed it was ai.

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

When an image is AI, there are clear structural signs: lines merging onto each other where the artist wouldn't intend to, outlines disappearing, color artifacting, asymetrical features that should look symetrical (pendants, earrings), repeating elements that don't repeat properly etc.

What you are doing is just vibing it, so all artwork with a specific artstyle looks "ai" to you. I get thisfeeling too but it's not a good thing. It ends up hurting the actual artists whose art got stolen to create the "ai artstyle". Don't just vibe it. Look closer. Search for clear brush strokes, like in this image. AI sucks with that, somehow. This image is real... or an extremely good ai model, that's always the option, but not very likely.

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MistSecurity@reddit

Even the one giant commission marketplace that bills itself as anti ai, and needs invites from other artists to join still ends up with AI on the platform regularly. In the near future IDK if you’ll even be able to tell using the various methods you mention.

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

Still, looking down on artists whose artwork was stolen to train AI is not a good alternative.

And the issues that I mentioned aren't an issue of scaling, they are an architecture issue. It's not something that can be solved by just making models bigger. It's something that stems from the model generating the chunks of the image through diffusion and not through laying down strokes on a digital canvas. Yeah, the signs can be harder to notice but that's still not an excuse to just vibe it and call everything AI.

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nikomo@reddit

That one nah, but I can see why you'd think that, this is after all what the models train on.

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Cikkeo@reddit

They ban AI slop, so if you spot anything report it. It's better than most wallpaper websites when it comes to that but obviously not perfect.

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

Ty :)

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turtle_mekb@reddit

is your pfp from outer wilds?

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Cikkeo@reddit

Yes it is :)

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

I think it is the Eye

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Kok_Nikol@reddit

Oooh, beautiful, thanks!

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rapidge-returns@reddit

Do they have animated backgrounds? I'd love to find a good one for my PC

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Low_Ebb4063@reddit

I'm so glad they chose to protect their existing catalog from being flooded with AI. Feels like a vestige of old internet.

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AwesomerIy@reddit

i think that you could try doing before:2020 on Google. you may still get AI but it will weed out a lot of stuff

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Fit_Smoke8080@reddit

What does this script exactly do? Stick tiles together until they reach a target resolution?

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AwesomerIy@reddit

yes, exactly

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

first modern image generation models (like midjourney and dall-e) came out in late 2022, chatgpt also came out in 2022.

why would you filter out artwork from 2020 and 2021?

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AwesomerIy@reddit

thank you

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

Sounds effective, ty for the method

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

use before:2022 or else you'll miss a lot of artwork (and there was a lot of artwork in the pandemic!!)

there were no modern image generators in 2021, it all came out in 2022

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pizzatimefriend@reddit

I use this for all my background searches, sorry to any of the artists that made good stuff after 2020 😔

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can_ichange_it_later@reddit

Wasnt chatgpt from something like 2023?

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charcuterDude@reddit

Uh, hey apparently an old person here. I had to look up what ricing means because I was worried what y'all were doing with my favorite carbohydrate. Now that I understand the definition, what is the etymology? How the heck did that come to mean "customizing"?

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ilovetacos@reddit

I'm gonna get downvoted because people love their racism for some reason, but the term is derogatory towards Asians.

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BaconCatBug@reddit

No, it isn't.

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ilovetacos@reddit

Yes, it is.

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charcuterDude@reddit

Oh. Thank you for being the only respectful response. As luck would have it I am also partly Japanese 🫤.

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syklemil@reddit

That was my impression in the old days, at least stuff like calling Asian cars "rice cookers" clearly wasn't a term of endearment.

But these days there seems to be more Asian users using the term on themselves, and they not only have a very different attitude towards rice and rice paraphernalia, but it can be taken as a variant of slur reclamation.

Which is super weird for those of us who only knew of ricer (derogatory) from decades ago, but at the same time, I don't feel like I have the authority to tell enthusiastic kids, especially if they're Asian, that they shouldn't be using the word.

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Booty_Bumping@reddit

To an extent, yes. The word itself is not so great considering it sits on a broad stereotype which is pretty blatantly orientalist. But in different contexts it could be celebrating Japanese car modding culture or making fun of it. What's particularly stupid is using the term to shit on Japanese car manufacturers, as if they are not solidly world-renowned at this point.

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Ezmiller_2@reddit

Haven't you ever heard of a rice grinder, like when someone talks about their Honda civic?

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charcuterDude@reddit

No, never.

