This Film Does Not Exist
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Jodorowsky’s Dune will likely remain the greatest movie never made. But artificial intelligence is changing how we can make movies from such vast imagination.

“I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of “Tron.”

“The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles.”

“The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly.”

“The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.”

“However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make “Tron.”

“I’m not even sure he knows what “Tron” is.”

“And Disney’s original “Tron” was released in 1982.”

“So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from? Who were these neon-suited actors?”

“And how did I — the director of the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” having spent two and a half years interviewing and working with Alejandro to tell the story of his famously unfinished film — not know about this?”

“The truth is that these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all.”

“These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.”

“It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle. It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.”

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all.”

“There seems to be a correlation between how Alejandro’s work was absorbed and referred to by subsequent filmmakers and how his work was ingested and metabolized by computer programming.”

“But these two things are not the same. I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm.”

“But looking at these images, how can I be sure?”

AI seems a power beyond our imagination, already changing even how we understand art as a process and as a product.

Like our OP author, I am pretty boggled by what AI makes possible for the creative process.

But is AI ultimately making us more or less human?

“That’s how powerful it is to allow A.I. to generate pictures of films or other art objects you wish could exist.”

“It’s like watching a magic show.”

“Going in, you know it will all be illusions and sleight of hand.”

“But during the show, your suspension of disbelief kicks in. Your heart wants to believe it’s real, and it gets your brain to go along for the ride. Life is more fun that way.”

“What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization?”

“When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven’t yet even been imagined?”

“I have a feeling we’re all about to find out.”

Magic is becoming more of a daily reality due to technology with every passing day.

Can the magic of AI elevate and improve human life and art? We shall see…

[deleted]

Appreciate it! I really like sharing my thoughts with exact quotations because I enjoy discussing ideas I have read with others (rather than pontificating about opinions without even glancing at OP articles).

I confess that I really tend to love quotation marks (as much as James Joyce despised them!), but with your kind advice and in the spirit of technological progress, perhaps I will try your magic method in the future!

When you use quotes like this, it looks like a dialogue. It took me a while to understand what was I reading.

Also, putting a line break at the end of every sentence makes it unnecessarily stilted to read.

YSK that the standard way to quote multiple paragraphs using quotation marks rather than indented block quoting (which is more and more preferred) is to put a quote mark at the beginning of each paragraph, but not at the end, except when you get to the very end of the quoted passage.

Can the magic of AI elevate and improve human life and art? We shall see…

Can it? Yes. Will it? Categorically no. People are shit, and people are controlling what the AI outputs. And I GUARANTEE you that between Deepfakes and AI image production, we're going to see a completely artificial, totally false, absolutely realistic image of a prominent political candidate having sex with a minor by the end of the decade. Millions of people will instantly believe that it's 100% the truth, and millions more will no longer consider photographic or video evidence of ACTUAL crimes to be conclusive evidence.

The good news is, we will have absolutely amazing AI created custom pornography to distract ourselves with as the world burns around us.

millions more will no longer consider photographic or video evidence of ACTUAL crimes to be conclusive evidence.

This already happens when the evidence is clear and conclusive. Consider the Jan 6th riot.

That has nothing to do with the medium. They are rejecting all evidence of the event.

Which is my point. The medium itself may have a lesser impact on "truthiness" than other factors than one previously supposed.

It will make politics and public affairs a much more complex problem.

Similar doomsday claims were used to justify image generation models staying behind paywalls with strict censoring, then Stable Diffusion released for free half a year ago now and none of the doomsday scenarios have played out. Instead a bunch of programmers and artists like myself have been having a great time with it and improving our creative output with happy customers.

I'm generally a massive pessimist, but imagining a possibility does not then mean that is how things will definitely go down. Life is hard to predict.

Photoshop didn't destroy civilization yet (and neither did politically-motivated photomanipulations, which go back to Stalin's time).

What matters most is evidence admissible at court. There will probably be an arms race between digital watermarks embedded in videos and the cracking of said watermarks.

As for pornography - I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think eventually people will just get tired of porn altogether. All of the mystery will be gone, there'll be no more barriers to cross. When everything is possible, nothing is interesting.

I wish I could disagree most vehemently. But I cannot.

People must rediscover human decency and act out of love and compassion, not reptilian passions, if we are ever to discover our potential for good as a civilization.

