okay im contemplating on whether i should delete this and make some changes and reupload because i included gene in the bg because i thought he was gay and that hed be the only canonically gay person here and im told hes not and now im thinking a more effeminate looking dude needs to be in his place

It may also be worth searching for public domain photos on Wikimedia Commons. That site has been very useful for finding photos to use for photobashes.

There's a Sketchup texture site that has a lot of CGTexture's building textures, though the free variants are massively tiled with a smaller resolution while the normal non-tiled variants require a club membership.

www.sketchuptextureclub.com

only much smaller scale sites and whatever usable may be found on openverse with the CC0/PD filter

texture.ninja
duion.com/art/main
openverse.org

Okay it turns out there were a couple other things I wanted to do with this so here's some last minute changes

Blender Denoised version

Here's the original photo I started off with

And here's a video I made showing the creative process with this. Here's hoping it's valuable to someone

There were apparently some artists back then that were inspired by Ganbreeder and did their own art/paintovers based off of the generated images from that site. Hell, the artwork for Red Vox's Realign album was based off of a Ganbreeder image. This is wild to think about with the stigma AI has today

There are of course several valid criticisms of the tech and how it's being developed and used to this day. I just wish I knew how to feasibly and reliably make art that looks like early Ganbreeder images, and unfortunately it seems to be much easier said than done.

Honestly, I think the interest I had in generative AI prior to it becoming a huge problem around the time Dall-E came out was the reason why a lot of the AI discourse was aggravating me a lot and made me stop browsing Bluesky since I kept seeing it in my feed from people I've been following.