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Booty_Bumping@reddit

It comes from a term for particularly gaudy car modding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

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LogicalExtension@reddit

This is the definition of the term that I thought of, and then was completely stumped about how it related to wallpapers.

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syklemil@reddit

Oh, we've been using it derogatively towards people without a technical clue who are obsessed with visuals and voodoo optimisations for decades as well. It kinda faded out IME (maybe at least in part due to becoming aware of the etymology), so seeing people self-report as "ricers" is kinda weird.

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oCanadia@reddit

Isn't it from customizing Japanese cars? You can figure out why rice from there, lol.

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Tony_Marone@reddit

Some of my favourite wallpapers can be found by following the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on RetroFuturism.

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No-Bison-5397@reddit

The best wallpapers are generally photographs of some kind for me

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DuivenMans@reddit

Wait until you find out AI can generate photographs too.

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No-Bison-5397@reddit

I mean they literally can’t and when they try to generate photorealistic images they generally aren’t up to snuff, yet.

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UnfilteredCatharsis@reddit

That has changed within the past year or two. At this point they're capable of generating videos that are indistinguishable from reality. Bespoke images are easy. What they still struggle with slightly is generating a series of images and maintaining consistent details.

Of course you can still spot the bad ones, but you have to factor in surviorship/confirmation bias. For each image you are able to identify as AI, you will probably seen many seemingly realistic photos/videos that you didn't think twice about that were actually AI too.

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

yet to see a truly indistinguishable ai video, even with the most modern generative models. i can see it fooling my grandpa tho

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UnfilteredCatharsis@reddit

For the best Sora videos, the only thing that gives them away is if they depict things that are physically impossible. If you're judging by the lighting, textures, etc. alone, they can be virtually indistinguishable. If they're not depicting impossible things, then they would pass for 99% of people as real.

I'm sure you think you're the cool genius in the 1% anyway though. That type of blind confidence means you're even more likely to be fooled. I practically guarantee you've scrolled past some random posts claiming to be viral videos or something that were actually AI generated and you didn't know it. And the likelihood/inevitability of that happening is increasing every day.

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

I've seen the demos of Sora 2. Yeah it's cool, it has cool effects, but if you interact with real people you can immediately tell from the expressionless uncanny valley motions of every single human character in every single scene.

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UnfilteredCatharsis@reddit

hahaha ok dude

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McDonaldsWitchcraft@reddit

my reply only mentioned videos. as a response to your claim that, on top of photorealistic images, it can generate photorealistic videos too.

I was only replying to that claim and made no mentions about images. go read the previous comments again.

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No-Bison-5397@reddit

The trick is starting with the assumption that it’s AI

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UnfilteredCatharsis@reddit

You think that AI cannot generate photorealistic images, but how would you know if you've seen an image you thought was real but it was actually AI? I'm sorry but it's just stupid to be so confident about that.

You can start with that assumption, but you have to decide ultimately whether you think it's real or not and be accurate 100% of the time in order to make that claim truthfully. You literally can't.

There have been test websites online for years at this point that people consistently fail at. It presents either AI images or real images randomly, and you choose which is which. Most people hover around 50-60% accuracy like 1-2 years ago. And it has gotten 10x better since then.

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No-Bison-5397@reddit

You think that AI cannot generate photorealistic images

I think in the context of wallpapers that I would pick (landscapes and nature images) AI doesn't generate good looking images that seem real.

how would you know if you've seen an image you thought was real but it was actually AI?

I don't need perfect accuracy but I start from the assumption that every image I am shown is AI and make my decisions about who to trust backwards. I don't need to be 100% accurate to pick my wallpapers. I decided my method when the tests came out: heaps of false positives for AI, very very few false positives for not AI. I just did 50 images to see what had changed and no false positives at all for not AI.

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xyrus02@reddit

The entire internet is flooded with slop of all kinds. I wouldn't know why wallpapers should be an exception. There are a lot of lazy fucks out there and in most cases, they get paid for entering a prompt and upload the result somewhere.

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UnfilteredCatharsis@reddit

You're right, it's increasingly more difficult to find collections of strictly non-AI images on the internet. It also sucks if you're an artist looking for reference images of things. It's just AI slop everywhere.

I just want to share one small trick I used recently to find non-AI wallpapers (besides wallhaven, which was already mentioned).

If you use the RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) add-on on a desktop browser, and either use old.reddit or opt out of the reddit redesign in your preferences, then you can use powerful filtering settings on subreddits.

