Using genAI video tools can be a lot like playing a low-odds slot machine. Jackpots, or anything intentional or convincing, are rare - most of the time you get absurd/uncanny/disturbing or just plain weird-looking results. These hallucinations can be funny as hell and seem useless, but they’ve actually been super valuable in helping me understand how the models understand language, and how to gently prompt them back to reality.

To get güd with generative video, you need to do tons of reps. Animating my 6-year-old portrait would only get me so far, so I needed a new source of assets to practice with. That’s when I remembered the stacks of vintage Playboy magazines my dad gave to me years ago after cleaning out his basement. Flipping through just a few issues from 1979 yielded a ton of photos, comics, ads and artwork in a wide variety of style and composition… perfect to play around with lots of different prompting scenarios. Also the vibe has such a good 70s stank to it - the clothes, the hair, the paper & printing texture - adding a touch of humanness to offset that AI plastic sheen.

This video is a compilation of some of the best hallucinations from this ongoing experiment.