
All through December, a social media person generally known as Stelfie the Time Traveller has been crafting a time-hopping travelogue utilizing generative AI. Due to Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning, an nameless artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into fake historic pictures set in several eras, similar to historical Egypt or the time of the dinosaurs.
Secure Diffusion is a deep studying picture synthesis mannequin that enables individuals to create fictional scenes utilizing textual content descriptions referred to as prompts. With an extra approach referred to as Dreambooth, individuals can insert their very own topic or character into scenes generated by Secure Diffusion. It can be used to insert real people into fictional conditions.
To this point, “Stelfie” has taken historic selfies in the course of the ice age (being chased by a woolly mammoth), in historical Egypt (in the course of the development of the pyramids), in historical Greece (with the Trojan Horse), hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci (whereas creating the Mona Lisa), within the old West, whereas working from a Tyrannosaurus rex, and whereas crusing with Christopher Columbus.

The artist behind Stelfie writes social media posts (on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit) in character as playful dispatches from a 41-year-old time traveler as he visits totally different places, for instance:
Log #3 – Columbus ship, 1492 DC. “Laaaaand” Now, I do not wanna brag however… After months of crusing Columbus was misplaced within the Oceans and properly to illustrate I’ll have kinda urged the proper route…
The nameless artist (a self-identified “humorous outdated man”) detailed some of the process he makes use of to create the pictures in a number of Reddit feedback: a mix of Secure Diffusion 1.5, a customized AI mannequin for the panorama, and a customized AI mannequin educated on the Stelfie face, which is outwardly a fictional person created utilizing Character Creator. He makes use of “a number of inpainting,” which implies inserting AI-generated imagery into the pictures to repair errors and sculpt the scene, and every picture takes three hours to create.
Some might discover Stelfie’s attempts to sell the images as NFTs unpalatable (the tech is controversial), however simulated time journey is arguably a novel leisure use of expertise that may in any other case create deepfakes and probably deceive others. Utilizing Dreambooth and Stable Diffusion, anybody can now insert a personality (or themselves) into implausible and fictional conditions, so we’ll possible see much more fictional leisure situations within the close to future.
Itemizing picture by StelfieTT