Love, compassion and reptilian passion are but spokes on the same wheel of irrationality.

[deleted]

We’ll never run out of original ideas

AI makes recreation easier, and recreation is creation

Yeah, honestly once the “free and open” AI image generators start showing up, it’s going to get really messy.

They’ve been out for several months now

r/stablediffusion

you can already run Stable Diffusion in 'porn is fine' mode, if you host it yourself

/r/sdnsfw (NSFW obviously)

Photoshop and aftereffects have been around a while now. And while yes, this does take an enormous amount of the labour out of those processes, I would imagine that arrangements will be reached between governments and AI generator developers that include subtle watermarks for those available to the public, much like the US requires for printers to prevent them being used to create fake currency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

This link shows some of the AI generated art.

Totally awesome!! So appreciate this excellent link!

Must see: “THE ART OF JODOROWSKY's DUNE - AI Concept Showcase”!!

The things we should automate away with AI aren't creative processes, but the bureaucratic ones. Especially the expensive bureaucrats, like company executives. Executives are expensive, erratic decision makers who don't understand people, and poor communicators. Surely AI can't be worse?

The stakes are rather low when a AI makes a “mistake” in a creative process unlike in a bureaucratic process. Those mistakes might make it better at being creative.

Guess both will happen one way or the other

As somebody making a living off art for a decade+ now, I resent that. I want to automate my work as much as anybody else (and have been using stable diffusion for months to help with my work for fantastic results).

I don't create to suffer through the process, I create because I want to get the result, and about 75% of what I do never gets seen because it stalls during the long and painful process.

[deleted]

I don’t know that it’s the best case scenario in the hearts of whoever that’s steering it rather than the dollar signs these technologies represent, humanity be damned.

I think with ai art it will offer a springboard or starting place for some, remain unused for others, and probably write a ton of schlock in between.

Though I do at times feel like humanity is spiraling towards a cyberpunk dystopia that ultimately culminates in our erasure.

Social media is such a double edged sword; why isn’t AI the same?

Technology functions as both curse and blessing all too often, and perhaps always.

The magic of AI seems to be enrapturing us so much that in articles like this, the possible dangers are not even acknowledged or mentioned.

[deleted]

You put it perfectly: AI is so terribly useful that we are almost choosing to play ostrich to its undeniably severe dangers.

We can hide our heads in the sand all we like while celebrating the amazing “magic” of AI, but at what point does it become too late?

I am reminded of that epic and iconic Terminator line:

“NO FATE BUT WHAT YOU MAKE”

Personally I think part of the problem is that opponents of it often start the discussion with fear mongering and doomsaying. Sometimes I hear a reasonable opinion about creative rights and the difference between original and derivative works. But more often than not a whole bunch of artists and emotional people immediately start slamming the people around them for getting anywhere close to the approval of AI generated art.

I think a lot of the nuance does fall on the rights of the art and who owns what. The legal side of things is going to get real sticky. But at the same time there's always been a gray area in ownership of art because innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. The line between homage and theft has pretty much always rested on the approval of those involved rather than literal law. Usually it's about whether someone cares enough that someone else is using their work in some fashion. Often this is a bigger deal for smaller and struggling artists but this gray area also allows us to play with the creative products of larger corporations (as long as they don't sue).

One of the more interesting things I haven't heard people tall about is how AI could actually help artists as well. Not only will it open up the creative potential of people who struggle with artistic practice, yet still have fantastic imaginations, but it would allow artists to generate their own works in less time. Feed an AI your own work, make it do the brunt of the creativity, edit the results to your taste by hand afterward. It still matters what the skill is of the work you feed it, and you can limit an AI to use specific works for reference and style. Skill still matters in a world of AI work. Like most technical advancements, it's best qualities are not just in allowing the average person entry into a different area of skill, but also in elevating the skill of those who are more invested.

You don't even have to use the art itself but rather take it as inspiration. If you prefer doing it by hand, you can still have the AI generate a general idea of what you want your next piece to look like, then recreate it by hand, experimenting along the way to explore that direction rather than just seeing it as a piece to be finished. As with most advancements, it's not just about the downsides of what other people can do to enter your arena, even with nefarious purposes, but what you can do now as the artist.

