[HN Gopher] Stable Diffusion: Is Video Coming Soon?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Stable Diffusion: Is Video Coming Soon?
        
       Author : Hard_Space
       Score  : 127 points
       Date   : 2022-09-01 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (metaphysic.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (metaphysic.ai)
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | An image is already a 2-dimensional flattening of a 3-dimensional
       | world. A generator of 2-dimensional images would already have a
       | disadvantage, since they have not learned anything about the
       | three dimensions, and are simply faking what other, real,
       | 2-dimensional images look like, including all artifacts which
       | comes from 3-dimensionality being flattened. But these artifacts
       | will always be weird and not consistent with each other, since
       | the image generator does not really know anything about the third
       | dimension, it's just mimicking what artifacts it has learned by
       | seeing them. Video is _one additional_ dimension: time. I would
       | guess that similar artifacts would also show up here, and be
       | difficult to eliminate.
        
         | l33tman wrote:
         | The current image generators certainly know about 3D
         | internally. It's not put there explicitly but the wealth of
         | knowledge they possess and the perfect lighting and shadowing
         | and material reflections compared to the tiny amount of weights
         | strongly suggest they have proper representations (just like
         | humans by the way).
         | 
         | Even a small model in early training learns to do proper
         | shadowing and lighting and mostly makes mistakes in the 3D
         | high-level object space, like wrong number of wheels or legs or
         | fingers and stuff like that.
        
           | teddyh wrote:
           | > _It 's not put there explicitly but the wealth of knowledge
           | they possess and the perfect lighting and shadowing and
           | material reflections compared to the tiny amount of weights
           | strongly suggest they have proper representations_
           | 
           | I don't think they do, but I can't prove it, either way.
           | 
           | > _(just like humans by the way)._
           | 
           | Oh, I don't think humans have it either (mostly), since
           | humans don't have 3D vision; humans have the equivalent of
           | wiggle stereoscopy1, which gives some hints of depth, and
           | humans have the additional advantage of the time dimension.
           | People do have some intellectual capacity to reason about
           | 3-dimensional shapes, and some people can even rotate things
           | in their heads with ease. Blind people might have it too,
           | since their concept of the world was not created by this
           | pseudo-3D visual input. But mostly, people don't _think_ in
           | 3D.
           | 
           | I think we can see this by looking at drawings by children.
           | Child drawings are dominated by the concepts important to
           | children: Faces, hands, etc. _Concepts_ , not actual images.
           | And it's all in 2D, as was the majority of art for much of
           | history.
           | 
           | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy
        
             | l33tman wrote:
             | I have to strongly disagree with you on this, I can walk
             | around in my (small) city in my mind in 3D without any
             | problems. Anybody who's ever had a dream would concur as
             | well. It's absolutely not true that humans can't think in
             | 3D.
             | 
             | The sensory input modalities and specifics do not control
             | or limit the internal representations; a sufficiently
             | capable neural network will extract the most efficient rep
             | to predict the input data, which is moving 3D objects.
             | 
             | That it's difficult to "render" this to 2D by painting is
             | not very surprising.
        
           | npteljes wrote:
           | I don't think that they consider 3d too much. Consider the
           | "Girl with a Pearl Earring" image, that's meant to represent
           | something that's state of the art:
           | 
           | https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-introducing-outpainting/
           | 
           | The image might look consistent at first sight, but if you
           | look closer, the dimensions are all over the place. They
           | reflect the method by which they were created: reproducing
           | observed patterns without deeper understanding.
        
             | l33tman wrote:
             | You can find lots of buggy images with bugs in all possible
             | ways. But the vast majority of the images have consistent
             | shading, perspective, and even global illumination. Some of
             | it can be done in "screen space" (as in some standard game
             | 2D post-processing filters) but lots of them couldn't work
             | this way.
             | 
             | At some low level, pixel patterns are rendered and I guess
             | you could say that this is "reproducing observed patterns".
             | Would you say that about a 3D game engine as well that does
             | the same when it textures local regions of pixels? A
             | network is layered for this particular reason. The lowest
             | layer will have less "understanding" than the higher
             | layers.
        
       | jasondigitized wrote:
       | Video game level design and artifacts seems like a closer next
       | step.
        
