The most interesting part I think is how I can't really describe why the results are bad. The colors, art style, silhouettes, etc are all exactly right. But they are just incoherent on a deeper level. Pokemon designs don't all match to living or realistic animals, but they largely do. When I look at these and imagine we made it real, I can't picture it actually being able to live while most pokemon do satisfy this test.
I think this is why its failing. The test and criteria that make it more realistic are too hard for the GAN to work out.
That's my belief about why this (sort of) works where all the previous Pokemon-specific GANs fail so completely: it injects knowledge from ImageNet using a pretrained classifier. ImageNet has a decent number of animals, so some of the knowledge carries over. That makes them more coherent. But it's still going to fall short of the full distribution of animal images out there that SOTA stuff like ruDALL-E-*, GLIDE, ERNIE-ViLG, OFA, or Exaone train on.
I think this is why its failing. The test and criteria that make it more realistic are too hard for the GAN to work out.