Skip to main content

The BigSleep A.I. is like Google Image Search for pictures that don’t exist yet

Eternity
BigSleep

In case you’re wondering, the picture above is “an intricate drawing of eternity.” But it’s not the work of a human artist; it’s the creation of BigSleep, the latest amazing example of generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) in action.

Recommended Videos

A bit like a visual version of text-generating A.I. model GPT-3, BigSleep is capable of taking any text prompt and visualizing an image to fit the words. That could be something esoteric like eternity, or it could be a bowl of cherries, or a beautiful house (the latter of which can be seen below.) Think of it like a Google Images search — only for pictures that have never previously existed.

How BigSleep works

“At a high level, BigSleep works by combining two neural networks: BigGAN and CLIP,” Ryan Murdock, BigSleep’s 23-year-old creator, a student studying cognitive neuroscience at the University of Utah, told Digital Trends.

The first of these, BigGAN, is a system created by Google that takes in random noise and outputs images. BigGAN is a generative adversarial network: A pair of dueling neural networks that carry out what Murdock calls an “adversarial tug-of-war” between an image-generating network and a discriminator network. Over time, the interaction between generator and discriminator results in improvements being made to both neural networks.

Beautiful house
A ‘beautiful house,’ according to BigSleep. I mean, it’s not wrong. BigSleep

CLIP, meanwhile, is a neural net made by OpenAI that has been taught to match images and descriptions. Give CLIP text and images, and it will attempt to figure out how well they match and give them a score accordingly.

By combining the two, Murdock explained that BigSleep searches through BigGAN’s outputs for images that maximize CLIP’s scoring. It then slowly tweaks the noise input in BigGAN’s generator until CLIP says that the images that are produced match the description. Generating an image to match a prompt takes about three minutes in total.

“BigSleep is significant because it can generate a wide variety of concepts and objects fairly well at 512 x 512 pixel resolution,” Murdock said. “Previous work has produced impressive results, but, by my knowledge, much of it has been restricted to lower-resolution images and more everyday objects.”

Image-generating A.I.

BigSleep isn’t the first time A.I. has been used to generate images. Its name is reminiscent of DeepDream, an A.I. created by Google engineer Alex Mordvintsev that creates psychedelic imagery using classification models. A GAN-based system was also used to create the A.I. painting sold at auction in 2018 for a massive $432,500. However, it’s certainly a fascinating step forward.

To try out BigSleep for yourself, Murdock suggested checking out his Google Colab notebook regarding the project. There’s a bit of a learning curve involving using the Colab GUI and a few other steps, but it’s free to take for a spin. Other ways of testing it will liekly also open up in the weeks to come. If you’re interested, you can also visit r/MediaSynthesis, where users are posting some of the best images they’ve generated with the system so far.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more