       | zone411 wrote:
       | > "Stable Diffusion was trained primarily on LAION-Aesthetics, a
       | collection of subsets of the LAION 5B dataset, which is itself a
       | subset of LAION-400M"
       | 
       | Err, no? As you can tell by the name itself, the 5B dataset is
       | larger.
       | 
       | > "Unlike autoencoder-based deepfake content, or the human
       | recreations that can be achieved by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)
       | and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion-based
       | systems learn to generate images by adding noise"
       | 
       | This is confused. Diffusion is orthogonal to NeRF. For example,
       | here is a paper that uses both: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.12390
       | 
       | > "Within days of release, the open sourced Stable Diffusion code
       | and weights were packaged into a free Windows executable"
       | 
       | That's not how it became popular.
       | 
       | > "Additionally, at the time of writing, Google Research has just
       | released a similar system called DreamBooth, which likewise
       | 'tokenizes' a desired element into a distinct 'object'."
       | 
       | The approaches are actually very different. DreamBooth uses fine-
       | tuning, unlike textual inversion.
        
       | lucidrains wrote:
       | yea of course https://video-diffusion.github.io/
       | 
       | we are going all the way to the holodeck (my guess is latent
       | diffusion on weights, aka hypernetwork, of a 4d NERF)
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | O__________O wrote:
       | Curious, what other notable features or use cases are people
       | aware of that are already existing in other systems, but not
       | present in Stable Diffusion?
       | 
       | Anyone aware of any other open source projects that have a known
       | list of requested features and way for community to express
       | support for them, for example bounties?
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | May be before Video it would be 3D Models? I am thinking it
       | should dramatically lower the cost of current Gaming development
       | budget.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Yes but training it and massaging the data set properly would be
       | pretty mind blowing
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | How about video game 3d assets? And physics simulations?
        
       | yeldarb wrote:
       | I'm not sure if this is real, but this video of a stable
       | diffusion powered video editor was posted on Reddit a couple
       | weeks ago and looks insane:
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/wmypmh/a_d...
        
         | yreg wrote:
         | I'm not as excited by the demo as you are. It seems that they
         | just detect foreground, key it and put an arbitrary picture (in
         | this case from stable diff) on a skybox behind.
         | 
         | It seems closer to what Mac OS X Leopard's Photo Booth was able
         | to do 15 years ago[1], than to a "Stable Diffusion for Video".
         | 
         | [1] -
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20071018033504/https://www.apple...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | grumbel wrote:
         | For object/background replacement one can use EBSynth[1] and
         | combine it with in-painting of DALL-E2 and Co.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki9NVyD3It4
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | the_third_wave wrote:
       | Video is already possible as is shown by e.g. SALT_VERSE [1]
       | (which may or may not use SD/DALL-E/... but that is not that
       | interesting), what is not there yet is a --txt2vid script option.
       | Implementing this would not be that hard but the processing time
       | needed is quite substantial.
       | 
       | Something else which would be possible is the use of a model like
       | SD in combination with a frame interpolation model like [2] as a
       | video generator. Use SD to generate key frames, feed these to
       | FILM and let it generate the intermediate frames and you should
       | get video.
       | 
       | [1] https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE
       | 
       | [2] https://film-net.github.io/
        
         | quitit wrote:
         | Amongst the many video experiments, I find Karen Cheng is
         | making some interesting concepts by piping AI output to a range
         | of other interpolation tools.
         | 
         | Below is a mini tut where the content from Dall-e it piped to
         | Ebsynth and then DAIN.
         | https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ch7aV2mjWOD/
         | 
         | In summary: Dall-e generated the outfits, Ebsynth mapped those
         | outfits to a range of frames (instead of having a new random
         | artwork on each frame) & Dain smoothed the transitions between
         | each outfit change.
         | 
         | Another example of this concept is here:
         | https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChmyFNoDHZY/
        
           | cma wrote:
           | is there a mirror without a login wall anywhere?
        
             | quitit wrote:
             | search for "instagram downloader"
        
         | aqme28 wrote:
         | > Implementing this would not be that hard
         | 
         | The fact that no one has been able to demonstrate it
         | convincingly makes me think that it might actually be quite
         | hard.
        
