Animating the daughter's paintings with AI

A low-key, pro-human-creativity use of the technology, I think

Many of you will be familiar with Grok Imagine, an AI tool used to create images, and six-second videos. It really made a splash, it seemed to me, when people realized they could upload old family photos, and have Grok make a six-second video from the photograph. I find that a somewhat dangerous use case actually, but just to show you what that looks like, I did it with a photo of Thomas Edison’s family. Here is the photo (Thomas Edison at far right):

And here is the fabricated video:

Now, you might immediately object that this is quite impressive, “but that never really happened”. I share that concern. People have plainly found it heartwarming to use this technology with old family photos (“it’s like my grandpa is alive again!” kind of comments), but the concern for me is, human memory is actually a very fragile thing. We are changing / over-writing old memories all the time under normal circumstances, and it’s relatively easy to convince someone that they remember something that never even happened (which is, yes, a problem for the legal system). Create a video from an old family photo and I think it likely that you will begin to "remember” that the video is what happened, when it was actually a software fabrication. Maybe you’d say “who cares if it enhances piety” or something (which is, you know, the way many Christians treat stories of the saints which are extremely unverifiable at best), but that bothers me.

However, using the same technology to animate a drawing or painting does not come with that risk, and I have actually not seen many people using it this way, so I thought I would write this post.

Animating drawings and paintings with Grok Imagine

So, we have a daughter who loves to draw and paint, and we have enjoyed animating some of those drawings and paintings after the fact. This is the first one I did, here is her drawing:

And here is the animation:

Now, this isn’t going to change the world (which is also why it isn’t threatening, perhaps), but if you imagine you’re a ten-year-old girl for a moment who just drew that picture, that’s really cool, to see something you did come to life like that. And, let me emphasize here, to see something you did come to life. We have not replaced the human with software, we have not used software to disconnect the human brain. It was human creativity and human work that got this whole thing started (drawing the picture), and then we used software to do something additional with it at the end. And I think it even adds a level of creative inspiration, because this animation is largely from your efforts (it feels different, I think, than if you had typed a prompt and produced a video entirely just from written text). It starts creating new possibilities within your own mind.

(And this is actually when AI feels best to me, when it is a sort of “mid-level operation”, a tool that is clearly still under our control, serving us, not running the show.)

And no human lost a job from this either. It’s not like we were just about to go hire a professional animation firm, and have them do this work for us. No, this is just something that would have never happened at all, but now a software tool has made it a possibility. And, I think, there is minimal false-memory risk, because the animation isn’t sourced from a photo, and (I think), your mind will more easily be able to distinguish the drawing you made, and the animation that was made from it later.

Here is one more example. First, the painting:

And the animation:

But I’m terrible at drawing

To end here, you might think “but I can’t draw at all, what happens then?”. I am right there with you! And I was curious. So I quick sketched this silly little thing, which is approximately the peak of my drawing abilities:

Why don’t you animate that, you silly little software:

The Conclusion

So just to reiterate, what we have done here is not world-changing, but it is a neat little addition to take real human creative work and use a software tool to bring it to life in a new way at the end, that might even inspire more human creativity. And we’ve been enjoying it.

---