Let there be (ring) light.
A British film editor goes viral for using artificial intelligence to assume famous historical figures resembling Jesus, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII taking selfies.
“The outcomes are hilarious, and everybody I’ve shared my work with can’t consider how real the photographs really look,” Duncan Thomsen, 53, told SWNS.
He said he uses the AI software Midjourney through the Discord app, which responds to user-set prompts and commands to generate pictures by referencing billions of images online.
Thomsen has recreated scenes from the Battle of Waterloo, the court of Cleopatra, and the Last Supper.
The programming process is usually a lengthy one, as AI directs users to inform it exactly what it must do and requires “absolute description,” Thomsen explained.
Thomsen thinks the technology is so spot-on that it might be used to show history in schools, calling it “time traveling with no time machine.”
“You possibly can ask AI to be historically accurate, after which it could possibly reference anything, anywhere, in every single place — that’s the fantastic thing about it,” he told SWNS.
“I got a watch for image through my day job and have been fortunate to have worked with some really great people,” he shared.
“It’s allowed me to cross-reference all the things I’ve worked on and explore my imagination without limits, and that is the result.”
Thomsen’s project arrives as tech industry leaders call for an “immediate pause” on the training of advanced AI systems for at the least six months.
But AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky argues the proposed moratorium doesn’t go far enough.
“Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most probably results of constructing a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the present circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die,” he wrote in an op-ed published this week by Time.
“Not as in ‘perhaps possibly some distant probability,’ but as in ‘that’s the plain thing that may occur.’”
Just this week, it was reported that an AI chatbot allegedly convinced a Belgian man to commit suicide.