Man sends his holiday video to AI and is left with ‘nightmare for life’

Before he died, Stephen Hawking warned that 'the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race'.

He warned that at some point AI would surpass human intelligence and from that point onwards, there'd be a catastrophe coming.

We're (hopefully) not at the point in the Terminator movies where we put AI in charge of the weapons and it tries to wipe us all out; instead, we seem to be feeding it stuff and seeing what it throws up.

People have been using it to see how depressing a computer thinks McDonald's will look 20 years from now and what a 'real life' episode of The Simpsons would look like.

Others have been making videos with AI, and the technology has come rather far in a very short about of time but the end product is still something that often tumbles down the uncanny valley.

One man who decided to feed his holiday video through an AI said he was 'pretty sure I'll have nightmares for life' as he suddenly sprouted jets of water from his feet, some weird kind of flesh monster burst out of the waves and someone collapsed into a pile of frogs.

Other weird s**t going on included a column of pink sludge, a woman opening up a tree which then caught fire and some kind of Godzilla attack.

All of it was very weird and there was little sense to what was happening on screen, though that didn't stop a procession of people who paid for Twitter singing its praises.

AI has been used for this sort of thing before, with varying results, and a lot of it looks pretty naff and nonsensical.

Enjoy this stuff if you will but so much AI output has a creepy aspect to it, and not just because if you wanted this sort of video in the past you'd have to hire someone who knew what they were doing to make it.

Handed my vacation videos to an AI for auto editing, and now I'm pretty sure I'll have nightmares for life 🤯 pic.twitter.com/rnODlnpCoG

— Javi Lopez ⛩️ (@javilopen) August 23, 2024

There have been other 'disturbing' developments around AI in recent times, as Scarlett Johansson turned down being the voice of OpenAI, one of the chatbots for ChatGPT.

The connection is not hard to see, given that she once played an AI voice for the movie Her, but people then sent her samples of the 'Sky' voice saying it sounded like her.

Johansson said the voice was 'so eerily similar to mine', and though OpenAI boss Sam Altman said the voice was cast with another actor 'before any outreach to Ms. Johansson' he apologised and paused the chatbot.