The evils of social media have been mentioned here as an example of the dangers of technological advancement. But we call them double-sided swords for a reason. The other side is the connectivity, the knowledge, perspectives we never could have access to before. And the downside comes less from the technology and more from, as mentioned, being ostriches about it all. It's not that the technology is wrong, or barely even that we should control the tech itself. It's really that the one advancement we consistently ignore is in how malleable culture is, and more importantly how responsible we should be for it.

We don't control ourselves and we use objects like technology and machines as scapegoats for the true problems in our society. That we can and should control ourselves and organize our society to be responsible for ourselves and such things as are offered by technology. We have advanced our knowledge of humans as much as we have technology, yet we still allow ourselves to live as if we are simple farmers from the middle ages. These days even the farmers have access to philosophy and technology. We are a much more evolved species than we used to be, and rather than blaming tech, we need to take responsibility for ourselves.

Fascinating points here that we need to take responsibility for ourselves rather than blaming technology for our follies.

But ever since Francis Bacon urged us to master nature, humanity has been seeking, conquering,and mastering without necessarily understanding why or for what ultimately common good.

Perhaps beginning with the negative regarding AI is an error (and its benefits may be huge), but the very idea of what makes an artist and what constitutes art and creativity is inevitably being revolutionized by new AI tools.

Really interesting links and ideas here about

“Will AI Kill the Artist?”

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/wyrqyw/will_art_created_by_artificial_intelligence_kill/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

That's a good point. I'll try to get to those links.

I agree that it will probably revolutionize art in a way that some might feel will maybe "kill" artists. But I think redefine is a better term. We've always been unsure how to define art specifically. I think there are different categories. At the highest level it is usually about creativity and, if possible, uniqueness.

In this vein then, I believe AI simply allows more of us to express our creativity through mediums we typically don't have access to in some way. Sure it might reduce what we consider technical skill, but it opens up more access to our own ideas, and letting them out into the world.

Your reference to the common good is the soul of what I'm saying. We as a species frequently try to blame the technology as enabling good or ill in and of itself. In truth we don't look inward enough to define ourselves, nor our goals as a species. We often seek to separate ourselves from, or force others in line with, society. With society itself being some kind of goal in and of itself rather than a tool which allows us to define the shape of our lives at different levels.

That's something very fascinating about this particular topic, because often art and artists try to fill that role for us. Get us to look inward, and examine and identify what makes us who we are and why we strive. Also what we strive for. In a way I think this could also mean that limiting AI for art could have the repercussion of limiting people sharing in this tradition.

Beautiful: I love your word “redefine”! Redefintion is the best human power to revolutionize, reframe, improve, and even perfect!

Appreciate your astute point how as a species we blame technology for our own failures to identify and choose the good.

How often individualism (with all of its glories) finds itself at odds, even at war, with our shared purpose(s) as a species.

Looking inward is a revolutionary act!

One whose power we have known since the Delphic Oracle announced, “Know Thyself,” and Augustine confirmed the urgency of the inward odyssey in his “Confessions.”

Now President Zelenskyy’s brilliant rhetoric encourages that same idea, that the enlightenment and knowledge we seek and need is within, not without:

“Want light? It’s in us.”

“Happy New Year from the Zelenskyys.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/100cq2c/want_light_its_in_each_of_us_happy_new_year_from/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

So fascinating how art and the role of the artist can open us to ourselves and to new possibilities, perspectives, horizons!

To me, artists always change the forms in which they appear, depending on cultural and historical context.

Homer had a lyre.

Shakespeare had what, a quill pen?

And Ocean Vuong can’t imagine his art without a computer and the internet.

The very word art in ancient Greek is “techne”, also translated as science or craft.

Technology, art, and science are etymologically inextricably bound up together, exactly miming how we are witnessing art and technology merge in a new AI revolution.

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

One might say

I've been saying for a while now there will someday be an event referred to as a "Deepfakes 9/11". I don't know what it will be - I just know that at some point, something of that cultural magnitude is going to happen, maybe like a video of a world leader or famous person being killed, or of a world leader or famous person committing sexual assault against a child, where the entire thing was done in AI. Something designed to spread like wildfire and sow immediate discord in a way intended to cause riots in the streets.

I'm of the mind that 'reality always wins'. Someone will always know it's a fake. And that information will be countered and the wildfire contained.

