How AI Generates Images and Videos
Artificial intelligence can now create images and videos from text descriptions, but this capability relies on complex processes and vast datasets.Teh core of many of these systems is a “diffusion model.” Imagine starting with random noise,and then systematically “cleaning it up” until a coherent image or video emerges. This cleanup isn’t random; it’s guided by what the user requests.
To get the desired result, the diffusion model works in tandem with another AI – often a large language model (LLM) – that understands the relationship between text and visuals. The LLM acts as a guide, steering the diffusion model’s cleanup process to produce outputs that align with the text prompt.
However, it’s crucial to understand where this understanding comes from. These LLMs aren’t inventing connections between words and images; they’ve been trained on massive datasets containing billions of image-text pairings scraped from the internet. This means the generated content reflects the biases and content present online,including potentially harmful material. The output is essentially a distillation of the online world, complete with it’s imperfections.
While often visualized with images, diffusion isn’t limited to still pictures. It can be applied to other data types, like audio and video. generating video requires cleaning up sequences of images – the individual frames that make up a moving picture – rather than a single static image.
This process demands significant computational power and energy. To address this, many video generation models employ a technique called latent diffusion. Rather of directly processing the immense amount of data in each video frame (millions of pixels), the model first compresses the frames – and the text prompt – into a more manageable “latent space.” This space contains a mathematical code representing only the essential features of the data, discarding unnecessary details.
This compression is similar to how videos are streamed online.Videos are sent in a compressed format for faster transmission, and your device then decompresses them for viewing.Latent diffusion applies a similar principle to make AI-powered image and video generation more efficient.
