‘Family Guy’ Recreated as a Live-Action 1980s Sitcom Using AI

An AI artist created a 1980s live-action version of Family Guy using the image synthesizer Midjourney.

The brilliant video was published on the Lyrical Realms (LR) YouTube channel last week and it’s already cleared four million views.

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AI created these lifelike versions of Family Guy characters. Meg Griffin, left, Peter Griffin, center, amorous neighbor Glenn Quagmire, right.

“All the images are straight out of Midjourney, but they did not come out using only the text prompts, it was a combination of using already existing images and using prompts as well,” the video’s creator, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells PetaPixel.

“Photoshop was used only for two different purposes: to remove artifacts (for example sometimes images come out with black or red borders) and to separate the intro into layers and give a 3D effect.”

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This image was discarded because Peter doesn’t have glasses.
pter and lois
This image was rejected because Peter was too tall compared to Lois.

LR shared some images that he rejected because of various imperfections, such as one where Peter doesn’t have glasses or is too tall compared with Lois.

LR generated the pictures by writing text prompts that inform the AI image generator, in this case, Midjourney, what pictures to generate.

“The prompt engineering part was without a doubt the most difficult part, I had to generate an ungodly amount of images before I started seeing the light and finally got to generate the kind of style that I was looking for (around 1500 images),” LR explains.

“Once the first character was generated (Peter) the rest were a bit easier. The most difficult to generate were Cleveland and Quagmire.”

From left to right: Cleveland Brown, Brian Griffin, Stewie Griffin.

Fans of the show won’t need captions to guess which characters are which, iconic characters like Stewie and Brian are easily recognizable. So too Meg, played by Mila Kunis.

LR is unsure exactly how many hours he pumped into the project but estimates it took him roughly five full days of work.

“I basically used a full weekend plus two days of time off from work (for vacation purposes),” LR says.

“Of those five days, I would say most of my day was focused on doing the video. I wasn’t always in front of the screen, since sometimes I would have to wait for some minutes for all the images to generate, but I had no other plans for those days other than creating the images and the video.”

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This image was rejected because of the poor borders.

LR says that he is paying $60 a month to use Midjourney and is using personal time to pursue a “hobby.” However LR admits to having experience in the artificial intelligence field.

“My full-time job revolves around machine learning and such, so I did have a bit of an advantage when I created the channel and started to make videos,” LR adds.

“Since I easily understood how the image generation from Midjourney works and how to prompt engineer a bit more efficiently.”

More of Lyrical Realms’ work can be found on their YouTube channel.

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