For example, on r/wallpaper they have a rule that people need to tag their posts with flairs that identify them as AI generated, and you can filter out posts with those flairs: https://imgur.com/oh9m3T8

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Nervous-Diamond629@reddit

People have removed their brains because they don't want to use them anymore.

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Clydosphere@reddit

"Computers and the program will start thinking and the people will stop" – Dr. Walter Gibbes, TRON (1982)

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Unhappy_Lie_2000@reddit

Maybe they should create a tool that looks at the metadata in images and find the common information that's in ai generated files and block them or create sub category for ai slop.

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scandii@reddit

it is trivial to strip or modify image metadata on top of that on this sub you're looking at an image (or images if video) of an image.

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Unhappy_Lie_2000@reddit

Hmm OK I don't download wallpaper I just use a Bing plugin and download wallpaper scenery around the world as having a static image can cause burn in.

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Ok-Objective3746@reddit

Gemini has it, stuff is imbedded into their images but only google knows the algorithm so you need to paste the image into Gemini and aak it to check

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TheJackiMonster@reddit

The obvious solution is drawing the wallpaper yourself.

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l33t_gosu@reddit

using AI

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Vortriz@reddit

LFS ideology

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outer-pasta@reddit

I love using an Ai generated image I made with Comfyui running on my own hardware (gaming laptop) with opensource models, that matches my exact screen resolution. It feels so bespoke. It may be kinda lame but I still think it's really cool: https://imgur.com/gallery/ai-generated-wallpaper-f2L9u5c#LARwnj6

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TheG0AT0fAllTime@reddit

I had a field day/year with stable-diffusion-webui and eventually moved to ComfyUI in 2025. It was fun to make pipelines. This month I've revisited the topic moving to doing it all right in python to no real advantage just to continue learning with pytorch. Models like Juggernaut XI can make some really nice images. Though personally I don't use them anywhere. All for fun really.

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outer-pasta@reddit

I can understand being "anti ai" to some extent but most of the complaining in popular discourse I hear sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me now. The worst version of first world problems. Your kind of take is refreshing. I guess I'm in the pro-ai camp.

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warpedgeoid@reddit

Yeah, just a bunch of whiny babies. Most of ‘em couldn’t identify AI art if it bit them on the nose.

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ivosaurus@reddit

A girl happily holding a gameboy the wrong way around like she must be blind is bespoke?

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CaptainObvious110@reddit

yeah I agree with you

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Key-Principle-7111@reddit

I've been using various photos released by NASA/ESA for years, e.g. images obtained by space telescopes or Mars rovers. Also, I have one display set up vertically so it's perfect for a photo of the Ariane rocket.

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PigSlam@reddit

No offense to those with different opinions than mine, but my opinion is objective truth.

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TwiKing@reddit

Most of the time windows are covering it anyway. People just showcasing their dots for the clicks. My wallpaper is a black background, why waste the RAM?

Since this is a rant thread.. Know what I'm sick of? Fastfetch slop. EVERY distro is plagued with it.

To no one in particular:

I don't care about your junky old Thinkpads from 2008 that installed Gentoo k?

I also don't care about your ugly Windows 98 themes.

I don't care if you use Arch btw, you're not amazing

Your cava and music player is not unique and I don't like your annoying lofi music.

Making your wifi configuration into a bloated graphics box that whirls around isn't interesting.

Your waybar looks like every one else's, so what.

Wow, you can open 15 kitty terms in a tiling window manager, you're so cool. I've never seen that one before.

No one really cares about other people's setups anyway, they just want to take their dots.

So yeah, to each their own. We can complain about it, but nothing is gonna change anyway.

Think I drove my point hard enough by now- slop is everywhere, and you're all doing it, and who really cares? Just deal with it.

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thearctican@reddit

I take my own wallpapers.

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Saethydd@reddit

I like to use the work of Jonas De Ro as my desktop backgrounds.

https://www.jonasdero.com

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AmSoMad@reddit

I mean, I don't get it.

I use AI to create wallpapers for me, in the style of other artists (don't worry, I don't share it or use it for commercial purposes), and I'm able to produce incredible wallpapers, and you can't tell they were made by AI, not a bit. They look like real works of art by <instert artists name>. And I do it all for free.

If you're looking around, and all you can find is AI art (that's obviously AI generated), then I'd say you need to think outside the box. It sounds like you're just exploring shitty AI websites with bad, obviously AI generated content. If anything, I'd probably chalk it up to "bad search engines" - because I know the feeling; trying to find wallpapers on Google.

