Ever since he broke out with Beetlejuice in 1988, director Tim Burton has had a very distinctive visual style, one that might be most clearly on display in animated films like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride. His characters are dour and gloomy, with reed-like bodies and eyes too big for their enormous heads. That style has helped him build a successful career over the past 40 years.
And now, artificial intelligence technology is capable of absorbing his style and popping out reproductions of it in any form you can imagine. Is this ethical? Does Tim Burton find it disturbing? I don't know, but it is impressive, and folks have been using the technology in entertaining ways. For instance, someone used AI to show us what Game of Thrones characters would look like if Tim Burton had come up with them. Check it out:
Man, Sansa's neck is like a foot long. And I love Daenerys Targaryen's freaky dragon. I'm not sure who the people at 0:42 and 0:45 are supposed to be; probably Jaime Lannister and Ramsay Bolton?
This is definitely impressive, but in the interest of giving at least equal time to an artist who doesn't use artificial intelligence, look below at the work of Andrew Tarusov, who gave us his take on what Tim Burton-esque Game of Thrones characters would look like back in 2019, before the rise of generative AI:
Man vs machine, who wins? No, actually, let's not have that discussion, although I will say that I like how Tarusov's creations have emotional currents that the AI renderings don't, like how Tormund Giantsbane is so eargerly trying to get the attention of a deeply unamused Brienne of Tarth.
People have used generative AI to put Game of Thrones characters into all kinds of fun scenarios. Have you seen the video where everyone from Westeros lives in a trailer park?
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