TLDR: You can watch the video now right over here!
The Backstory: Back in 2020, I spent part of the pandemic lockdown playing around with generative AI models and built an app I called Pixie to generate music visualizations guided by a combination of the song audio, lyrics and user prompts. I used it to make the animations in videos for songs like “Give Up” and “Stay Safe.” Looking back on those now, they seem like the products of some distant-past technology — something from decades ago, not just four years. Given everything that’s evolved in the time since, I wanted to give another AI co-created video a shot with the same general "co-listen and guide" technique I was using a few years ago, this time via an app powered by the latest Stable Diffusion — a much bigger model with a more advanced architecture than BigGAN, the model I was using back in 2020.
So, that exploration became the video for “Dead Centuries,” my latest song. It’s the product of many hours of prompting the model with variations on the themes in the lyrics, trying to find the right balance between the literal and figurative, and battling the model’s tendency to over-weight certain words or fall down thematic rabbit holes. I wanted something that felt like the song to me: worn out but hopeful, down but not out. It’s a song about fumbling around for light against the backdrop of what might be a growing darkness on many fronts — political, social, environmental, economic — and not letting the past bind us to a particular future. I hope the video captures some version of all that. Either way, it was fun to make.