AI Gave Friends a 80s Makeover, and You Should See What It Did to Richard
One remarkable technological advance which happened in 2022 was neural networks becoming capable of making decent images.
Yes, 95% of their output remains technically flawed, far in the uncanny valley, or simply creepy, and usually what you can see on the net is a hand-picked selection of best images.
There also are still severe restrictions on composition of images, as networks struggle with non-standard and dynamic poses or multiple characters (although new advances which allow to sketch poses with a few lines and then have a network turn that into a full character image might be a way around that).
Furthermore, for passable results you generally need a neural network "trained to draw" in a specific style.
On the other hand, what neural network excel at, is taking existing images, such as pictures and photos, and redrawing them in a specific style, preferably one they were optimized for.
We have already covered examples of this, for starters, Family Guy redrawn as an old-style sitcom.
And one of the currently most popular exercises among enthusiasts who post results on the net is reimagining various properties in the style of 80s dark fantasy movies (think John Milius' Conan the Barbarian and its rip-offs).
For example, look how the cast of Friends would have looked in such a movie. What the computer did with Richard is particularly funny.
All images in the clip are generated using the Midjourney neural network, and the series' theme was presumably given a medieval-sounding rendition by the clip's creator.
It should be stressed that said creator concentrated on doing what Midjourney and its likes do best, generating faces, and making the selection he formatted into the Youtube clip still likely took him a lot of attempts and experimenting with prompts – you should not expect to just run Midjourney and get results of this quality.
However, it also should be remembered that this technology is only making its first steps, and it has already surpassed your average amateur/low-tier human artist, of the sort who form most of population on Deviantart and similar sites.
What horizons it can open in the near future can only be guessed.