         | Vetch wrote:
         | The article is thorough and covers why your [2], under
         | tweening, is insufficient. Video beyond stereotyped repetitive
         | movements is likely AI-complete.
         | 
         | Presumably you'd want to be director and be able to control
         | camera angles. You might want to have a cartoon or 3D render
         | visual style. Unreal engine prompt tag even more literal. Most
         | important, you will want actors. Anything alive will have to
         | move convincingly and intentionally. Some might even bring up
         | the ethics of allowing the movie to end.
         | 
         | Before proper video, I think we'll first have to see tools for
         | music, 3D rendering and animation that bring down difficulty by
         | orders of magnitude.
        
         | O__________O wrote:
         | Comment by SALT creator on HN yesterday saying they are using
         | Midjourney, though Midjourney supports Stable Diffusion too:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651855
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | contingo wrote:
         | SALT_VERSE just uses still images generated by DALL*E-2 and
         | Midjourney. They're animated using techniques that have already
         | been around for a long time: panning around and zooming in and
         | out of a larger frame, fake raster-to-3d effects (auto
         | projection mapping), typical After Effects transitions. There
         | are some overlaid face animations done with something along the
         | lines of NVIDIA's Audio2Face. None of it is video generated by
         | SD, DALL*E-2 and Midjourney.
         | 
         | There have been some actual video explorations of SD's latent
         | space, this example amazes me:
         | https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1559343616270557184
        
       | dqpb wrote:
       | For video, I feel like we'd be better off generating models,
       | textures, and universal scene descriptions.
        
       | alphabetting wrote:
       | Not close in short term but it's inevitable
       | 
       | https://sites.google.com/view/transframer
        
         | lucidrains wrote:
         | yup, training on DCT representation in general is an untapped
         | research direction. can also help with larger images, longer
         | audio, etc
        
       | Tenoke wrote:
       | While on the software side we are close, the amount of compute
       | required to train a model to produce longer, high quality,
       | sensible, and non-surrealistic videos - especially with a plot -
       | is simply too much for the time being.
        
       | SpaceManNabs wrote:
       | it is still a significant endeavor for the same reason audio is
       | still difficult. will be a huge breakthrough because it means
       | having made quantifying uncertainty in the near continuous limit
       | tractable.
        
       | null_shift wrote:
       | True video capability would entail describing a scene as a prompt
       | and getting a video in return. Not interpolating between a
       | handful of images as is being done now (not to discredit those).
       | 
       | This will be a huge game changer when it occurs. Whether it be
       | for deep fake videos, creating custom content, or making a new
       | season of your favorite tv show that was cancelled too early. The
       | possibilities are endless.
       | 
       | This is probably not in the near future (i.e. this year), but I
       | doubt it is very far off.
        
         | naillo wrote:
         | Imagine how fun sitting at a terminal in vim editing a 100 line
         | 'script' for a short movie and getting rapid feedback back. I'm
         | so excited about the future.
        
           | tintor wrote:
           | Feedback will likely not be rapid.
           | 
           | It will take a lot of compute to compile the script and
           | render the video.
        
             | naillo wrote:
             | I thought we'd never get image generation this fast. Last
             | year it was 30 minutes per image. The stable diffusion
             | folks are planning for a 100mb release of the image
             | generator in Q1 which for sure would be real time. I
             | actually suspect you _can_ get something like that
             | incredibly fast (even though all intuition says otherwise).
        
           | zionic wrote:
           | How about "hey Siri, play LOTR replacing every character with
           | Nicolas Cage"
        
             | darknavi wrote:
             | "NOT THE ~BEES~ NAZGUL!"
        
             | gitfan86 wrote:
             | The possibilities are endless. "Insert Willie Wonka, as
             | Froto's love interest, and Willie should joint the major
             | battles with UZI machine guns, and his dialog should be as
             | if he is an inner-city gang member."
        
             | zardo wrote:
             | Play 2001 A Space Odyssey, make it a tight 90 minutes,
             | directed by Michael Bay.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Cogvideo generates a video from a prompt, but you can also use
         | an image as a start.
        
