AI company Stability AI recently announced a new AI tool called Stable Video Diffusion, which turns images into moving videos. Naturally, Internet users started putting memes into the processor, and as Gizmodo has found, the results are a bit strange to say the least. Thomas Germain humorously writes,

For less creative internet users hoping to drum up clicks (can you imagine such a terrible creature), the most obvious use of this tool is to plug memes into the thing. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened on Twitter—aka X—where a variety of meme-to-video AI creations went unfortunately viral. The results were about as horrific as anything you can imagine.

-Thomas Germain, AI Turned These Memes Into Videos, It’s Horrible (gizmodo.com)

If you go through the slideshow provided at the Gizmodo link, you’ll see the blatant distortions in the human faces to the point that they’re almost unrecognizable. Visual AI tools have had this problem from the beginning. A few months ago, it became evident that AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E could never quite capture human hands very well. The hands were either gnarled, or included too many fingers, or suffered from some other similar kind of disfigurement. In general, one can often tell that something feels “off.”

In addition, Getty Images sued Stability AI earlier this year for allegedly copying its storehouse of images without “permission or compensation.” Visual artists have also launched respective lawsuits against AI companies for copyright infringement. With “text-to-image” AI, you can type in an artist’s name and be given variations of their style. Not surprisingly, artists who have worked hard to trademark their unique styles aren’t too happy about that.