Down the rabbit hole with Hugging Face

AI is bonkers. I’ve been playing around with a lot of new platforms and was recently tooling around in Hugging Face Spaces, an AI app directory, to see what their community is up to. If you’re curious about what people are doing with AI, it’s a fun place to explore without a paywall. And in an odd way, it feels like mashup between Roblox and Superbad.

Here are three examples to wet your appetite:

Digital Products

I was able to create a simple and elegant CPG website concept using DeepSite v2, a website builder created using DeepSeek. Like other vibe coding platforms, a single prompt creating a solid prototype in approximately five minutes, and it added tons of useful features I didn’t even ask for.

Did it blow my doors off? No. The initial product wasn’t full featured (or production-ready), the FPO images were questionable, and there are better platforms on the market for this sort of thing. That said, the UX and UI design still provide an amazing starting point to have deeper conversations sooner. Designers, developers, managers, and other contributors are still needed to create and maintain the final product, but vibe coding applications can help us make the design process feel more collaborative — especially in conceptual stages.

Video Animation

Back in the day, I remember a tool called Morph that created animated GIFs by transitioning between two images, much like PicMorph. Fast forward a [few years] and Wan2.2-Animate transforms static images into talking characters (without audio). Here’s the result of combining this image with this video.

Would I use something this for a client? Heck yes. I wouldn’t use it for haphazardly, but I can think of countless ways this could be used to bring things to life in fun and unexpected ways.

First thought, adoption request messages from shelter animals! Imagine if the dog bios Donna Meagle wrote for April Ludgate’s pet adoption fair were told by the dogs themselves? One thing is for sure, there would be a lot of great stories about people being saved from burning buildings!

Text-to-Speech

There are several TTS experiments like Edge TTS Text-to-Speech, where you enter your text, select a voice, and click submit to generate a voice over file. This example also provides options to adjust rate, volume, and pitch. For example, I chose a favorite move quote and several different voices.

Would I use this instead of voice over talent? Ideally, no. The examples above are not perfect, but brands are already using market-ready tools to save time and cost associated with scripting, hiring, and recording voice talent. And really, this is nothing new. Siri and Alexa have been answering the call for years.

Conclusion

AI has come a long way and is already impacting the work we do. From image and video manipulation to 3D game development and voice cloning, creatives have more opportunities to go further with fewer limitations. Are there downsides to that? Yes, but there are tremendous upsides as well. Which direction are you headed?

Despite the constance of change, the pace of AI advancement feels dizzying. Fortunately, Hugging Face Spaces provide are a fun and approachable way to explore new ideas and seek inspiration.