Generative artificial intelligence has exploded over the past couple years. Suddenly, we can chat with life-like textbots, or put a prompt into a computer program and have it generate a photo-realistic image or even a video.
Google DeepMind is one of many generative AI programs out there, and people are finding some pretty creative applications for them. Take Ammaar Reshi, who's the head of design at ElevenLabs, a company that specializes in using AI to creative natural-sounding speech synthesis software. He is also, it seems, a fan of Game of Thrones, HBO's epic fantasy series that ended back in 2019. Reshi used Google DeepMind to "recreate" scenes from the show. What was the result? Watch below?
I just recreated iconic scenes from Game of Thrones using Veo 2 from @GoogleDeepMind!
— Ammaar Reshi (@ammaar) December 18, 2024
How many can you recognize?
We can finally make the ending we deserve. pic.twitter.com/YKwjVw8ODg
I put the word "recreate" in quotes because the resulting scenes do resemble bits from Game of Thrones — I recognize scenes like the Red Wedding and the Battle of the Bastards — but do seem off and odd in the way that AI videos often are. Sometimes it's really obvious, like how DeepMind outputted a video that seems to channel Cersei Lannister's Walk of Shame, but in this version Cersei is fully clothed. Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister and Varys all appear in the video, and while they're accurate enough for me to recognize them, they look weird.
It can be tricky to make AI programs do exactly what you want them to do (and obviously no AI program made by Google is going to be able to reproduce an accurate version of the Walk of Shame; it likely has guardrails to prevent that, for good reason), and there is an unsettling uncanny feeling to a lot of this footage. Still, it's impressive! And just a couple of years ago a reel of this kind would be unthinkable; who knows where the technology will be in a few years? Maybe fans could come up with a whole different ending for the show, as Reshi speculates.
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