Confession— I Was Obsessed With Steve Harvey

A flirtatious affair with myself, Steve Harvey and Ancient Amharic Scripture

The Christmas season has always been an awkward period for me. Raised in a Muslim household, Christmas always reeked of Shirk – not the usual “Shirk”. Islam Shirk.

The term shirk in Islam is used to refer to idolatry or polytheism, which means deification, or worship of deity, gods, or anything other than Allāh.

As a result, this time of year is typically extra quiet in my house. Work slows down, many friends hunker down for the holidays, leaving me feeling a bit bored and lonely, a heady combination of emotions. Each day feels extra long and chilled, a much needed yet strange respite from the hustle and bustle of the 9-to-5 routine. I usually revel in the quiet, though boredom can feel torturous at times — especially since boredom and isolation, is a literal effective torture technique.

During these flat periods, I usually dive deep into something of interest, adopting a study-like approach to keep the blues at bay and see what I can achieve in a limited timeframe. These forays are often useless but they’re moderately educational and semi-enjoyable.

So, there I was, on a Monday, bored, and in a “working” mood after finishing my 9-to-5. My sister was not yet home and I had no plans. What to do? I was vulnerable, impressionable — ripe for any whim that might tickle my fancy. And then I found it: my muse, my saviour; Deliverance.

Look at the despair. The raw emotion. The composition. I instantly became obsessed. Where did it come from? Why is he crying? Is it real or fake? In the abyss of Steve Harvey, I saw a reflection of myself. I wanted to merge with him… So I needed to do some research.

To become AI Steve Harvey, I needed a plan. A workflow, involving generative AI, face swapping, and presumably a whole other host of tooling unknown to me. Imagine face swapping in wedding photos, saving money on wardrobes and costumes for photoshoots by generating everything with AI. Simply collecting high-quality headshots and do it all in post-production? What if you could build a model of the face and then use that? My obsession quickly developed a rational scaffolding, and my descent into madness began.

I started by tracing the origin of AI Steve Harvey, coming across a meme page on Know Your Meme, featuring collections of sad Steve Harvey images and even Steve Harvey being chased by aliens in the woods.

The polaroid nature of these images worked well with the natural lossy style of AI to create something especially realistic. This reminded me of the earliest Pixar movies, which focused on plastic toys (Toy Story) due to the graphic engines' inability to create realistic skin. We could lean into AI's weaknesses in a similar way. When creating finer details, sometimes the output falls into the uncanny valley or produces unwanted aberrations and artefacts, but with blurred polaroid flash photo shots, we can bypass some of these issues and produce really fun stuff.

I created some images using Dall-E, but it wasn’t enough. The control wasn’t fine-grained. I needed something more potent, more targeted, with face-swapping ability.

So, I dived into Stable Diffusion, watched tutorials, downloaded the webkit, and experimented with Reactor, Ropa, and Face Swap Labs – three extensions for face swapping with impressive results. I used old images saved from my Midjourney adventures, learning about positive prompts, negative prompts, latent spaces and all that sweet sweet JARGON.

I added ControlNet to capture the pose of the face and in painting to draw faces specifically. I can see the potential.

But it didn’t work. The computer said no. I had to go deeper. I downloaded ComfyUI Stable Diffusion reactors with the ultra-realism models and ControlNet with GFPGAN processing. If that makes no sense do not worry, I won’t explain.

I was babbling, frustrated, and obsessed. I HAD TO GO DEEPER. I dove into the Ancient Amharic Scriptures of yesteryear. Maybe my salvation existed meta physically?

The numbers mason, what do they mean!?

I was in the deep end. It was 1 am. My heart was racing. Pupils, dilated. Hands, shaking. Would I ever become AI Steve Harvey? Was this pursuit emblematic of something deeper? Was it escapism? I was no longer bored, just tired, defeated, and utterly drained. AI Steve Harvey was tantalisingly close, promised to me by the Generative AI Cambrian explosion and the youtube tutorial overlords. I was parched. I went to get some water, and on the way back I caught my reflection in the mirror. I was crying, with a glass in my hand. It dawned on me, I was AI Steve Harvey all along. It wasn’t about the AI Steve Harvey on my computer; it was about the AI Steve Harvey in my heart, and the friends I made along the way.

Resigned, I closed my laptop and felt a release. I had, in a sense, attained AI Steve Harvey. It may have been a brief affair, but it was powerful, enjoyable and brought me face to face with the cutting edge of AI image generation. And just like that my Christmas season adventure came to a close. When I return to the office and people ask, “Hey… what did you do over the holiday?” and I reply “just had a chilled one”, a GPU somewhere dies and Steve Harvey get goosebumps.