"Make it really awkward and creepy."
Digital Getdown
For some reason, an artist has taken images of celebrities hanging out with their younger selves and given them the AI treatment — and the results are positively nightmarish.
The original work in question was created by Dutch artist Ard Gelinck, whose manipulated images of celebs like Will Smith, Keanu Reeves, and Tom Hanks canoodling with their younger selves went mildly viral in 2021 because, well, they actually looked pretty good.
Three short years later, however, the digital art landscape looks a lot different.
Accordingly, he set AI loose on the works. And the results are so uncanny, even the artist admitted in an Instagram post that they're "f*cking scary"
M I N D B L 🔥 W I N G !!
Of the 20 images in this video, I created 17 and someone(Ai) finished it. 🤯😱😳😀🔥UNF*KCING BELIEVABLE 😮
Ai is fun but also really, really crazy and scary and also moving. 🥹
Ai don’t know where this ends. 🤷🏼♂️ pic.twitter.com/X7lYrcwyDI— Ard Gelinck (@ArdGelinck) July 17, 2024
Cursed
While Gelinck seems to think his creation is the good kind of scary, others find it to be creepy in the worst way.
In one post resharing one of the videos, which ranges from a strange-looking Emma Watson hugging herself as Harry Potter's Hermione Granger to a grown-up Smith posing with himself in the "Fresh Prince" era, an X-formerly-Twitter user joked that it might be "the most cursed thing on the internet."
Another user was even more scathing with their criticism.
"Hey AI what would it look like if a bunch of celebrities were in love with their younger selves?" the user quipped, in the style of an AI prompt. "Make it really awkward and creepy."
In yet another post, a user posted a screenshot from the "hideous" clip that, unlike the other celebrity older-younger pairs, featured three Michael Jacksons instead of two — one in his later years prior to his death in 2009, one at the height of his pop career, and another of him as a child in the Jackson Five.
"This one stood out for some reason," the user noted.
Even with recent years' leaps and bounds in sophistication, these sorts of outputs are still so uncanny that they even seem to freak out the people creating them — a certain indictment of the reality of generative AI as it stands today.
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