Joel Simon (@_joelsimon) on X

Here's an incredible video by ig@christopher_kapsaroff made from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights - entirely animated 'by hand' in Puppets !!

Puppets was a reaction to the perceived lack of craft in most generative AI tools (back in early 2021 but still feels relevant) Why is it that ancient traditional crafts feel timeless while the hottest AI images from just two years ago look dated?

In an era of rapid mass synthetic media production, craft (traditional and digital) may offer guidance on the values of expressive play, constraints, and the balance of childlike simplicity with deep mastery.

For Puppets, we also wanted to capture the group sandbox feeling, where it's more about the joy of improvising together than the quality of the output.

For a technology to become a creative tool - and not merely a technical demo - it must have sufficient expression and craft capacity. The capacity for craft is what enables the hand of the creator to feel present in the output. Without that, the output is soulless.

It's not only about control - a paintbrush, a saxophone and a tractor all have different types of control, but they are each meaningfully different for creative expression.

Puppets is great for guiding generative video too. Here's me puppeting masks for animate-diff. This allows one to capture the subtlety of complex motion in a way that language can't.

Prompting has always been - imo - more of querying an infinite library than an act of creation. And that's fantastic for exploring ideas! But, there's a missing deep satisfaction that comes from the act of feeling creative authorship and forming a relationship to a medium.

What is craft anyway? It's the skill of expression in a medium, but even more so, I feel that craft is to material as language is to sounds. A learned mapping of continuous to discrete (i.e wood -> joints) where we have a shared language of "moves" we modify and combine.

Puppets has been a long time coming. In a 2022 sprint we forked the UI into Collager - one of the first img-to-img tools - before stable diffusion or img-to-img was named. So that took off and we never polished up Puppets until recently.

The joy of creativity is just as important as any output. In that spirit, the creation of Puppets was a real joy and opportunity to collaborate with amazing folks at

. It was a real labor of love. We're still trying to make creative tools with heart.