AI Dreaming Of Time Travel

We love the intersection between art and technology, and a video made by an AI (Stable Diffusion) imagining a journey through time (Nitter) is a lovely example. The project is relatively straightforward, but as with most art projects, there were endless hours of [Xander Steenbrugge] tweaking and playing with different parts of the process until it was just how he liked it. He mentions trying thousands of different prompts and seeds — an example of one of the prompts is “a small tribal village with huts.” In the video, each prompt got 72 frames, slowly increasing in strength and then decreasing as the following prompt came along.

There are other AI videos on YouTube, often putting the lyrics of a song into AI-generated form. But if you’ve worked with AI systems, you’ll notice that the background stays remarkably stable in [Xander]’s video as it goes through dozens of feedback loops. This is difficult to do as you want to change the image’s content without changing the look. So he had to write a decent amount of code to try and maintain visual temporal cohesion over time. Hopefully, we’ll see an open-source version of some of his improvements, as he mentioned on Twitter.

In the meantime, we get to sit back and enjoy something beautiful. If you still aren’t convinced that Stable Diffusion isn’t a big deal, perhaps we can do a little more to persuade your viewpoint.

20 thoughts on “AI Dreaming Of Time Travel

        1. Giving examples is precisely “specifying how to create art”.

          Do we even know how to “create art”? If you can specify the process and do it automatically then it isn’t art, it’s an algorithm.

          The AI will discern the patterns in what it is shown and the generated output will depend completely on what the humans have decided to show it. If they show it 50 pictures of dogs playing cards then the AI will decide that “art” is pictures of dogs playing cards.

          The patterns that it recognizes are not necessarily “simple”, they can have whatever complexity that is necessary to fit the examples. For example you can show it hundreds of pictures of legal chess boards and it will have to divine the rules of chess to make its own images.

          1. Even a good algorithm can be classed as art!
            Ever heard the saying “that was a work of art” over many thing which arnt classed as art.

            You may not see an algorithm as art, but I’m a way, it’s the programmers art! The art is the ability to program a device to do such a thing.

            Algorithm or not, it’s still a work of art!

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