The thing though is we need cultural accountability for the misinformation that currently exists.

Agreed. Reality has the benefit of invariance with respect to belief. It'll always exert its influence no matter what.

I've found if anything people have spent far more time imagining problems for these tools which then haven't played out in the real world.

You're using social media right now so guess you don't think it's too bad.

Hell, think about what the internet was supposed to be vs. the corporate hellscape it's turned out to be.

That's pretty wild, it's hard to imagine what the technology is going to be able to do in 20 years.

Wild indeed! If this is what AI can do already, future possibilities are truly mindblowing:

“If, as Mr. Gurdjieff taught, creation leads to the development of one’s soul, whose soul is being developed here?”

“Nothing in this software seems controllable in the pixel-precise way artists use digital tools like Photoshop.”

“When Mr. Darrell generated these images, he didn’t choose the colors, the framing or what the characters would be doing.”

“He also didn’t determine some of the other choices that the A.I. program assimilated from 1970s science fiction: the seemingly all-white cast and the vintage gender roles.”

“Whatever he might have had in his mind’s eye was not what he was going to get.”

“He needed to state his prompt cleanly and clearly.”

“But the creativity bubbled out of the machine.”

What happens to humanity and decency when creativity bubbles out of a machine like a commodity?

Creativity as a product generated by technology seems the utter antithesis to the kind of inspiration humanity has traditionally understood to create art and express human experience, all the way back to Homer singing, “Tell me the man, Muse…”

Technology, or rather AI, is becoming Our New Muse more and more every day.

I'm pretty much against AI art being the end all be all of art, but see there being to problem in being part of the process. That said, these stills look amazing and so on point.

Although a famous curmudgeon, I have more empathy for Miyazaki's response to AI generated 3D animation by the day. https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc

I think this comment thread is ultimately off topic from the posted article.

But is there more context to them sharing that with Miyazaki? It seems like such a poorly chosen example given the 'audience'. Like a poorly chosen presentation topic and execution for a class assignment.

I mean, it's an article about AI generated movie stills for a movie that doesn't exist. My comment was a link to a video of a famed animator who makes movies responding to AI generated animation/art.

Most of the comments I read are about how AI art affects artists? I feel it's pretty relevant.

I also don't know what they were expecting. Miyazaki is not someone I would ever be comfortable showing any of my work to. He'd probably look at me and be like "why do you exist?" and I'd just implode.

Thanks, I actually think this is relevant to the discussion here and was interested in his take. Anyone know what this is from?

An NHK special, https://www.indiewire.com/2016/12/hayao-miyazaki-artificial-intelligence-animation-insult-to-life-studio-ghibli-1201757617/

Thank you. :)

r/RetroFuturism

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If films are pictures place back to back, has anyone tried to create an AI generated movie?

Maybe the audio is an issue, but the ai could create an accompanying script to direct the voiceover and other audio?

Not sure how difficult it'd be but the algorithm would have to adjust pretty significantly to make motion out of many pictures. Right now it doesn't even know what motion or time is, nor does it seem interested in replicating scenes exactly but with minor changes (as far as I've seen anyway).

Coherence is the biggest problem right now, they kind of look like scanner darkly rotoscoping type effect but it’ll get there soon enough

You can make them with a stable diffusion script called deforum. It’s pretty acid trippy still because it lacks coherence between frames but it’s fun to mess around with. Some people are getting closer to getting it to be more consistent/coherent. Maybe some custom models trained on movie stills would help.

Sounds amazing! It reminds me of the "movies" I have seen on here, like the AI depiction of human evolution and some others. Is that what they use?

Yep those are the ones! People also feed it existing videos and it can change the style to something different like anime or whatever

[deleted]

This is the first generation of these tools though. Right now the art generated is impressive but obviously flawed. What about in 10 or 15 years?

I agree with your last statement though. These tools won’t replace artists, they will be used by artists to do their work faster.

[deleted]

This is every holodeck episode in star trek TNG lmao

You have to keep in mind that pretty much all of the succesful algorithms that are being used to generate these images were released max 12 months ago (DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney). The technology is evolving at an insane rate.

ChatGPT is not even 2 months since its public release. Of course it's not perfect yet but at this rate it won't take long at all.

I’m so tired hearing of about AI