When Heidi becomes the stuff of nightmares

Comedian Karpi showcases the flaws of AI generated video. It is also unclear from where the AI is getting its material, bring in the question of copyright infringement. KI / Karpi

What happens when you let an artificial intelligence (AI) system experiment with the story of Heidi? Nightmare fuel.

Johanna Spyri’s 1880 novel Heidi is world famous: green meadows, happy cows and care-free yodelling – the world of the plucky little orphan embodies a romantic Switzerland. But another, unforgettable, world of Heidi exists.

Bloated cows, scary children’s laughter, human-animal grimaces and torchlight marches in the Alpine village. This week users have been sharing a Heidi trailer online that could also have come from an episode of British dystopian television series Black Mirror or a film by David Lynch. The idea came from Swiss satirist Patrick Karpiczenko, alias Karpi. The AI tool was Gen-2.

I've asked an AI to generate a trailer for a HEIDI movie and now I can never sleep again pic.twitter.com/8M9t726hrIExternal link

— Karpi (@karpi) July 10, 2023External link

The video is the result of an experiment by the Swiss comedian and film producer. “I’m currently developing a television series with creepy digital morsels on the subject of artificial intelligence,” says Karpi, who is also behind a satirical series for SWI swissinfo.ch, “Switzerland Says Sorry!”, apologising for Switzerland’s transgressions.

Swiss iconography could not be missing, he says. “I’m fascinated by how I can break the idyll and the pleasure ironically.”

Distorted and grotesque images

Karpi dictated sentences to the new AI tool Gen-2, by the US company Runway, such as “six-year-old girl in a dirty old dress rejoices over green meadows in Switzerland”, “photogenic horse with long hair” and “an angry crowd marches through a Swiss village with torches”.

But Gen-2 does not do a good job, in Karpi’s opinion. “The tool is relatively bad,” he says. “The way grotesque faces come out, or bodies with too many limbs, shows how it mixes things.” For example, the goat gets a beard like Heidi’s grandfather and the command “sad cow” results in a cow with a bloated belly.

However, fired up by the bizarre images, he pushed further chimeras. He ended up collecting enough material to make a trailer out of it that “strings together the bad aspects of technology”.

Viewed millions of times

Karpi is not the only one who is enthusiastic about it. The video had already been clicked 18.4 million times. “I didn’t expect that,” he says. “It caught me by surprise.”

The reasons for the enthusiasm in the Twitter community are – as with most internet trends – complex. “It takes people who think it’s cool and people who think it’s creepy,” Karpi says. Users, he adds, are probably reassured that AI still works too poorly to produce serious films.

Heidi fever nightmare lol.

Why does AI video do stuff like this? Seems to not have a 3d model of what it's showing you. It's just pixels getting reorganized. pic.twitter.com/IxfgyLj2r1External link

— HSI.TV (@HSI_TV) July 10, 2023External link

Others celebrate the surreal imagery. “Body horror”, as Karpi puts it – that’s what people find fascinating. 

I cannot decide what to screenshot as the most demented and disturbing visual. That's an achievement.

The smile? The cow? The torches and pitchforks? The audience?

pic.twitter.com/Rsm1ZMQpYJExternal link

— BooksBats&Blackboards (@booksbats) July 10, 2023External link

Copyright unresolved

The question of copyright remains. “My name and the AI’s name. That’s how I would state it legally,” says Karpi. And morally?

“I just don’t know what the AI is fed with.” Certainly not the Heidi cartoon, anyway. The comedian found this out when he entered “make more Heidi in a meadow”. Gen-2 couldn’t do anything with that. He assumes it uses stock material. It’s unclear, however, whether the material was bought or stolen.

It also remains open how similar the new Heidi horror is to the original and whether the AI infringes copyright. Karpi thinks it’s OK if AI creates strong collages “that are put together from hundreds of places”.