TV

AI Transforms TBBT Women Into Men and One Looks Exactly Like Jacob Elordi

AI Transforms TBBT Women Into Men and One Looks Exactly Like Jacob Elordi
Image credit: Legion-Media/globallookpress

2022 brought us a great technological leap in the area of AI-generated art.

While just a year ago it was on the level of childish doodles at best, now neural networks, while still limited in many aspects, can produce a lot of fascinating and funny results with correct prompts.

That includes imitating specific artists and styles and re-imagining iconic characters or even franchises in a completely different set of aesthetics. And, as it happens, speculating how women could have looked if they were men, and vice versa.

For example, look at what AI did with the cast of The Big Bang Theory:

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by u/Cool-Face5083 in bigbangtheory

Who in their right mind could have imagined that Bernadette might look Jacob Elordi? Similarly, genderbent Leonard looks like Rachael Leigh Cook in She's All That, while Penny looks like Lance Bass.

And Amy is somewhat similar to Wil Wheaton. It is actually not impossible that the AI might use real faces as a basis. Meanwhile Sheldon still has his trademark stare even as Sheldina. Overall, the results are pretty cool.

Some images however, show limitations of the nascent technology. Results which it produces might be creepy – Stewart, for example, looks as if they've pulled a body out of the river.

Or they might just be plain bad, even after the majority of bad results are filtered by a human, running the whole experiment – while most images here look rather realistic, Howard is just Howard, but in a wig.

In the future, as neural networks become more efficient in reacting to prompts, and various teething troubles are dealt with, we can expect a lot more fun of this sort.

And it won't be limited to gender-bending actors. It won't even be limited to re-imagining them in a show with different style, or in a different medium.

Imagine tools already approaching the level of DeepFake being relatively widely accessible and easy to use. Possibilities are almost endless and a bit unsettling (imagine, for starters, realistic-looking porn, featuring digital likenesses of celebrities).

There already are actors like Keanu Reeves, who are completely against any digital editing of their appearances on screen, and provide solid reasoning for that.

Who knows whether the current revolution in digital image creation would swell numbers of CGI haters.