STABLE DIGEST #17
Artist spotlight - Infinite Vibes, plus Stable LM 3B, fun tools & tuts, and more!
THIS WEEK’S ISSUE
Stable LM 3B is here!
This week's spotlight features the diverse talents of Infinite Vibes.
In Tools & Tuts, you’ll learn all about Mini Loras & Traveling Prompts.
Finally, our COW winners are back!
Have suggestions for artists spotlights or community features? We wanna hear from YOU. Email us community@stability.ai
FOR THE COMMUNITY
Stable LM 3B
Last week we rolled out the experimental Stable LM 3B, a compact yet mighty AI language model designed especially for portable devices. Boasting 3 billion parameters, it's efficient, eco-friendly, and still packs a punch.
Head to our blog for all the details!
BY THE COMMUNITY
For transparency, it should be noted that the items being showcased are not necessarily affiliated with our company.
TOOLS & TUTS
ComfyUI instant 'mini LoRA': Always wanted to train a LoRA but never had the time to learn it? Well this ComfyUI workflow can create the same basic effects with as little as 6 images, and absolutely no training required.
AnimateDiff CLI Traveling Prompts: Animatediff just keeps getting more and more exciting! This week the amazing community added the ability for traveling prompts: ie using multiple prompts to create scene changes etc. It’s not on ComfyUI yet, but this tut walks you through how to use it right in your command-line interface.
WITH THE COMMUNITY
STABLE SOCIETY DEEP DIVE - Infinite Vibes
“Have fun, be kind to others and be kind to yourself.”
Hello Infinite, it's a pleasure to have you with us today! You've taken the name, Infinite Vibes, meant for a collective and made it your own, embodying the notion of containing multitudes. Walk us through your unique journey from music production and sound design to AI visual effects, and how these two worlds have intertwined for you.
Thanks for having me, it’s nice to be here.
Dr. Sbaitso, a 90s chatbot-psychologist and speech-synthesiser was my first experience with AI and an early experience with electronic sound. I found it hilarious and sometimes wonder how it shaped my young mind.
Fast forward 20 years and an art director heard some of my music online which led to my first commission. I instantly quit my crappy job and dedicated myself full time to doing sound for all sorts of clients, with a lot coming from the fashion industry. Because fashion is a creative industry which is still able to pay freelancers as you can’t download clothes (yet!).
Infinite Vibes music as part of Nowness
During the first lockdown in 2020 I’d recently moved from London to Berlin and was living in a tiny studio apartment with my girlfriend. I had very little work, a nonexistent social life and a lot of spare time.In July of that year I came across the open source 3D software Blender and an explosion went off in my head. I was instantly hooked.
With little else to do I spent all day every day making animations, rendering my experiments overnight on a decrepit old MacBook. I started to see the physical world differently and it also permeated my dreams (one time even figuring out a technique used by the excellent 3D artist ze.zima while asleep).I was blown away by this new world of possibilities and was also getting a kick out of soundtracking my own films after spending years doing it for other people.
Having something to pour myself into kept me vaguely sane during the pandemic.Crystal Float (Blender) by Infinite Vibes
Exactly one year after downloading Blender a friend sent me the first VQGAN+CLIP notebook by Katherine Crowson and another obsession began.
The morphing, expressionistic, dreamy quality of the imagery spoke to me immediately and I tried out every GAN and diffusion method I could get my hands on.Exchanging imagery and discoveries with a small group of devs and artists on Discord before things really caught on was a beautiful time that I already have a sense of nostalgia for.
As for intertwining, the right sound is massively important to motion pictures. It’s responsible for at least half of the feeling you get from experiencing a film and I find it a tragedy that for so many it seems to be an afterthought. When the pictures and sound fit together just right you get something more than the sum of its parts and it’s beautiful. It can hit you so deeply in places that nothing else can reach.
Forest Vision (VQ+GAN) by infinite vibes
While numerous AI artists have predominantly explored the NFT domain, you've taken a unique route, seamlessly incorporating AI into mainstream ventures like music videos. Could you shed light on your journey in merging AI within these traditional professional settings and the challenges that came with it?
A friend of mine got married last year and his father said in his speech that his “greatest quality is being completely oblivious to obstacles when they present themselves”. I’m not oblivious to obstacles but I intuitively don’t feel the boundaries and distinctions between categories that some do.
Requests started coming in for visual work in 2021, initially from friends and then from all sorts of people. I was already very excited about the possibilities presented by AI so it was completely natural to integrate it into my processes.
I’m a bit of a novelty seeker so getting to do many things like create music videos and collaborations, perform live visuals at festivals, design record packaging, make artbooks, make VFX for advertisements as well as have work shown in galleries across the world has made the last couple of years an absolute thrill.
Infinite Vibes music video visuals for Jessy Lanza
The main challenge has been trying not to burn out as it can be hard to say no to work as a freelance creative. It’s great to be in demand but if you don’t take care of yourself you end up not being able to do your best work anyway, so it’s lose-lose. That isn’t unique to the AI realm but the wild rate of development and the desire to try out the latest tools adds another layer.
The only other issue I’ve had is people not understanding how much human time and effort goes into making something worthwhile. It’s not a magic button.
