Amid this previous week’s controversies in AI over regulation, fears of world-ending doom, and job disruption, the clouds have briefly parted. For a short and shining second, we will take pleasure in a fully ridiculous AI-generated video of Will Smith consuming spaghetti that’s now lighting up our lives with its horrible glory.
On Monday, a Reddit consumer named “chaindrop” shared the AI-generated video on the r/StableDiffusion subreddit. It shortly unfold to different types of social media and impressed combined ruminations within the press. For instance, Vice stated the video will “hang-out you for the remainder of your life,” whereas the AV Membership referred to as it the “pure finish level for AI growth.”
We’re someplace in between. The 20-second silent video consists of 10 independently generated two-second segments stitched collectively. Each exhibits totally different angles of a simulated Will Smith (at one level, even two Will Smiths) ravenously gobbling up spaghetti. It is totally computer-generated, due to AI.
And you will notice it now:
We all know what you are pondering: “Did not I see this sort of superior deepfake know-how in 1987‘s The Working Man?” No, that was Jesse “The Physique” Ventura defeating a faux Arnold Schwarzenegger in a dystopic recreation present cage match, set someplace between 2017 and 2019. Right here in 2023, we now have faux Will Smith consuming spaghetti.
This feat is feasible resulting from a brand new open supply AI software referred to as ModelScope, launched a couple of weeks in the past by DAMO Imaginative and prescient Intelligence Lab, a analysis division of Alibaba. ModelScope is a “text2video” diffusion mannequin that has been educated to create new movies from prompts by analyzing thousands and thousands of pictures and 1000’s of movies scraped into the LAION5B, ImageNet, and Webvid datasets. That features movies from Shutterstock, therefore the ghostly “Shutterstock” watermark on its output.
AI group HuggingFace at the moment hosts an internet demo of ModelScope, though it requires an account, and you may must pay for compute time to run it. We tried to make use of it however it was overloaded, seemingly resulting from Smith’s spaghetti mania.
In accordance to chaindrop, the workflow for creating the video was pretty easy: give ModelScope the immediate “Will Smith consuming spaghetti” and generate it at 24 frames per second (FPS). Subsequent, chaindrop used the Flowframes interpolation software to extend the FPS from 24 to 48, then slowed it all the way down to half pace, leading to a smoother video.
After all, ModelScope is not the one recreation on the town concerning the rising subject of text2video. Just lately, Runway debuted “Gen-2,” and we have beforehand lined early text2video analysis initiatives from Meta and Google.
Since Will Smith consuming spaghetti grew to become a viral hit, the Web has been graced with follow-ups corresponding to Scarlett Johansson and Joe Biden consuming spaghetti. There’s even Smith consuming meatballs, a video that’s maybe really actually horrifying. But it surely’s nonetheless nice one way or the other—good future meme fodder.
After all, as soon as the outputs of those text2video instruments get too life like, we’ll produce other points to cope with—deep social and cultural points, seemingly. However for now, let’s take pleasure in ModelScope’s imperfect, horrible glory. We apologize upfront.
