Award-winning sci-fi author Lavie Tidhar is a busy man. In between his own writing and editing projects, including his anthology The Best of World sci-fi, he’s working with his animator Nir Yaniv, through their company Positronish, on his sci-fi film series, including . mars machine“The Toaster and Coffee Pot of Mars”, About Film Noir rune townBut when Yaniv approached him about another project to create something using the AI image generator Midjourney, he said yes, with a few conditions.
result, Welcome to the future of AI! – which you can watch below – is a disturbingly surreal short film set in a future where the world has been destroyed, but one human being has been discovered by an apparently well-meaning artificial intelligence. of that ability.
Alison Flood: Who came up with the idea for your latest project?
Lavie Tidhar: It all started when I had a game designer friend who started talking about Midjourney with great enthusiasm. I thought that was great and told Nir to go hang out.
Then Nir called me.And he said, if we could do something The Pier, a French sci-fi movie from the 60s, made up of a single image, and might be a little funny.plot of The Pier Involving a man who time travels from post-apocalyptic Paris to our present day – it was the inspiration for 12 monkeysI just liked the technical side. Can you tell a cinematic story using only still images?
My first reaction was no. So I thought, why not make a movie about AI using AI tools? I got home and started writing. It’s basically a futuristic AI trying to talk to the last surviving human. My other note was that if you do that, you should make sure the narration is also done by the AI, the voice consists of her two AI-generated male and female voices. and these merge into a very unpleasant voice.
So all the images are the result of Nir asking Midjourney to come up with something related to scrapping the story.
yes. I had to write the instructions in the shooting script. What image, what emotion should be evoked? Nir then sat for three full days, generating thousands of images. I don’t know how he didn’t go mad. A lot of it was actually he kind of forced the AI into place. I think Nir used himself as a seed for some image of man.
We were really into the uncanny valley aspect. So each image is somehow wrong. My favorite part is the AI wrote with these rabbits trying to calm humans down by showing them pictures of rabbits. And it’s so disturbing! AI tries its best, but it can’t do everything right.
Rabbits in Sci-Fi Movies: Welcome to the Future of AI
Nil Yanif
What are your concerns about AI? As a writer, do you worry about encroaching on your territory?
These AI systems lack creativity. They have to be told to do something, they can’t come up with anything new. I don’t worry about other writers on the planet, I don’t worry about competing with 8 billion people all the time. Art is you. It’s a unique perspective. And these tools don’t have that.
There are legitimate concerns about companies using AI instead of human artists to cut costs. But from a creative standpoint, it’s really just a tool I had to use and really manipulate to get the effect I wanted.
Any plans for other projects like this at Midjourney?
No, but I think it was fun to play. I found the results very interesting. I wanted to jump into that conversation because it moves so fast.
If it can be replaced by a machine, I am concerned that it will be replaced by a machine. But people said the same thing about cameras. They said the same thing about Photoshop. We still need artists, we still need people who bring that unique perspective.
It takes time to adjust, but it’s nowhere near the actual generic artificial intelligence you see in the movies. That’s what I’ve heard from AI scientists about the idea that AI is taking over the world and trying to destroy humanity. It seems like the future of his sci-fi versions of 1970s disaster films. If anything, evolving AI will be heavily dependent on humans.
So I wanted to talk about the idea that AI is only trying to help, and that it can go catastrophically wrong. The movie does not suggest that it was AI that caused the destruction of the planet. Humans did it, AI just misses them.
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