I'd also mentioned, while I wouldn't recommend Yandex for much of anything, especially when searching for wallpapers, it gives me significantly better image results than all the other search engines.

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scy_404@reddit

So you straight up just get an AI to plagiarise people's shit?

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AmSoMad@reddit

Plagiarism, by definition, requires an audience. You cannot “pass off someone else’s work as your own” unless it is presented to someone else. Additionally, the AI isn’t redrawing the artist’s image, it’s generating a new image in the same style (so... also not plagiarism).

But absolutely, yes. Why wouldn’t I? It’s not an ethical or moral dilemma if you aren’t sharing the content.

There's this incredible digital artist, who's been my favorite artist since I was first introduced to her work. So I had the AI generate an extremely dark, dystopian, cityscape - in the same style as my favorite artist. It took a few tries, but I ended up with the coolest wallpaper I've ever had or seen in my entire life.

The "AI bad" thing is getting exhausting. It's here. It's not going anywhere. And I'm not even using it for ethically-dubious purposes.

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scy_404@reddit

Sure you might not be but that AI has been fed her work for other people to then profit off of. Whether or not you are passing it off as your own is irrelevant when someone's work is being stolen

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AmSoMad@reddit

I don't know how to speak to you.

First of all, no. AI tools have strict policies for whether they're allowed to train off of your data or not, and you're in control of that setting. The AI I used did not train off my prompt or generation.

Secondly, "Whether or not you are passing it off as your own is irrelevant when someone's work is being stolen"? Do real words, with real definitions, just not exist in your world?

Literally, and objectively, nothing was "stolen", and nothing "was being passed off as my work" - which I already explained to you - requires sharing or showing the content to a third-party (otherwise there's no one to pass it off as my work to).

If you're struggling with simple word definitions and communication, it's no wonder you don't get it, and have such an obstinate, uneducated perspective on AI.

But it's not really conducing to a debate, feel me? I work in an industry that's had hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the last 5 years due to AI. I'm a vector artist myself, I also write software, and I'm active in the open-source community (AKA, I give the software I write away to people, for free, because I like to help).

If I can manage to think and speak about AI reasonably and rationally, maybe you should give it a try. Maybe learn a little about it, instead of hopping on the Reddit bandwagon (because you think it's representative of the world).

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TrivialRamblings@reddit

Yes for personal use it's great

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

You see I don't really care for personal use, but it's clogging up search engines and practically every website dedicated to finding wallpapers

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AmSoMad@reddit

I used to be an Affiliate Marketer. I'd build blogs and sites with affiliate links, I'd do the SEO, then I'd market them and earn commissions. So maybe it's just my bias, but for me, virtually all search results - for well over a decade now - have been nothing but ads, shallow/hollow content, and affiliate sites and landing pages.

So for me, AI doesn't feel like the root or beginning of the problem. And I guess I search for different stuff, because I'm not encountering wallpapers unless I explicitly search for them.

Anyways, frustrating that as a full stack developer, who uses Linux exclusively, both privately and personally - I can't ever say anything not-negative about AI - without getting downvoted to oblivion, and without anyone genuienly engaging me.

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BlackMarketUpgrade@reddit

I get what you mean. Also, AI is sort of amoral IMO. It’s just a force multiplier whether you use it to good or bad things.

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JockstrapCummies@reddit

Just open up GIMP and use the green pepper stamp like the champions of old did.

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Icy_Guidance@reddit

I usually get my wallpapers from Danbooru; as I do that, I make sure to add width:1920 height:1080 to get the resolution I want.

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ohaiibuzzle@reddit

Here's your dose of Ai content

(jk, but Zerochan literally considers AI Art banned content, so if you want to look for anime stuff they're good at that).

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kansetsupanikku@reddit

I'm using many wallpapers from old Linux releases and projects, such as KDE, Fedora, and Ubuntu - many of them are just natural photos. But the older ones lack in the resolution. Guess what I did...

To be fair, I've only used models that I was able to read the paper on and run locally, like Sam-DiffSR and SwinIR. Trained on sets that focus on restoration rather than hallucinating. AI can help aesthetics sometimes.

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Slight_Manufacturer6@reddit

Or the opposite.

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pretendimcute@reddit

They are a disaster in general. Im always looking for beautiful night time northern lights inspired mountain view wallpapers with animated snow and lights, but a majority of it is AI weirdness

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

It's been an absolute Hiroshima for images related to scenery

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Federal-Quarter9459@reddit (OP)

Ty :)

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