The Artifact Atlas
A field guide to how AI video breaks.
Named failure modes, what causes each one, and what actually fixes it. Everyone publishes the shots that worked; this is the other half, and it is the half that is genuinely hard to find.
- Entries
- 4
- 01Manageable
Temporal flicker
Frame-to-frame instability in brightness, texture or fine detail that is invisible in a still and obvious the moment the clip moves.
Also called boiling, shimmer, frame jitter, crawling detail
- 02Stubborn
Identity drift
A subject's face, build or defining features change gradually over a clip, so the first second and the last second are recognisably different people.
Also called face morphing, character inconsistency, subject wander
- 03Manageable
Style bleed
A style applies unevenly — leaking into regions it should not touch, or resolving differently in adjacent shots that were supposed to match.
Also called style inconsistency, look drift, conditioning leak
- 04Manageable
Keyframe seams
A visible discontinuity exactly where two generated segments meet — the one moment in a clip when a viewer is already paying close attention.
Also called segment boundary artifact, stitch line, window seam