         | gitfan86 wrote:
         | You could "hack it" by using a couple of other models as part
         | of your pipeline. Similarly to how you have to use GAN after SD
         | to "fix" faces sometimes.
         | 
         | You also could put a language model on top of your prompting
         | system. So "gandolff kicking ass" gets translated into " Page
         | XXX, Paragraph XX from LOTR "
        
         | the_lonely_road wrote:
         | I am much more interested in an intermediary step. I would love
         | to be able to use a tool like this to create a comic book. This
         | is after all just static artwork which the tool already creates
         | quite beautifully.
         | 
         | What it would need to be able to do to get from here to there
         | is understand some concepts. The first being "characters". On
         | reddit there was beautiful image that recently won first place
         | in an art contest and its quite frustrated some of the art
         | community. When I was looking at it I thought it was awesome,
         | but wondered at the ability to create another hundred or so
         | images in that same 'world' that the created image was showing.
         | I would want to do something like give it the prompt "tired old
         | medieval knight with a mace and shield" and have it create the
         | character then be able to name it "Tom" or something and feed
         | it more prompts for that characters like "Tom is sitting in a
         | forest brooding" and have it create the same exact character
         | but in a different context.
         | 
         | That would be pretty game changing for opening up amature web
         | comics to a large body of people who have ideas and tell
         | stories but have no art skills to speak of - my stick
         | characters are crooked :(
        
           | grumbel wrote:
           | There is some work exploring that with Textual Inversion[1].
           | 
           | Another trick to approach this problems is specifying the
           | random seed, this will cause the same image being generated
           | by the same prompt without any randomness. When you now
           | change the prompt you get an image that is very similar to
           | the first one, but with the variation included. Somebody used
           | that to age a woman across 100 years[2] with quite stunning
           | results. Even works with gender or style changes.
           | 
           | [1] https://textual-inversion.github.io/
           | 
           | [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/
           | por...
           | 
           | [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wq6t5z/
           | por...
        
           | jshprentz wrote:
           | > I would love to be able to use a tool like this to create a
           | comic book.
           | 
           | Last week PhilFTW explained "How To Create a Complete Graphic
           | Novel in ONE Day" with Midjourney in a YouTube video [1]. He
           | uses five tools:
           | 
           | - Midjourney (to generate images)
           | 
           | - InferKit (to generate the story text)
           | 
           | - Word (to rearrange the story text to fit into some
           | narrative)
           | 
           | - Comic Life 3 for iPad (to place the images and text in
           | comic book panels)
           | 
           | - Affinity Designer (to design the cover and export
           | everything to print, Kindle, and Blurb)
           | 
           | [1] https://youtu.be/tjj6KsPSHZc
        
           | landonxjames wrote:
           | I recently saw a Twitter thread from last year where someone
           | made a comic book with AI generated backgrounds. The
           | characters were added in later, but it stuck with me as a
           | very cool future use case
           | 
           | https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1467652391059214337
        
         | ShamelessC wrote:
         | The article shows a model that does this.
         | 
         | It's only a few frames, but they are entirely generated from
         | text - no seed image or interpolation required.
        
           | nonameiguess wrote:
           | Interpolation here meaning one smooth motion transition is
           | all that is depicted. An entire episode of television
           | requires things like cuts between scenes, possibly
           | discontinuities like flashbacks, scenes that take place days,
           | months, or even decades later, and characters should still
           | look the same, but might be wearing different clothing, or
           | grow a beard, or get really old but still have similar facial
           | features and the same skin color. If one ages, they should
           | all age about the same, unless it's a story with time travel
           | or humanoid immortal characters that don't age.
           | 
           | I'm sure these types of capabilities will come at some point,
           | but no current model can do it. It requires more than just
           | projecting motion into a scene.
        
           | MuffinFlavored wrote:
           | What is referred to/defined as "interpolation" because as an
           | outsider... isn't "Stable Diffusion interpolating text into
           | images/frames/video" in a "literal" (maybe not technical)
           | sense?
        
