AI-Generated GIFs Flood the Platforms

AUG 15 2022 · 12:00

A cyberpunk robot from the Stable Diffusion era. After SD's release on 22 August 2022, AI-generated reaction GIFs began flooding Giphy, Tenor, and Reddit. Place: Stable Diffusion (Stability AI) · Runway · Pika Labs · Giphy and Tenor backends Figures: Emad Mostaque, Stability AI founder · the Stable Diffusion open-source community Stable Diffusion releases publicly on 22 August 2022. Within weeks, image-to-image variation and frame-interpolation techniques produce the first wave of AI-generated reaction-style GIFs uploaded to Giphy, Tenor, and Reddit. The aesthetic is recognizable on sight: the slightly too-glossy faces, the inconsistent backgrounds between frames, the hands. Quality is variable. Quantity is overwhelming. Runway's Gen-2 (March 2023) and Pika 1.0 (December 2023) raise the quality floor substantially and add native short-video generation without the frame-interpolation step. By 2024 the median new upload to a Giphy cute or reaction tag is more likely AI-generated than human-filmed.