Ingi Erlingsson

From graffiti to ilovedust

Ingi Erlingsson grew up in Iceland and started out as a teenager doing graffiti, which he kept up for about twenty years, before moving into graphic and web design^[12][1]. He says he got the internet at 14^[1]. As a student he spent a six-month placement at Surround, an animation and live-action company in New York, mostly on design work^[12].

He graduated in 2006 and went to work for ilovedust, a small illustration studio in Southsea^[13]. Over seven years he went from illustrator and designer to creative director, and led the animation department the studio built in Shoreditch; an illustration job for Pepsi that turned into a TV ad was the turning point^[12][15].

So I started off as a teenager doing graffiti

Ingi Erlingsson^[12]

Golden Wolf: animation for the internet

In 2013 ilovedust split in two, keeping design while animation became a new studio, Golden Wolf, which he founded and ran^[13][15]. Within a year it had 11 animators and clients including Cartoon Network, for its 20th birthday, Major Lazer, for a tour intro, and MTV^[12]. Its stated aim, in his words on Fast Hours: if you are going to make someone watch an ad, make it worth watching^[1].

Golden Wolf leaned hard into Instagram when it was new, posting original work rather than client reels, and he believes it was the first animation studio in the world to pass 100,000 followers there^[1]. The idea, he says, was to show future clients what the studio wanted to make next, not what was in a two-year-old portfolio^[1].

DuckTales, Watch Dogs and a studio in New York

Golden Wolf's credits grew to the Watch Dogs 2 graphics and opening sequence for Ubisoft, the Powerpuff Girls titles for Cartoon Network, Nike's Vapormax campaign, and music work for Major Lazer, Steve Aoki, Zedd and Dog Blood^[13]. For Disney it made Marshmello's Fly music video and the main title sequence for the 2017 DuckTales reboot, which trade press reported as Emmy-nominated; the category and year were not given, and AI LIVE has not confirmed it with the Television Academy^[13][14][15].

He grew up on the original DuckTales, he told Fast Hours, and the craziest part for him was that the studio did the intro and the song^[1]. By September 2018 the animation and VFX studio Psyop was a minority investor in Golden Wolf, which had signed with Stink and opened its first US studio in SoHo, New York, next door to Psyop, with him as executive creative director^[15][13].

Doodles, and the first Doodles model

On 24 January 2023 Cartoon Brew reported that Doodles, the NFT and entertainment brand led by Burnt Toast, had agreed to acquire Golden Wolf; he would become Doodles' Chief Content Officer while still running Golden Wolf's London and New York offices, and Doodles, Golden Wolf and Psyop planned an AI and blockchain joint venture called Active Ingredient^[16][17]. He had nearly launched an AI company in 2022, very like SYSTMS, before the deal^[1].

Being brand side for the first time changed how he saw his old job. He had spent his career thinking agencies wanted something cool, he says, and found that brands want something that sells^[1]. By his own account his team grew the Doodles socials by more than a million followers, saw its animations watched billions of times and made a 20-minute animated special with Pharrell that premiered at TIFF^[7]. His last day was 6 December 2024; he stepped down from Golden Wolf too and stayed a Doodles shareholder^[7].

Once a wolf, always a wolf

Ingi Erlingsson^[7]

SYSTMS

SYSTMS is a London applied AI studio founded by him and Armand Weeresinghe, launched in late 2025, an Official ComfyUI Partner that trains models, builds tools and makes content^[9]. He is co-founder and CEO^[8]. Its open releases are INFL8, a Wan 2.2 LoRA that inflates any subject, ACTION, a Qwen Image Edit LoRA that turns any subject into an action figure, FLW, an LTX 2.3 transition LoRA, and TIMESLICE, a ComfyUI node for time-slice effects^{[10][30][31][32][33]}. By SYSTMS's own count INFL8 has 100M+ organic views and 25K+ downloads, and the studio 100M+ social views and 40K+ model downloads^[10][9].

SYSTMS also built PRISM 1.0 for Doodles, a model trained on the Doodles hand-drawn archive that the brand owns and runs^[11]. He told Fast Hours he trained the first version of the Doodles model himself^[1].

How does AI see us?

His own posts, mostly on X, are the reason people find him. Four months before Fast Hours he was making Breaking Bad memes, one of which he says reached millions of views; once he started posting in his own style, he was "flooded with inquiries"^[1]. A Tim Cook meme reached half a million views on X and won him about 20 followers, which taught him that memes get attention but not recognition^[1]. His work travels further on Instagram, where he posts as @ingi.ai to 28,300 followers: 148 of his reels have about 10 million views between them. The most watched is "I am the one who pops", a Breaking Bad scene recast as helium balloons, at 3.28 million, with This is America and By the power of Grayskull past 1 million each; of his experimental motion graphics, "don't get bent out of shape" leads at 260,000. His 72 TikTok videos add another 222,000^{[35][38][37][36]}.

Much of the style starts from one question: how does AI see us? He treats people as shapes moving through a motion graphics piece, conveying emotion through movement almost like dance, and every overlay, dot and box is tracking data pulled out of the video itself, not stuck on top^[1]. He wants people to know a piece is AI as soon as they see it, and to like it either despite that or because of it^[1]. He used to list every tool in his captions, until the conversation became only about the tools^[1][3].

I want people to know that it's AI as soon as they see it.

Ingi Erlingsson^[1]

Control, keyframes and his own LoRAs

He started with DALL-E 2 in early 2022, then Midjourney, AUTOMATIC1111 and ComfyUI, which has been home base since soon after it came out; he runs it locally on an RTX 6000 with 128GB of RAM^[1]. He plans every keyframe, then generates very short first-frame, last-frame bursts of about two seconds each in Wan 2.2 and stitches them together, so that every move is his decision^[1]. A 30-second generation, however good, would not feel like his, he says^[1].

He would not train a video LoRA on a style any more: a strong image model such as GPT Image 2.5 plus Wan already handles the look, so his video LoRAs learn movement instead^[1]. He has spent nearly a year and a half training his own Wan transition models, which drive all the transitions in his work, and the first working version took six months^[1]. For style LoRAs he mixes models such as a thermal imaging LoRA and a studio photography LoRA in Krea 2, whose online trainer he rates far above his own local runs^[1].

Custom nodes in ten minutes

Most of his effects are ComfyUI nodes he has written himself, usually to replace jobs that took forever in After Effects^[1]. One tracks whatever he types, such as a face, then draws dots and bounding boxes in hex colours he chooses; he has not released it yet because it is too hard to use^[1]. He builds them with an LLM: describe the effect, put the reference images in a folder, and a node for glass refraction took him about ten minutes^[1]. He showed the method in a Fast Hours Overtime build with Claude^[21].

Goals, not prompts

His advice for AI creatives is to give an agent a goal, not a task, and to stop hunting for other people's prompts, since a borrowed prompt only makes someone else's thing^[1]. ComfyUI workflows are different: pulling apart someone else's workflow is the best way to learn^[1]. He has gone deep on agents through Astra, and says he once spent a hundred pounds on it in a day just making images^[1].

On AI LIVE

AI LIVE first showed his work on Ep 118 on 24 April 2026, when Racing Grannies was the producer's pick, an example of how a brand like Red Bull could turn footage it already owns into something new^[28]. On Ep 134 on 13 October 2026, with Chris First as guest co-host, the show played listen and praised how he decides which nodes to vibe code and which to keep meticulous, citing his interview with Rory Flynn and Drew Brucker on Fast Hours^[29].