Image AI like Midjourney make many things possible. Among other things, it can generate an image in seconds that shows what someone might look like as a cartoon character in a cartoon. TECHBOOK had Midjourney create a small picture gallery.
What if… AI like Midjourney can provide an answer to many of the possible questions. What would a fish with a hat look like? Or a tiny Brandenburg Gate next to a giant cat? Or what if gaming characters existed in real life? And what would celebrities look like if they were cartoon characters in a movie? The AI conveys some quite sophisticated optical options for this, which are created using text prompts. TECHBOOK used Midjourney to create a gallery that shows various prominent people as cartoon characters.
Celebrities as cartoon characters
Some films already mix real acting with animated or drawn elements. For example, Gene Kelly danced with the well-known mouse Jerry from the cartoon “Tom & Jerry” as early as 1945. Another impressive sequence followed in 1956 in the film “Invitation to the Dance” – also with Gene Kelly, in which the Hollywood star hovers over the floor with a cartoon character.
The film industry then made more and more use of comparable techniques, such as in the classic “Mary Poppins” in which Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke walk as real people in a painted landscape. There are now many films that mix the two elements, and we already got a glimpse of what celebrities like Amy Adams or James Marsden could look like as cartoon characters in a fairy tale in “The Cursed”.
That’s why we asked ourselves whether it wouldn’t work with other actors as well. So we used the AI Midjourney to create a gallery of what well-known celebrities would look like as cartoon characters.
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How we did it
To create our gallery we always used the same prompt: “/imagine xy as cartoon character”. This worked fine for most of the names we entered. What is remarkable, however, is the similarity to many Disney characters. For example, Margot Robbie looks very similar to Cinderella from the cartoon of the same name. Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, looks almost like Rapunzel and Orlando Bloom looks like Flynn Ryder from the same movie.
On the other hand, the pictures, which are kept in a completely different style than the others, such as Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep, are all the more striking. Incidentally, the AI has sometimes reached its limits – for example with Ryan Gosling. Apparently, the celebrity’s last name carries more weight for the AI than the association with the word cartoon character. Gosling translates to Gosling, which is exactly what the actor looked like in the Midjourney-generated images.