If you’re in Spain I have a piece showing in several locations across the country until December in an exhibition of 5 AI artists curated by ONKAOS.
Next week a music video which I used no less than 13 AI tools to create is coming out so keep your eyes peeled.
Beyond visuals, you're deeply rooted in music, and are currently working on composing for the indie video game Settle Gliese. Given your proficiency with AI in visual arts, do you foresee or have you already begun to integrate AI music generation tools into your musical creations in a similar way? What challenges or opportunities do you anticipate in the space?
It’s going to be interesting to see where it goes in the coming months. I’ve been keeping a close eye on developments since the Google Magenta suite, had a lot of fun getting OpenAI Jukebox to continue clips of my music in bizarre styles and have used real time playable instrument models like Mawf and DDSP-VST in productions.
As for generative models, the ability to generate formulaic music is already at an impressive level but not any use to me creatively and there’s still a long way to go in terms of controllability. Prompting more imaginative things usually returns something unusable but occasionally you get something wonderfully unusual to use as sample fodder.
The one thing that will definitely get a lot of use going forward is Synplant 2 which just came out. You can drop audio clips into it and it will try to replicate the timbre of the sound in a synthesiser patch which you can then tweak to your heart’s delight.Tools like this that integrate into musical workflows make the most sense to me at the moment but who knows what wild stuff the young’uns will make with unconventional approaches.
As an aside, the dev of Settle Gliese has also integrated a bit of AI to give each item and creature in a vast open world a unique description. I rarely play video games but some of the possibilities floating around in that sphere are fascinating.
Congratulations on the nomination for Best Visual FX for Hak Baker's DOOLALLY at the UK Music Video Awards 2023! Can you share with us the creative process and the challenges you faced while working on this project? Were there specific elements or techniques you tried for the first time in this video?
Thanks!
That video was my third time working with director Hugh Mulhern and editor Joseph Taylor - both mega talented people who take the mad stuff I generate and mix it seamlessly with many different sources to form it into something special.
ControlNet was fresh out when we were working on that so it was my first time using it in a commercial project. Rather than trying to get everything tracking nicely I pushed it to the edge of breaking and got some great effects that feel like being heavily intoxicated at a party, which is what the song and video are all about.
A lot of the best stuff comes from finding out what tools can do rather than what they’re supposed to do. That’s why I’ve been a huge fan of WarpFusion ever since the Disco Diffusion days - there are so many parameters and therefore so many ways to get interesting and/or unexpected results.
Into The Silicon Heart by Infinite Vibes
You've mentioned that creating is a way of life for you and that there's something profoundly beautiful about the human experience of music and art. Can you share a moment or experience from your journey where this connection between creation and human experience felt most profound?
Getting profoundly moved by art happens to me all the time, it’s a large part of what makes life worth living.
Last week I found myself holding back tears while sitting in a McDonald’s in a rough neighbourhood, late at night, listening to Schubert and watching life go by. So much beauty and so much pain. I love the way music can flavour your surroundings and bring different things to your attention.
Growth Cycle I by Infinite Vibes
With my own work it’s important for me to use elements that are personal and close to my heart even if it’s not obvious on the surface. The first things I did when DreamBooth came out were to make models of myself and people close to me and then to train models on my own film photography. I still use a camera that my mother gave me for Christmas when I was 11 or 12. It’s one of the only possessions I have to remember her by and I feel thankful to her whenever it’s in use.Most recently I used a model trained on black and white photos taken with that camera for some scenes in a James Blake music video which just premiered at the Tate Modern and should be out any day now.
Your desire to step back from commissions to focus on a substantial audio/visual solo project is intriguing. Without giving away too much, can you share the essence or inspiration behind this project, and how you plan to intertwine your expertise in both AI visuals and music?
The first seeds of the project came about around 6 years ago when I was going through a time of profound upheaval. Over the course of a few months a series of strange experiences, visions and lucid dreams shook me to my core and were the catalyst for some major changes in my life (note: this was not due to any psychoactive substances).
Substrate Collision II (Submerged) by Infinite Vibes
I’ve felt an urge to express what I experienced ever since and have made countless notes, sketches and pieces of music based around it. A lot of the work I post online explores the feelings, aesthetics and characters of this ‘world’ but I’d really like to take time out to focus on it properly and present it as a larger narrative work.
AI in combination with other tools makes an ambitious project like this feasible for one person which is astounding and was unimaginable a few years ago.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us! Would you like to share any additional thoughts with us and our community of readers, or give shoutouts to anyone who has been an inspiration to you along the way?
Shout outs to sorrymary_ who makes great stuff and taught me some tricks in After Effects that I use all the time, UglyStupidHonest who makes excellent images with AI exclusively trained on his own 3D artwork, Shinra Knives who makes brilliant brutal music with AI visuals to match and to all the open source devs making these tools that bring so much joy <3
“Have fun, be kind to others and be kind to yourself.”
You can learn more about Infinite Vibes on their website.
COW!
COW is back and better than ever! Gecktendo takes home the prize for “The Inventor’s Legacy”, a beautiful and intricate meow in the machine!
