Hey guys, I spent most of yesterday trying to train an AI to generate new Pokemon sprites. I bought a subscription for Runway ML, gave it thousands of GBA-style Pokemon battle sprites from all the games, including a thousand or so fake Pokemon from DeviantArt, and told it to do its thing. After about 2 hours it started producing blobs that look a little bit like Pokemon – the colors, sizes and linework look about right. But I think it never quite understood that Pokemon are stylized animals, with features like symmetry, limbs, faces, etc. There’s so many radically different Pokemon, that it likely struggled to find out what they had in common. It probably would have worked better on a smaller set of Pokemon, perhaps only dragons, or dogs.

After spending some more time in the oven, perhaps 6 or 7 hours, the final results look a little bit more like Pokemon, but they’re still way off. I doubt the results would improve much past this point, so it’s time to give up for now. Maybe in a couple of years I’ll try again when some new tech is up to the task. But here’s what you get for now…

Behold, Pokemon Nightmare and Acid Trip: