All through December, a social media person often called Stelfie the Time Traveller has been crafting a time-hopping travelogue utilizing generative AI. Due to Steady Diffusion and fine-tuning, an nameless artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into fake historic pictures set in several eras, equivalent to historical Egypt or the time of the dinosaurs.
Steady Diffusion is a deep studying picture synthesis mannequin that enables folks to create fictional scenes utilizing textual content descriptions referred to as prompts. With an extra method referred to as Dreambooth, folks can insert their very own topic or character into scenes generated by Steady Diffusion. It can be used to insert actual folks into fictional conditions.
To this point, “Stelfie” has taken historic selfies in the course of the ice age (being chased by a woolly mammoth), in historical Egypt (in the course of the building of the pyramids), in historical Greece (with the Trojan Horse), hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci (whereas creating the Mona Lisa), within the outdated West, whereas working from a tyrannosaurus rex, and whereas crusing with Christopher Columbus.
The artist behind Stelfie writes social media posts (on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit) in character as playful dispatches from a 41-year-old time traveler as he visits completely different places, for instance:
Log #3 – Columbus ship, 1492 DC. “Laaaaand” Now, I do not wanna brag however… After months of crusing Columbus was misplaced within the Oceans and properly as an example I’ll have kinda urged the right path…
The nameless artist (a self-identified “humorous outdated man”) detailed among the course of he makes use of to create the pictures in a number of Reddit feedback: a mix of Steady Diffusion 1.5, a customized AI mannequin for the panorama, and a customized AI mannequin educated on the Stelfie face, which is seemingly a fictional individual created utilizing Character Creator. He makes use of “lots of inpainting,” which implies inserting AI-generated imagery into the pictures to repair errors and sculpt the scene, and every picture takes three hours to create.
Some could discover Stelfie’s makes an attempt to promote the pictures as NFTs unpalatable (the tech is controversial), however simulated time journey is arguably a novel leisure use of know-how that may in any other case create deepfakes and probably deceive others. Utilizing Dreambooth and Steady Diffusion, anybody can now insert a personality (or themselves) into implausible and fictional conditions, so we’ll possible see much more fictional leisure eventualities within the close to future.
Itemizing picture by StelfieTT
