The monkey looks you straight in the eye, reassuring, leaning on the branch of a forest. But in a few seconds it transforms. The metamorphosis is frenetic. The primate becomes a prehistoric man, then a medieval soldier who seems to have stepped out of the popular videogame Assassin’s Creed. And then here is the modern man, followed by a cyborg and a scary alien, with wide jaws and sharp teeth.
The short 39-second clip is called The Evolution of Man. It was posted on Instagram on October 2nd. But only a few days ago it went viral, with millions of views on Twitter. A success that overwhelmed (and shocked) its author, the 34-year-old Fabio Comparelliwho created the video using theartificial intelligence. The boy was born in Italy but lives in Switzerland, where he arrived with his parents when he was still very young.
The viral video on the disturbing evolution of man created with artificial intelligence
In everyday life, Comparelli does a job that has nothing to do with creativity and machine learning. “What I do now does not fascinate me – he explains – I have always dreamed of being able to live off my creativity and what has been happening to me for some time now is incredible”.
Even before the dizzying views of The Evolution of Man, in fact, Comparelli – who shares his digital creations on social networks under the name fabdream.ai – received a job offer from a composer who writes music for trailers that they end up Netflix. “He found me through TikTok,” said the young artist, who now dreams of leaving his current occupation to start a freelance adventure. “I have received several offers – he explains – but this kind of work with AI is so new that it is also difficult to quantify the commitment required, not to mention that every day there are new tools to study to improve one’s technique”.
How did you discover artificial intelligence?
“Three months ago, by chance, on YouTube. Someone was showing how easy it was to generate an image from simple descriptive text. It struck me immediately, I felt like a shock: it could have been an opportunity to express my creativity ”.
The video you posted on your Instagram page, called The Evolution of Manit went viral. It has been viewed over nine million times on Twitter. How did you create it?
I used an open source model, Stable Diffusion developed by Stability IA, which uses deep learning to produce images based on a textual description. I wanted to create an animation with a strong visual and emotional impact. And I wanted to highlight the movement, the uncontrolled evolution of things, the time that passes without man being able to do much. All in the name of chaos. the initial one, the present one and the one we will experience in the future.
Did the algorithm do it all by itself?
Absolutely no. It is I who decided everything, from start to finish, each time providing the description of the image I had in mind: the monkey, then the prehistoric man, the medieval man, the modern man, the cyborg, the alien and finally the state of pure information. I clearly influenced the AI in several steps of the animation.
Can you explain the creative process better?
“The AI, as we have said, is only able to propose images starting from a description. Creating the video requires more human work than you might think. It is as if you are the director of the scenes that produces the algorithm. I have to indicate everything to the software: the subject, the setting, the colors, whether it is day or night, even the artistic style to which it must be inspired. For the clip The Evolution of Man at least 55,000 images were generated from which to choose the best ones for the final product. Each rendering resulting from a textual description, in fact, is purely random and different from time to time ”.
The Evolution of Man video is about 39 seconds long. How many images are there in each second?
“There are 30 of them, for a total of more than 900 total images. Each of these was generated by artificial intelligence. I can influence, with my description, only the first frame of each second. All the others are created randomly by the AI ”.
The problem is that AI doesn’t offer the best picture on the first try, is it?
“Yes, that’s right, to get to the image you want, the one you have in mind, in short, it takes time. For the video we’re talking about, it took me about 6 hours a day to produce 900 images that I had to evaluate each time, one by one. I even managed to process 4000 images a day, because in the end my computer was no longer enough and therefore I rented other GPUs, through sites, to increase my computing power. The best thing to do, if possible, is to follow the work of the machine in real time. So, if you realize that artificial intelligence is taking a different path from the one you had in mind, you can intervene immediately “.
What did you do, in the end, with all the chosen images?
“I placed them side by side on the timeline of a video editing program, Premiere, and I added the transitions to get to the final video you see on Instagram”.
Many, watching your video on the web, thought that a machine had really predicted the evolution of man.
“They were wrong. Today it is necessary to educate people in the use and above all in the understanding of these new tools. It should be understood that the results of the AI are only a reflection of the wishes of its creator ”.
Some have defined The Evolution of Man fascinating but also “disturbing”. Do you agree?
“Today AI is divisive. I wanted the video to have a “creepy” side just to provoke a reaction in people. I’m a big fan of science fiction, all these themes fascinate me a lot, for this video I was clearly influenced by artists like HR Giger (Swiss artist who in 1979 won the Oscar for the visual design of Alien, ed) and by films like 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the end, everyone defines my work as they perceive it. In my opinion it can be understood as disturbing because people have a bad idea of artificial intelligence: they don’t understand that it only generated the images, while the creative process, the corrections and the direction were my doing.
Can AI-generated works be considered art? There is a great debate going on.
“AI is our creation. What is an artist? Is a banana on a wall art? As a visual creator, I see artificial intelligence as a tool like a painter uses a brush. I use it, drive it and act on its results to get the vision I had in my head. It constantly forces me to reaffirm why I do what I do. Being an artist means making choices. And to choose is to surrender. Giving options to artificial intelligence is already an artist’s choice. It would never occur to us to discredit a digital artist for using Photoshop or Illustrator. More important is the vision and how it is achieved. The technical aspects must take second place ”.
What made you think about the success of your video?
“With the passing of uncontrolled time, just like in my video The Evolution of Man. Social media buzz is something that happens very quickly and is uncontrolled. This is exciting and horrifying at the same time, because often the message is skewed, people steal a creation and come up with catchy headlines like “This is what artificial intelligence imagines for our evolution” without even taking the time to understand. process of creation by a real person “.