In the video, a crowd roars at a packed summer music festival. As a beat begins to sound through the speakers, the performer finally enters the stage: it’s the Joker. Dressed in his signature red suit, green hair and makeup, the Joker pumps his fist and dances across the stage, jumping on a track to get even closer to his sea of fans. When it’s time to start rapping, The Joker bends his knees and propels himself off the ground, bouncing up and down before doing a 360° spin on one foot. It seems easy, yet if you tried it you would fall flat on your face. The Joker has never been cooler.
Then there’s another video, in which NBA All-Star Joel Embiid comes out from backstage to greet the crowd before doing those same dance moves. Next up is “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David. But in each of these scenes, something is wrong: whether it’s the Joker, Joel Embiid or Larry David, the performer’s body shakes, while his facial expressions never change.
Of course, this is all powered by AI, thanks to a company called Viggle.
The original video shows rapper Lil Yachty taking the stage at Summer Smash Festival in 2021 – according to the title of a YouTube video with over 6.5 million views, this entrance is “the hardest walkout ever.” This became a trending meme format in April, as people inserted their favorite celebrities — or their favorite villains, like Sam Bankman-Fried — into the video of Lil Yachty taking the stage.
Text-to-video AI offerings are getting awfully good, but you can’t type “Sam Bankman fried as a little yachty in summer 2021 smash” and expect Sora to know precisely what you mean . Viggle works differently.
On Viggle’s Discord server, users upload a video of someone doing some sort of move — often a TikTok dance — and a photo of a person. Then, Viggle creates a video of that person replicating the movements in the video. It is obvious that these videos are not real, although they are still entertaining. But after Lil Yachty’s meme went viral, Viggle became hot and the hype didn’t subside.
“We are focused on building what we call the controllable video generation model,” Hang Chu, founder of Viggle, told TechCrunch. “When we generate content, we want to precisely control how the character moves or how the scene looks. But current tools focus only on the text-video side, where the text itself isn’t enough to spell out all the visual subtlety.
According to Chu, Viggle has two main types of users: while some people create memes, others use the product as a tool in the production process for game design and visual effects.
“For example, a team of animation engineers could take some designs and quickly turn them into rough but fast animation assets,” Chu said. “The goal is to see what they look like and how they look in the final plan sketch. It usually takes days or even weeks to set them up manually, but with Viggle it can be done instantly and automatically. This avoids tons of tedious and repetitive modeling work.
As of March, Viggle’s Discord had a few thousand members. As of mid-May, there were 1.8 million members, and with just a few days left in June, Viggle’s server now has over 3 million members. This makes it larger than game servers like Valorant and Genshin Impact combined.
Viggle’s growth shows no signs of slowing down, except that high demand for video generation has made wait times a little too long for impatient users. But because Viggle is so Discord-centric, Discord’s developer team worked directly with Viggle to guide the two-year-old startup through its rapid growth.
Luckily for Viggle, Discord has been through this before. MidJourney, which also runs on Discord, has 20.3 million members on its server, making it the largest community on the platform. In total, Discord has around 200 million monthly users.
“No one is ready for this type of growth, so at this stage of virality, we start working with them, because they’re not ready,” Ben Shanken, Discord’s vice president of product, told TechCrunch. “We need to be ready, because a lot of the messages being sent right now are Viggle and MidJourney, and a lot of the consumption and usage on Discord is actually generative AI.”
For startups like Viggle and MidJourney, building their apps on Discord means they don’t need to build an entire platform for their users. Instead, they are hosted on a platform that already has a tech-savvy audience, as well as built-in content moderation tools. For Viggle, which only has around fifteen employees, the support of Discord is crucial.
“We can focus on building the model as a backend service, while Discord can use its infrastructure on the front end, and basically we can iterate faster,” Chu said.
Before Viggle, Chu was an AI researcher at Autodesk, a 3D tools giant. He has also done research for companies like Facebook, Nvidia and Google.
For Discord, acting as an accidental SaaS company for AI startups could come at a cost. On the one hand, these apps bring a new audience to Discord, and they’re probably good for user stats. But hosting that many videos can be difficult and technologically expensive, especially when other users on the platform are live streaming video games, video chatting and making voice calls. However, without a platform like Discord, these startups might not be able to grow at the same rate.
“It’s not easy for any type of business to scale, but Discord is built for this type of scale, and we’re able to help them absorb that well,” Shanken said.
Even if these companies can simply adopt Discord’s own content guidelines and use its content moderation apps, it will still be difficult to ensure that 3 million people behave well. Even these Lil Yachty memes technically violate Viggle’s rules, which encourage users to avoid generating images of real people — including celebrities — without their consent.
For now, Viggle’s saving grace might be that his outcome isn’t one hundred percent realistic yet. The technology is truly impressive, but we know better. This crazy Joker animation certainly isn’t real, but it’s certainly funny.
techcrunch
