Interesting background! Prompts like this also test the latent space of the image generator - it’s usually the other way round, so if you see a man on top of a horse, you’ve got a less sophisticated embedding feeding the model. In this case, though, that’s quite an image to put out to the interwebs. I looked to see what gender the horse was.

EDIT: After reading the prompt translation, this was more just like a “year of the horse is going to nail white engineers in glorious rendered detail” sort of prompt. I don’t know how SD1.5 would have rendered it, and I think I’ll skip finding out

On the topic of modern Chinese culture, Is there the same hostility towards AI generated Imagery in China as there seems to be in America?

For example I think there would be a lot of businesses in the US that would be too afraid of backlash to use AI generated imagery for an itinerary like the one at https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate-overseas.aliyuncs.com/Qwe...

There's also the "horse riding astronaut" challenge in image generation: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut-redu...

While I don't doubt this was one influence, there was also an infamous problem with Dall-E 2, which was perfectly able to generate an astronaut riding a horse but completely unable to generate a horse riding an astronaut.

This problem is infamous because it persisted (unlike other early problems, like creating the wrong number of fingers) for much more capable models, and the Qwen Image people are certainly very aware of this difficult test. Even Imagen 4 Ultra, which might be the most advanced pure diffusion model without editing loop, fails at it.

And obviously an astronaut is similar to a man, which connects this benchmark to the Chinese meme.

Why not ask for simply a man or even an Han man given the race of Tsai Kang-yong. Why a white man and why a man wearing medieval clothing. Gives your head a wobble.