AI Created An Olympic Gymnastics Routine & It's Pure Gold

If they gave out a gold medal for genuinely weird, unsettling videos created by artificial intelligence (AI) to commemorate the 2024 Paris Olympics, then surely a clip posted recently on YouTube would walk away with both a 10/10 from the judges as well as the top prize.

The video, titled "The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics," is a montage of sequences of a female athlete — created wholly by AI — performing a series of exercises on a balance bar and beam. But because AI does not yet fully understand the mechanics of the human body nor the way that it can move while performing such highly precise and demanding routines, the results look more like something out of a David Cronenberg body horror movie.

Watch with growing unease as the young woman's physique twists into new forms that the human body isn't capable of, loses clothing, body parts, or cohesiveness (sometimes all three at once), vanishes completely, replicates itself, and even sinks into the floor below. The video is equally unsettling and hilarious — as with all AI-generated material, it seems — and only points up again that the technology has a long way to go before it can authentically replicate the human body and make big changes to movies and TV.

The Olympic video was posted online by a user named Paolo Lutha, who promotes AI-generated content on his channel and described this one in particular as "unique and captivating," while adding that "the AI attempts to replicate the flexibility, balance, and precision of gymnastic movements, highlighting the discrepancies and surreal moments that arise."

"Discrepancies" is one way to put it. We'd go with "nightmare fuel" ourselves. And the commenters under the video weren't too impressed either. User @ToozdaysChild wrote, "You'll never bring back the gold unless you can fold yourself into at least 5 dimensions," while @dorpth remarked, "I wasn't very impressed while they were creating perpetual energy from nothing while twirling in the air, but she finally won me over in the finish by phasing through the floor."

Another user, however, @sleeby526, thought that the AI was instructed to make the video as bizarre as possible on purpose: "You can tell it was told to make it weird," they said, "because of the way the camera highlights the disappearances and the relative normality of the background." So which is it — deliberate clickbait or another indication that AI isn't exactly ready for prime time yet? We'll wait for the judges to decide.