AI? So what?

 Another week, another “fully AI” project for people to overreact to. 

This time, director Neil Blomkamp (District 9) released a 13 minute short/teaser that sets up the premise for a new zombie movie. He used Byte-Dance’s Seedance 2.0 AI to generate the visuals.

It is not terrible— which makes it light-years better than most other AI-created video that's come out in the last few months.^[1]

“Awesome!” You may be saying to yourself, “Maybe I don’t have to sweat learning about this video thing! I can have AI do it all for me!”

Um, maybe not. To make this not-terrible short, Blomkamp:

Wrote a story. Had human artists create “concept art” to show the AI what the film should look like. Licensed the faces and voices of 30 real human actors. Prompted the AI shot by shot by shot, going back over and over until he got what he wanted. Had a human edit the output.

In other words, Blomkamp made all the big choices, and he let AI make the little ones (including, one assumes, having “London” traffic driving on the wrong side of the road in the opening shot.)

The director made all the choices that guided the video– choices based on his concepts, his prep, conversations with his collaborators, his reactions to what he was seeing, his larger understanding of what he wanted to make. 

He chose to "shoot" it using a computer image-generating tool instead of putting people in front of a camera, building sets, etc. But the video isn’t “AI generated.” It’s Blomkamp-generated. Without his guiding hand, this video would not even rise to the level of uncanny-valley mediocrity that it manages.

To make Nightborne as good as it is requires someone who has experience communicating with video. Someone who understands how camera angles and editing and story can be used to generate a reaction. Someone who gets what makes an action sequence work. And someone who has practiced this in real life, on a real set, with real objects and real people.

In other words, AI is just another brush in the hand of an artist. It’s a tool. As any artist or craftsperson knows, you want to match the tool to the job. And AI’s job isn’t to create a finished video all by itself. That’s your job. You'll never be good at AI video unless you're good at video.

The lessons, the practice, the emotion, the decision-making that goes into making your videos is still fundamental, even if you someday use AI to help you make it.