You’d think that a cute, fluffy, chubby, adorable little hamster having a mishap on its exercise wheel — a sight common on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the like — wouldn’t be a problem for AI to generate. Especially as it’s an element common to many peoples’ childhoods, a hamster running so quickly he flings himself into the air, or orbits around astronaut-style from his sheer momentum.
Think again.
These are two depictions that Midjourney gave me.
Cartoon panel generated in Midjourney
I can’t fault the energy and horror here, but the action looks obscure.
Cartoon panel generated in Midjourney
This one is oddly static with its hamster-tiger hybrid.
Stable Diffusion XL on huggingface yielded single-panel results that were more in tune with what I was looking for. Mostly.
Hamster AI art
This one gave me the 1950s look I put down in the prompt, and the wheel is spinning, or rather vibrating, furiously, and the hamster is vibrating too, hence his blurred body with its four eyes and three front paws. However, he’s not running on the wheel as I’d hoped, and the wheel is weirdly lopsided. But there are some happy artistic accidents here, too, like the eerie, empty room and the flying pieces of debris from what the viewer can assume is the edge of the wheel digging into the floor. The primary colors too are a nice touch.
Hamster AI art
This hamster brings to mind Sisyphus pushing his stone uphill. The wheel is again deformed, looking more like a wooden wagon wheel. For this one I asked for the style of a dry-witted New Yorker cartoon.
Hamster AI art
Changing some words of the prompt gave unexpected results, like this superhero hamster on a treadmill.
Hamster AI art
Using just “hamster accident” gave me this vision of existential angst showing a frightened creature amidst the wreckage of disaster.
