These AI-generated Overwatch fusions are beautiful and terrifying

overwatch ai art fusions
(Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

I've gone back and forth on AI art being cool and scary, but I can't deny that these Overwatch hero fusion renders I saw on Reddit last week are pretty sweet. It is fascinating that we can now ask an AI's opinion of what Soldier 76 and Mei would look like smooshed together, and it can spit out a shockingly cool, arguably original character design.

That's what author Drew Harrison did when he became one of the few thousand with access to Stable Diffusion, an AI image model similar to other popular tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. Harrison started by feeding the AI simple instructions like "make a fusion portrait of Mercy from Overwatch and Junkrat from Overwatch" and in some cases took more direct control over artistic influences with tags like 4K, highly detailed, cinematic lighting. Having only messed around with the DALL-E Mini online tool for a bit, I wasn't aware you can get so specific with instructions.

The results are striking:

I'm particularly intrigued/unnerved by the glare of Mercy x Junkrat (Mercrat) and the arm-mounted belly on Moira x Roadhog's (Moidhog) arm. You often can't expect an AI to spit out a fridge-worthy sketch on its first try. Harrison told me that AI art is often a process of trial and error.

"You try a prompt, see what comes back, revise, rerun, and repeat until you get the desired image," Harrison said. Speed is why Harrison currently favors Stable Diffusion over other AI art tools. He describes Stable Diffusion as "lightning quick and lightweight," two major advantages when your only creative bottleneck is render time and VRAM.

Stable Diffusion is also the biggest AI art tool in the process of going open-source, though it sounds like you'll need a pretty beefy rig to run it.

AI art still has some clear limitations, though. As you can see from Mercrat's weird octo-hand, AI models still don't seem to know what to do about fingers and palms. Sometimes there are too many fingers, or not enough, or what's there is a blurry mess. AI also tends to go weird on proportions when mimicking humans, though Moidhog is an extreme example. Check out the full gallery of Overwatch fusions here.

While I do hope Mei 76 becomes an actual Overwatch hero someday, the rapid proliferation of AI art makes me a little uneasy. Stable Diffusion, like every other AI, is trained on a dataset of internet images pulled from everywhere and anywhere. As Harrison demonstrated to me with "a fusion of Joe Biden and Barack Obama painted by Van Gogh," these tools are capable of seeking out and mimicking a specific person's style.

You could argue this is no different than a person drawing inspiration from another artist, but when we're talking about a computer brain storing millions of copies of other people's art, it's hard to know where inspiration ends and copying begins.

Morgan Park
Staff Writer

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

Read more
A zombie santa with six fingers leaps at the screen.
Call of Duty admits it's using generative AI to 'help develop some in-game assets', and suddenly all those poorly made calling cards make sense
Le Sserafim Overwatch 2 collab
Overwatch 2 is launching another Le Sserafim collab with 'more transformative' skin designs, guided by Blizzard Korea Studio's keen eye for Korean trends and street style
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
LocalThunk forbids AI-generated art on the Balatro subreddit: 'I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds'
The OpenAI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with an AI brain visible in the background, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 2, 2024. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal
An Ai face looks down on a human.
Xbox announces 'a generative AI model for gameplay ideation' called Muse, but don't get too excited: Machines aren't about to make games for you just yet
Aloy
'Creepy,' 'ghastly,' 'rancid': Viewers react to leaked video of Sony's AI-powered Aloy
Latest in FPS
A female druidic figure clutches a heart riven with thorns in Hunt: Showdown
'We want to increase the cost of silence': Hunt: Showdown 1896's latest update brings a new event, a massive list of bugfixes and a tougher challenge for stealthy players
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Ogryn
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide adds a psychic horde murderzone mode and makes Ogryns even smashier
Starfield's companion robot giving a thumbs-up
Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it's 'much less stressful as an indie' without daily meetings or 'office politics': it's 'very refreshing to just care about the game'
A crew of prospectors in Wildgate, featuring a robot, a rabbit man, and a small aquatic creature in a combination mech/aquarium.
Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime's new company is putting Sea of Thieves-style shenanigans in space with a new crew-based shooter
Team Fortress Spy being shocked
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
Neighbors Suburban Warfare screenshot a child aims a slingshot at a man from across a cul-de-sac.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
Latest in News
Crysis hero Prophet running down a beach while under fire
Crysis Remastered Trilogy activates maximum value mode as upgraded version of the legendary, hardware-crushing FPS series is currently 60% off
A goblin with sharp teeth, wearing goggles, lets out a mischievous cackle in WoW's latest patch: Undermine(d).
World of Warcraft's started swiping good ideas from one of its most popular user-made UI addons, and it's honestly about time
A female druidic figure clutches a heart riven with thorns in Hunt: Showdown
'We want to increase the cost of silence': Hunt: Showdown 1896's latest update brings a new event, a massive list of bugfixes and a tougher challenge for stealthy players
It's ENA! From the free adventure Dream BBQ!
Mindbending free multimedia adventure ENA: Dream BBQ is out now, has activated all my neurons and opened my third eye
PC Gamer magazine issue 408 Doom: The Dark Ages
PC Gamer magazine's new issue is on sale now: Doom: The Dark Ages
A gigantic terracotta sentinel made of living armor
Total War: Warhammer 3's army of Cathay has broken containment and is making its way to tabletop Warhammer at last