Let there be (ring) light.
A British film editor is making a splash through the use of AI to assume famous historical figures like Jesus, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII taking selfies.
“The outcomes are hilarious and everybody I’ve shared my work with cannot imagine how realistic the photos look.” – Duncan Thomsen, 53 told SWNS.
He said he uses Midjourney’s AI software through the Discord app, which responds to user-set prompts and commands to generate images by referencing billions of images online.
Thomsen recreated scenes from the Battle of Waterloo, the court of Cleopatra and the Last Supper.
The event process may be lengthy because the AI tells users to say exactly what it must do and requires “absolute description,” Thomsen explained.
Thomsen believes the technology is so accurate that it could possibly be used to show history in schools, calling it “time travel with out a time machine.”
“You’ll be able to ask AI to be historically accurate, after which it could possibly apply to anything, anywhere, in every single place – that is the fantastic thing about it,” he told SWNS.
“I even have an eye fixed for image in my day job and I have been lucky enough to work with some really great people,” he said.
“It allowed me to match every thing I have been working on and explore my imagination without limits, and that is the result.”
Thomsen’s project comes as tech industry leaders are calling for an “immediate pause” in training advanced AI systems for not less than six months.
But AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky says the proposed moratorium doesn’t go far enough.
“Many researchers imbued with these issues, including myself, expect that the most certainly final result of constructing a superhuman intelligent AI under conditions just like today is that literally everyone on Earth will die.” wrote in op-ed published this week by Time.
“Not like in ‘possibly some distant likelihood,’ but in ‘it’s an obvious thing that might occur.’
This week alone, it was reported that an AI chatbot allegedly convinced a Belgian man to commit suicide.