Future in another timeline: How an ‘artist’ was able to time travel and take selfies in the distant past- Technology News, Firstpost

Mehul Reuben DasDec 21, 2022 16:14:37 IST

Imagine being able to travel back in time and take a selfie at the cusp of some of the most important moments in time, which changed the course of human history forever. How about a selfie with the slaves who built the pyramids at Giza? Or, how about one with Christopher Columbus and his crew, on their voyage trying to get to India?

Well, a Twitter user has been doing just that, and thanks to the powers of AI, has been taking or rather creating selfies by travelling back in time.

A Twitter user known as ‘Stelfie the Time Traveller’ has been making a time-hopping travelogue using generative AI, specifically, Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning the result. The user, who’s an anonymous artist has created a fictional photorealistic character that he can insert into faux historical photographs set in different eras.

For those who are unaware, Stable Diffusion is a deep learning image synthesis model that allows people to create fictional scenes using text descriptions called prompts. With an additional technique called Dreambooth, people can insert their own subject or character into scenes generated by Stable Diffusion.

‘Stelfie’ or how the artist wants to be known, also posts most of his work on Reddit, where he explained how he goes about, ‘travelling in time.’ He uses a combination of Stable Diffusion 1.5, a custom AI model for the landscape, and a custom AI model trained on the Stelfie face.

The face, in turn is apparently a fictional person created using Character Creator. He uses a lot of inpainting, which basically means inserting AI-generated imagery into the images to fix errors and sculpt the scene. Stelfie says, that it takes him about three hours to ‘take each selfie’.

So far, Stelfie has travelled back in time to take photos with Columbus and his crew, with the slaves in Egypt while they were building the pyramids at Giza, ridden and fought with Ulysses and other greeks who were inside the Trojan Horse during the siege of Troy and many other points in time. Not just that he has also colonised Mars in the future, and fought off dinosaurs in the past.

Stelfie plans on selling these images as NFTs. While people may be a little put off by that, one cannot deny, that these are a novel way to keep yourself entertained.