World Class Asian Players

The previous post in the weekly AI comics series investigated the burning question Why Are 'Comics' Rarely Funny? (November 2024). This post explores the World Championship match currently being played in Singapore, last seen on this blog in World Championship Yahoos 2024 (November 2024).

'Ding Liren and Gukesh play chess in Singapore.'
AI Comic Factory

Not very good is it? Although there are two Asian players, one of them maybe Chinese, there is nothing obviously related to Singapore. I tried a number of different styles -- Franco-Belgian, Modern American, ... -- and they all had the same flaws. Some of them showed two (probably) Chinese players in each of the four panels.

What went wrong? I suspect that the source dataset used to generate the images is older than the emergence of Gukesh as a recognizable name in chess, i.e. there are not many images of him. I also suspect that the keyword 'Singapore' might have skewed the software to over-represent Chinese players. I know the software understands the characteristics of (Asian sub-continent) Indians. See, for example, Real Chess Villages (March 2024).

For my first experiment on the name to face recognition of World Champions, see Rogues' Gallery (December 2023). There I wrote,

The following composite image is assembled from 18 times '[Name] plays chess', where '[Name]' is one of the World Champions.

In that image the likeness of Ding Liren is acceptable, if only so-so. It is better than some of the other, historical World Champions, which is not setting the bar very high. Maybe I'll come back to this in a future post, but there are other fish to fry in AI comics.