‘Harry Potter Star Wars’ AI images are part of a global competition

Because it’s May 4th, aka Star Wars Day in some sectors of the galaxy (because “May the 4th be with you,” you see), Star Wars memes and references are all over the internet today. AI-generated images of Harry Potter characters are also abound. There’s a Wookiee/Hagrid mix, Severus snape dressed as an alien with pointy ears, and many more. These images, cropping up on Twitter and TikTok, often aren’t properly credited, which is a shame both for the sake of the creators and because knowing where they’re from is an invitation into a huge gallery of fandom mashups. These images also show the limits of AI and its tendency to reproduce certain patterns.

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These images are from Freelancer.com’s Harry Potter Reimagined competition, a worldwide contest that specifically asked entrants to use AI tools to generate images of Harry Potter characters in alternate settings. Abderrahmane B. was an Algerian designer and illustrator who placed second in the contest. Rabbi Ali from Bangladesh, a web designer, created Harry Potter-themed images. The Walking DeadImagine them to be victims of the zombie apocalypse. (Or in Voldemort’s case, as a zombie.)

Image: Rabbi Ali/Freelancer.com

In a press release announcing the winners, Freelancer.com communications manager Marko Zitko said the contest was meant to push the site’s freelancers-for-hire into experimenting with new AI art generation tools. “Our latest Fast 50 data shows there’s a growing demand for generative AI skills,” he said, “so we wanted to create a contest that will let our freelancers experiment with powerful AI tools and see how they can use them to generate things we’ve never seen or thought about before. In this case, we thought: what if Harry Potter was filmed as a completely different genre.”

A gallery of all the entries is publicly available online, and it makes for some fun — if sometimes repetitive or deeply uncanny — exploration. They were from around the globe, and they put Harry Potter characters into Aardman Studios style claymation. The MatrixThe DC Snyderverse and even a Clint Eastwood Western are all possible. Peaky Blinders. The designs are also varied, ranging from the more traditional anime style to those that have a more modern feel. Nadia – The Secret of Blue WaterApproach to a Dragon Ball Z chibi piece amongst many, many other. Nearly 650 people entered the contest.

It is worth looking at the results, in part, because they show both benefits and limitations. These images are full of visual errors and limitations, particularly when rendering hands and mouths. Others, in the signature Midjourney photorealistic style, are such literal, exact renderings of Warner Bros.’ existing movie versions of these characters that they barely feel like artistic choices were being made. And a great many of the images, coming from the same AI engines, don’t look distinctive or specific, and tend to blur together.

Put together, they offer up a current portrait of the state of AI art, and how much it relies on copycatting existing artists (some of whom have filed a class-action lawsuit to protect their work from AI infringement), on detailed input to get a desired result, and on a specific, imaginative direction from the creator, in order to generate something different from everyone else’s images exploring the same prompt. Nikki V. from the UK, for example, took a unique approach by using her Harry Potter character in The Hunger Games’ world.

Image: Nikki V./Freelancer.com

Like any art competition, the exhibition contains some true gems as well as some duds. Few of the entries offer an alternate universe that would be interesting to even die-hard fans. Unlike one of the most popular AI art experiments on social media these days, the “What if Wes Anderson directed Star Wars” (or any other franchise movie) fad, these aren’t really “What if?” prompts, they’re just visual experiments and AI test cases. More than anything, they’re a window into the minds of the designers playing around with AI tools right now, seeing what those tools have to offer.