you may have Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed some impressive AI-created video memes. Harry potter Nightmarish footage of Will Smith eating spaghetti, reimagined as a Balenciaga commercial, recently went viral. , highlights how problematic some uses of technology can be.
Looking at these videos, last year programs like Craiyon (previously known as DALL-E Mini) produced crude and often unrealistic, but recognizable images such as baby surveillance footage. I remember the moment when AI image creation tools became popular. Gas station robbery, Darth Vader courtroom sketch, Elon Musk eating crayons.
Craiyon was an open-source knockoff of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT)’s DALL-E 2 image generator, which was then carefully restricted. This tool was the first to demonstrate the ability of AI to take text prompts and transform them into what look like real photographs or human-drawn illustrations. Since then, DALL-E has become available to everyone, and as programs such as Midjourney and Dream Studio have developed and improved similar tools, it has become relatively easy to create complex, realistic images with just a few taps of the keyboard. can now be created in
These image creation tools are becoming a reality as engineers tweaked the knobs and levers of the algorithms behind these image generators, added more training data, and bought more GPU chips to run it all. has become very good at counterfeiting Check out Alex Jones at the Gay Pride Parade or The Box of Covenants at his sale at the Yard, to name a few examples from the subreddit dedicated to weird AI imagery.
Widespread access to this technology and its sophistication has forced us to rethink how we view online images. It was highlighted last month when an AI-generated image purportedly showing the arrest of Donald Trump went viral. Due to this incident, Midjourney has announced that it will no longer offer free trials of its service. While this fix may deter some cheesy villains, it leaves the broader issue untouched.
As WIRED’s Amanda Hoover wrote this week, algorithms still struggle to generate compelling videos from prompts. Creating many individual frames is computationally expensive. Also, as today’s jitter and sputtering videos demonstrate, it is difficult for algorithms to maintain sufficient consistency between them to produce meaningful video.
But AI tools are much more adept at editing videos.Balenciaga meme and the version it references friend and breaking bad, was created by combining several different AI tools. I generated a static image first, then added a simple animation effect. But the end result is still impressive.
