End of Season 1 - Musings and Preview of Season 2
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Hello All,
My name is MKUltra or just MK for short. For those who have been downloading my LORAs and liking them. Thank you very much! Thank to your efforts, my placement in the leaderboards have skyrocketed double digits on a near daily basis. I am writing this post for those who are interested in my background and give a preview the next season (a.k.a. THE LIST for the next series of celebrity LORAs)
To start off, I never had a very strong interest in AI to begin with. I was primarily a gamer who in COVID-19, I decided to splurge on a big budget computer. At the time, I got the RTX 3090, which in my mind, I could use for ETH mining while I am sleeping or at work. Little did I know, that the prices for ETH would become less and less and the entire plan was ruined when it became a proof of stake. This left me with a pretty expensive racehorse with nothing much to do, aside from playing the occasional game in ULTRA mode (looking at you Detroit: Become Human!).
The release of Stable Diffusion would change my perceptions of AI. Thank God, I kept my 3090, as AI requires a powerful GPU to use, which the 3090 can comfortably do well. To put succinctly, I had become an AI enthusiast. ImageGen, TextGen, Conversational Models all excite me and I am interested to see all the amazing things that AI can do in the future. At the beginning, LORAs felt like an arcane science and the Youtube videos certainly didn't help. I pretty much gave up trying with LORAs and accept the fact I will be downloading from CivitAI for the rest of life. However, recently, someone recommended a new method training LORAs. I dabbled in it for just a moments, left my computer on for a few hours and give it a try.
I was surprised by the fidelity of the images, and the inferences that it could make (include body parts, which the training data had none). I posted a couple of photos on certain imageboards and it was positive. I wanted to share the LORA, but using cloud storage was a hassle and an expensive endeavor. So I posted my first LORA on March 23, 2025 - 3 years after the initial account creation. That LORA was the one of Miranda Cosgrove, which is my top popular model. Since then, I have streamlined the training method and workflow in my computer and I can roughly train a new LORA every 3 hours (assuming I can optimize my day around work and family obligations).
The model Biglust has been a great boon to image generation. Combining LUSTIFY - a general purpose model (despite its name) and bigASP, which has way better captioning than any other model out there for SDXL, biglust can generate some pretty insane stuff. Another essential tool is DMD2
https://huggingface.co/tianweiy/DMD2
The DMD2 combined with the Biglust model has created one of the most effective tools for generating content at a fast speed. For those who are using either comfy and sd-webui, your settings should always this for your sampler:
Steps - 14
CFG - 1.0-1.3 - Use 1.3 if you want to use negative prompts. But there is a higher chance of artifacts.
Sampler: LCM
Scheduler: Karras
Based on the the settings, I have gotten consistently good results based on your prompts.
A common question is why I decide to pick obscure celebrities, instead of choosing someone more popular. In the end, my goal is to "entertain" people. Celebrities come in all shapes and sizes and aren't there times that you see someone in a TV series and ask "That girl looks kind cute"?. Variety is the spice of life and sometimes the right mix may strike your fancy.
Thank you all for reading my shit. Please leave likes to the photos and if you have time, leave a (tasteful) gens to appropriate LORAs, so that other people can see the quality.
Without further ado, I am hereby announcing Season 2 of MKUltra's Loras. Training will commence on Monday March 31st, 2025, but I will be actively working to gather photos in the meantime.
THE LIST - Week of Monday March 31, 2025
Awkwafina
Aya Cash
Catherine Bell
Disha Patani
Mary Mouser
Grace Park
Gwendoline Christie
Jennifer Finnigan
Jodie Whittaker
Laci Green
Lauren German
Oliva Thirlby
Emily Perkins
Blake Blossom - P-Star
Haley Lu Richardson
Diora Baird
Emma Rossum
YEJI Itzy
Luality
Cailee Speeny
Grimes
Emmanuelle Chriqui
Eunha from VIVIZ
Jenny Nicholson (Youtuber)
Until then. Use responsibly and don't chaff yourself.
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MKULTRA