So I was watching a few music videos on youtube when I saw a video in the sidebar – “The Electric Prunes: I Had Too Much to Dream (an AI interpretation).” Given the song, I thought it would be perfect subject for AI to try making a video.

Pretty wild, as expected. The camera motion panning across scenes was unexpected, but worked fairly well, and the slight dissonance in perspective actually worked with this song, with its psychedelic feel. It was uploaded a month ago, so I figured it’s fairly cutting edge, as these things go.

I went to the channel to see what other videos were there. The next one I checked out was “Dreamboat Annie” by Heart.

The video was pretty good, although now some limitations were becoming apparent. Certain repetitions tend to appear. But it worked pretty well, and had a a feel to it that went from warm and sunny and ethereal to a hard-edged city setting and back again.

Then I saw “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. This should be fun, I thought. I love the song but the subject matter is very down-to-earth and mundane, how would an AI that has been producing trippy visuals process this?

Awesomely, is how.

The video moves from ultra-detailed city scenes to snapshots of people living their lives to cosmic vistas of time passing and back again. And it’s animated. Or some of it is, anyway. There are people walking and musicians playing in real time… or as real as time gets in an AI-generated video. Somewhat stiff and rigid, but considering it’s all machine-created, quite stunning.

The editing is somewhat choppy, but it’s still a compelling vision, and it smooths out as the video goes along. The sax players are vivid and colorful but still recognizably human. The guitar solo could have been handled better, but that’s a small complaint.

How much of this is the machine doing its thing and how much is due to human editing, or even from human-generated prompts, I have no idea. But it’s still extremely impressive. It was uploaded 7 days ago (August 7), and is a leap over the “Dreamboat Annie” video, which was posted 12 days ago.

The sad part is, these are better than most videos I’ve seen in years.