JVTech News I watched the trailer for the first film made entirely by an AI. My opinion is very clear
Published on January 28, 2024 at 7:10 p.m
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The first fully AI-generated film will be released soon. While the gesture may be interesting, let me tell you straight away: it is despicable.
Here is the trailer of Maharaja in Denims: first film directed by AI
The Indian director Singh Khushwant proudly announced it on his Instagram account: his film Maharaja in Denims would be the first “AI film” in history. There is no film studio worth mentioning here. The film is produced by IntelliFlicks Studios, a fairly unknown company whose job appears to be to generate prompts for Chat GPT and Midjourney. It's not even particularly demeaning to say that, even the company's official website looks like it's AI-generated. If we want to find out about the team, for example to find out if any animators worked on “Maharaja in Denims”, we read:
Our team
Our team consists of highly qualified professionals with many years of experience in their respective fields. We work together to deliver the best possible results for our customers.
What could be translated: “Our team consists of highly qualified professionals with many years of experience in their respective fields. We work together to achieve the best possible results for our customers.” Admit that this type of text reeks of AI. We believe this is a general answer and does not correspond to anything specific. The more I tried to find out more about this project, the more I found things that were shaky, if not downright shoddy.
Maharaja in Denims is an adaptation of a novel by Khushwant Singh. The film's script therefore comes from the mind of a human being, no LLM. The Indian bestseller tells the story of a teenager consumed by flashbacks to his past lives. That's why we see scenes in the trailer that seem to come from different eras.
My opinion is clear: AI in cinema sucks
I'm not the type to have stupid anti-AI opinions. In general, I would be a bad tech journalist if I wasn't at least a little fascinated by technical progress. To tell you everythingI use AI myself regularly to help me with administrative tasks, reword a paragraph that I think is unclear, or create a thumbnail image, for example. It seems important to me to clarify all this before dismantling the film's premise.
We could start with that List the obvious :
- it looks like a sequence of generic tables;
- there are aberrations in the images;
- we are in the middle of the valley of the uncanny;
- everything is too smooth and too blurry;
- there is a lack of dynamism, even the lips don't move during the dialogue;
- The character changes his head in every shot…
I can keep going like this for a long time. AIs are not perfect and Currently, it is very complicated to release a visually appealing film simply by animating the images created by MidJourney. However, I don't think these flaws are the most important ones to highlight. After all, it is very likely that artificial intelligence will develop very quickly and all these purely aesthetic shortcomings will be eliminated within a few years. In my opinion, a good review of this trailer should focus not on the form but on the content of the project.
The core of the project is the transformation of cinema. The expression is not mine, but Singh Khushwant himself. This film still cost $1 million (you have to have a marketing budget, pay salaries, etc.), but that number is ridiculously low. Normally a project of this size in India costs “six times as much,” said the director.
The aim is therefore to lay the foundation for a less human cinema in order to save money. A cinema that makes its actors precarious in the broadest sense of the word. A cinema that is being unified. A cinema that is less and less artistic and more and more industrial. Even if AIs become perfect, I can't cry in front of a cold production like a printed circuit. Without the warmth of the guts and guts of artists, films, music, books or paintings can never touch me.
AI itself is a great tool. When AI is used as a simple money-making machine that destroys artistic gestures, it becomes a very sad tool.