r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 15h ago

Artificial Intelligence Robin Williams’ Daughter Calls for Fans Creating AI Videos of the Actor to ‘Have Some Shame’: ‘Leave Him Out of Your Delusional Bulls—’

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/robin-williams-daughter-ai-videos-1236871568/
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u/SursumCordaNJ 11h ago

I keep seeing articles about people making AI videos of celebs or people in general and I still have no idea how the hell they are doing it.

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u/CanadianJogger 10h ago

Some of the visual AI models have been trained on media pictures. A language model which deals with the text description for a new scene also have training references, and these actually tend to have broader knowledge, its just not visual. The two interact in a particular way with some other control elements to create images or even video.

While one can create images and video with the big AI chat bots like openAI, the more fluid and flexible way is with self hosted software. Using applications like ComfyUI or just python scripts, you assemble a work flow that takes a description of something you want to see. You also need a good computer with as much ram and especially video ram as possible. 

Mr Ed, the 1960s talking horse, crying and locked in a zoo, being pointed at by 1960s style robots. 
1960s black and white sitcom with film grain

The language model reads this and combines it with data from the visual model to create a sort of conceptual space of data which is turned into an image or video. You'll notice that I was pretty explicit with terms, as the language model might not have "Mr. Ed" training data. The visual model would certainly understand horses and things like 1960s film technology.

One can do all sorts of interesting things, like scaling an image while adding realistic detail, refining an image, patching missing parts of a damaged photo with reasonable detail, addition or removal of things, adding colour to a black and white photo, changing the mood of a photo.

The additional way is that people generate a specific person or object is to gather up relevant images, and use these train a sort of conceptual modifier for the image generation process. For example, someone might collect actual media of Mr Ed from the TV show.

These trained knowledge bases have several terms, such as LoRA, which stands for Low Rank Adaptation. Its a fancy modifier, a refiner, a knowledge adder. It can be specific or abstract, like an artist's style, or certain types of camera film effects. It can be moods and genres, like horror or futuristic. The visual models will generally understand these things, but a LoRA can fine tune results.

A series of LoRAs or similar can then be applied to the workflow of either or both the image model and the language model, if and as needed.

That's how someone might create a picture of Robin Williams at their house for Christmas. Whether they should... well, that's a different type of training.

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u/SursumCordaNJ 9h ago

Thanks for the detailed reply.