AI was made to turn David Bowie songs into surreal music videos

The new generation of artificial intelligence tools for image synthesis are so good that they are already being used everywhere, from music albums to magazine covers.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” created by YouTube user aidontknow. Their process involved typing the song lyrics into the AI prompt, verse by verse, to generate each image for the video.

Sure, the likes of Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Fusion will one day leave the uncanny valley behind and provide a never-ending source of perfect stock photos that will look as convincing as the real thing. But there’s also a big downside to all this fun: These tools are essentially mining the existing work of designers and photographers who receive no AI licensing fees in a rapidly evolving field that will have negative downstream effects for the industry.

Right now, this video demonstrates that AI’s often otherworldly results are still limited: well-suited for poetry and fantastic literature, but not anything too literal. That seems to be the idea that moved aidontknow to turn some of Ziggy Stardust’s songs into music slideshows.

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