             | FlyingAvatar wrote:
             | It's to be interpreted in the quasi-mathematical sense
             | where you have images for frame A and frame B representing
             | your data points. To interpolate between those frames, a
             | flow of plausible images simulating the transition from A
             | to B is generated.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | WikiSeries
        
       | jnurmine wrote:
       | Is there something like Stable Diffusion for text only?
       | 
       | Like, feed in some text and pose questions, like people have done
       | with GPT-3.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | There are many open source models like GPT-3, the problem is
         | that you need a GPU cluster if you want to run something
         | yourself that has similar performance to GPT-3.
        
       | bob_paulson wrote:
       | hmm noise added to pictures using AI. Is Midjourney and DALL-E2
       | not there yet? Just asking. Don't know.
        
         | adamsmith143 wrote:
         | >hmm noise added to pictures
         | 
         | Hope you don't actually think that's what these models do.
        
           | bob_paulson wrote:
           | humor...
        
             | prophesi wrote:
             | I think even taking Poe's Law into consideration it would
             | be difficult to parse that comment as a joke.
        
       | kachurovskiy wrote:
       | Google Photos already has image to video capabilities with the
       | Cinematic photo feature -
       | https://blog.google/products/photos/new-cinematic-photos-and...
        
         | lolspace wrote:
        
       | hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
       | I'm wondering is there a service to create tilemap spritesheet?
       | Say I want to make a retro style Ultima-ish spritesheet with
       | 64*64 sprites, but I don't have any drawing skill, is there an AI
       | to generate some for me?
        
         | heliophobicdude wrote:
         | Try using Dalle for it. I just searched "sprite sheet of a cute
         | 16 bit character"
        
           | hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
           | Thanks, will try it out.
        
       | tarunmuvvala wrote:
       | I guess the next step is to make stable diffusion better a lot of
       | local context driven and multi- image prediction .
       | 
       | Today still the AI misses local context as the images are more of
       | trained from Open images annotated in English by experts. But
       | imagine if you have single image annotated by multiple people in
       | different languages then what happens to AI capabilities
        
       | spyder wrote:
       | Another cool trick: to achieve video in-painting, combine
       | diffusion models with ebsyth:
       | 
       | https://www.tiktok.com/@karenxcheng/video/713806710521107588...
        
       | pc2g4d wrote:
       | The "initial frame -> video" problem seems way harder than
       | generating video from a text input. Once a good dataset for that
       | problem is assembled, it seems like Stable Diffusion would
       | naturally accept an additional "time" dimension, and generate
       | cohesive output, with corresponding massively increased hardware
       | requirements.
       | 
       | Though I'd venture that the first "novel to feature film" or
       | "novel to TV series" algorithm won't just be an upscaling of this
       | tech....
        
       | mcbuilder wrote:
       | The pieces are coming into place
       | https://github.com/microsoft/VideoX/tree/master/X-CLIP
        
       | throwaway920102 wrote:
       | Video will suffer even more than still imagery or text from the
       | inherent lack of continuity/self-consistent memory that these
       | autocomplete/prediction algorithms have.
       | 
       | So cool for abstract art but not for storytelling or following a
       | script. Unless you are OK with the content being visually
       | inconsistent like an acid trip.
        
         | FairlyInvolved wrote:
         | I think that's just a scaling issue, fundamentally there's no
         | reason why a model trained on video couldn't come to create
         | coherent motion in the same way that image models can now
         | product coherent lighting/themes.
         | 
         | Smaller image models had the same problems with logical
         | inconsistency just because they didn't have sufficient general
         | understanding of how visual concepts.
         | 
         | The same is almost certainly true of video - early smaller
         | models will likely create janky movements/motion, however once
         | they've seen enough video to understand how a person walks, how
         | a scene is framed etc.. there's no reason we couldn't get to
         | the same level of maturity as today's image models.
         | 
         | I think the real issue will come from labelling - most video is
         | only going to be labelled simply with basic info/captions
         | without detailed descriptions of the camera pan, movement of
         | subjects. The amount of text required to accurately describe a
         | scene is much larger than a still image and I'm not sure how
         | once would go about collecting this.
        
         | babyshake wrote:
         | It does seem to be the case that this type of generative image
         | AI makes somewhat surreal imagery unless given very specific
         | literal directions (aka, Tom Cruise hugging Ben Affleck). If
         | using this AI right now it is probably best to work within
         | these constraints.
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-01 23:02 UTC)