‘Will Smith Eating Spaghetti’ Is The Latest AI-Generated Eldritch Abomination

Recently, AI-generated images have been wreaking havoc across the internet, and now AI-generated video clips are going viral, with a deeply unsettling clip of “Will Smith eating spaghetti” viewed on Twitter more than 8 million times.

The clip depicts a hideously malformed Smith shoveling handfuls of spaghetti into his mouth, with a terrifying gusto. Unlike “Trump’s arrest” and “Balenciaga Pope,” the “Smith eating spaghetti” clip certainly isn’t fooling anyone; it has spread across the internet by force of sheer malevolence, with some Twitter users describing it as “demonic.”

Words cannot express the psychic damage conjured by the video, as every single aspect of it is deeply, profoundly wrong; the facial expressions, the movement, even the spaghetti itself, which exhibits a life of its own.

Originally posted to Reddit by a user known as “chaindrop,” the clip was made using a new Modelscope Text2Video generator, which turns text prompts into short video clips. As viscerally unpleasant as the original post is, it just kept getting worse, as another Reddit user added “meatballs” into the original prompt, which plonked Smith’s smiling head onto a horrific “body” composed of a pulsing, slimy pile of meatballs, which he happily gorges on.

On Twitter, another user generated a clip of Will Smith eating a spaghetti monster, which might be the moment the meme peaked, as Smith is now chomping on strands of a living entity, seemingly against his will, his teary eyes put into focus by weird, intrusive close-ups.

Will Smith’s hellish meals sparked a surge of AI-generated clips that depict celebrities eating spaghetti, a race to the bottom to generate more monstrous mouth movements. Scarlett Johansson and Brie Larson soon joined the cursed spaghetti club, along with Pope Francis, who has emerged as one of the most popular archetypes of the AI explosion; that puffy jacket transcended the Holy Father to digital immortality.

“Balenciaga Pope” was originally conceived by an AI hobbyist tripping on magic mushrooms, and psychedelic streams of consciousness might be the best way to describe the AI-generated videos, which have a dreamlike fluidity to them.

Figures flicker in and out of the objects they interact with, sometimes transforming into someone else entirely; an AI-generated clip of Elon Musk eating spaghetti sees the mercurial Twitter owner morph into former President Donald Trump, just for a moment.

The Modelscope text-to-video tool was recently made public, and users are experimenting with absurd combinations; no clip has yet touched the existential horror of Will Smith frantically swallowing spaghetti, but most are unsettling in their own way.

In one, Vin Diesel takes the most intense shower imaginable, cycling through random scenarios, some of which are disorienting, others vaguely sinister.

More basic prompts, like Paris Hilton taking a selfie (a well-documented act with plenty of reference material) is too glitchy to be impressive, and too boring to laugh at; not the most fun use of the current generation of the tech.

A short clip of a zombie cowboy munching on human flesh seems to fit the format; if there’s any artistic potential in this stage of the technology, it surely involves horror, and a touch of nausea.

We all laughed at the early days of AI-generated images, as melted faces, wonky, missing limbs and extra fingers were the norm; now, those imperfections are disappearing.

AI-generated video will surely sharpen up, at some point, and become a tool for funny pranks and dangerous misinformation. For now, they’re a lot of fun, and a way to generate the stuff of android nightmares.

As for Smith, well, at least he’s going viral for a video clip that doesn’t see him slap Chris Rock.