In the video, a crowd roars at a packed summer music festival. As a beat begins to play over the speakers, the performer finally takes the stage: it’s The Joker. Dressed in his red suit, green hair and signature face painting, the Joker pumps his fist and dances across the stage, leaping onto a catwalk to get even closer to his sea of fans. When it’s time to start rapping, Joker bends his knees and pushes himself off the ground, bouncing up and down before doing a 360 turn on one leg. It looks effortless, and yet if you attempted the maneuver, you would fall flat on your face. The Joker has never been so cool.
Then there is another video where the NBA All-Star Joel Embiid comes out backstage to greet the crowd before nailing the same dance moves. Next, he’s the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David. But in each of these scenes, something is a little off – whether it’s the Joker, Joel Embiid, or Larry David, the performer’s body shakes, while their facial expressions never change.
Of course, all this is created by artificial intelligence, thanks to a company called vigil.
The original video shows rapper Lil Yachty taking the stage at the Summer Smash Festival in 2021 – according to the title of a YouTube video with over 6.5 million views, this entry is “the HARDEST quit EVER.This turned into a trending meme in April as people introduced their favorite celebrities – or their favorite bad guyslike Sam Bankman-Fried – in the video of Lil Yachty coming out on stage.
The text-to-video AI offerings are getting scary good, but you can’t type “sam bankman-fried as lil yachty in the 2021 summer smash” and expect Sora to know exactly what you mean. Viggle works differently.
On Viggle’s Discord server, users upload a video of someone doing some sort of movement – often a TikTok dance – and a photo of a person. Viggle then creates a video of that person replicating the moves from the video. These videos are obviously not real, although they are still entertaining. But after Lil Yachty’s meme went viral, Viggle became hot and the hype hasn’t subsided.
“We’re focused on building what we call a controlled video production model,” Viggle founder Hang Chu told TechCrunch. “When we produce content, we want to control exactly how the character moves or how the scene looks. But current tools only focus on the text-to-video side, where text alone is insufficient to determine all the visual subtlety.”
According to Chu, Viggle has two main types of users – while some people make memes, others use the product as a tool in the production process for game design and VFX.
“For example, an engineering animation team could take some original drawings and quickly turn them into rough but quick animation elements,” Chu said. “The whole point is to see how they look and feel in the rough sketch of the final design. This usually takes days or even weeks to set up manually, but with Viggle, this can basically be done instantly and automatically. This saves tons of tedious, repetitive modeling work.”
In March, Viggle’s Discord had a few thousand members. By mid-May, there were 1.8 million members, and with June just days away, Viggle’s server has climbed to over 3 million members. This makes it bigger than the servers for games like Valorant and Genshin Impact combined.
Viggle’s growth shows no signs of slowing down, except that the high demand for video production has made wait times a bit too long for impatient users. But because Viggle is so focused on Discord, Discord’s developer team has worked directly with Viggle to guide the two-year-old startup through its rapid growth.
Luckily for Viggle, Discord has been through it again. MidJourney, which also operates on Discord, has 20.3 million members on its server, making it the largest single community on the platform. In total, Discord has around 200 million monthly users.
“No one is ready for this kind of growth, so at this stage of the viral temperament, we’re starting to work with them because they’re not ready,” Discord VP of Product Ben Shanken told TechCrunch. “We have to be ready, because a huge part of the messaging right now is Viggle and MidJourney, and a lot of the consumption and use on Discord is actually artificial intelligence being created.”
For startups like Viggle and MidJourney, building their apps on Discord means they don’t have to build an entire platform for their users – instead, they’re hosted on a platform that already has a tech-savvy audience, as well as built-in review tools content. For Viggle, which has just fifteen employees, Discord’s support is vital.
“We can focus on building the model as a backend service, while Discord can use their 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 also did research for companies such as Facebook, Nvidia and Google.
For Discord, acting as a random SaaS company for AI startups could come at a cost. On the one hand, these apps bring a new audience to Discord and are probably good for user metrics. But hosting so many videos can be difficult and expensive on the technology side, especially when other users across the platform are streaming live video games, video chats, and voice calls. Without a platform like Discord, however, these startups may not be able to grow at the same pace.
“It’s not easy for any type of company to scale, but Discord is built for that type of scale, and we’re able to help them absorb it pretty well,” Shanken said.
While these companies can simply adopt Discord’s content guidelines and use content moderation apps, it’s always going to be a challenge to make sure 3 million people behave. Even these Lil Yachty-dropping memes technically violate Viggle’s rules, which encourage users to avoid creating images of real people — including celebrities — without their consent.
For now, Viggle’s saving grace could be that his production isn’t one hundred percent realistic yet. The technology is truly impressive, but we know better. This fancy Joker cartoon is definitely not real, but it sure is funny.
