Trend archive · March 2023
Will Smith eating spaghetti, the AI video meme of March 2023
Updated · Remake the Trend
In March 2023 a Reddit user posted a short AI video made from one prompt, "Will Smith eating spaghetti". The faces melted, the forks merged with the pasta and the noodles went everywhere, and it became the internet's favourite picture of how bad AI video was. Since then it has been the test people run on every new video model. This page is its history; we don't make videos of real celebrities, and what you can make with your own photo is below.
In brief
- When
- Posted 23 March 2023; viral from 27 March 2023.
- Made with
- ModelScope's text-to-video model, an early open model.
- Where
- Reddit's r/StableDiffusion, then X (Twitter).
- Now
- Still used as an informal benchmark for new AI video models.
Who made the Will Smith spaghetti video?
Reddit user u/chaindrop posted it to r/StableDiffusion on 23 March 2023, made with ModelScope text2video from the prompt "Will Smith eating spaghetti". It gathered over 6,500 upvotes in a week. Its jump to everyone else came on 27 March, when an account on X reposted it and it passed 4.9 million views in four days.
A dated timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 23 Mar 2023 | u/chaindrop posts the clip to r/StableDiffusion. |
| 27 Mar 2023 | A repost on X takes it viral: over 4.9 million views in four days. |
| 16 Feb 2024 | After OpenAI shows Sora, people ask for a Sora version of the spaghetti clip. |
| 19 Feb 2024 | Will Smith posts his own parody on Instagram, playing an AI version of himself eating spaghetti; it passes 164,000 likes in three hours. |
Why is it used as a benchmark?
Eating is hard for video models: hands, a fork, food that has to go into a mouth, and a face that has to stay the same person while it chews. The 2023 clip failed at all of it, so every new model gets the same prompt and the results are compared side by side. It became shorthand for how far AI video has come.
Could you make it today?
Not here: we don't make videos of real celebrities or public figures, from any photo. Our models can do eating scenes far better than the 2023 clip, and the trends below show it with your own face.
Sources
- Know Your Meme, "AI Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" (post date, upvotes, the viral repost, the Sora request and Smith's parody with its numbers)
- Know Your Meme, how it was made (ModelScope text2video)
- The Daily Dot, the spaghetti clip as an AI benchmark