The Unreal Has A Question For You

My video proof of concept that is 99% AI generated

The Unreal has a question for us: Who are you?

I first noticed this in movies.

In The Wizard of Oz, the first question the Wizard asks Dorothy is “Who are you?” In Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, the first question a duplicitous huckster asks his soon-to-be mark, played by Patricia Neal, is “Who are you?” In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the question turns: a tearful mother asks her newly imprinted robot son to tell her, “Who am I?”

From Lawrence of Arabia to Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty, chances are, if a film has a character who is not what they say they are — if they’re not real — the most existential question of all will be asked.

Now we’re confronted with a new great impostor in AI. And just like all the others in the movies, it's asking us: Who are you?

I decided to answer:

I’m a filmmaker making a movie to support trans and LGBTQ youth — and there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do to get that movie made.

So with little money and new friends named Claude, Kling, Seedance, Eleven, and a silly kid named Nano Banana, I made a proof of concept that is 99% generated by AI.

I know, I know. The environmental concerns. The ethical concerns. The jobs. The quiet reality that I’m helping make a handful of powerful oligarchs even more powerful. Despite these and other justifiable concerns, I spent two weeks with the above named platforms to create a one minute proof of concept for A Still, Small Paw, the feature film I’m producing.

The video is embedded above or you can watch it at the film’s website. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Despite it being born from unreality, I’m pretty darned proud of it. It accomplishes what I prompted it to do: it conveys the film's tone, suggests the world of the story, and feels like a viable feature film.

It took two frustrating weeks, a few hundred dollars, and about five hundred prompts to create. I averaged about one successful clip per day. Each clip probably required discarding 30 or more that were wrong, broken, or weren’t consistent (keeping characters consistent was my greatest challenge). AI tends to over execute everything, so many of my prompts were focused on pulling it back.

Even though the video is far from perfect, I’m blown away by what I was able to accomplish with AI. I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do. No wonder artists of all stripes are worried and just about everybody is anxious about their futures. From what we already know, I can’t imagine AI’s impact on humanity being anything other than seismic.

Of course we’re worried — we should be!

AI isn’t life, yet it seems poised to replace it. And the tech oligarchs don’t seem to care much about what happens. Elon Musk casually talks about a future with great tech, but no people. Our hand-wringing and apocalyptic talk isn’t for nothing.

So what can you do about something so big as an earthquake?

I think of the movie No Country for Old Men, and a scene near the end when Sheriff Bell visits Ellis, a wise old man confined to a wheelchair. With a worn and worried face, Bell tells his friend that he feels “overmatched” by the world.

Ellis’s response is just as true about AI as it is about anything else that’s come down the road and frightened us with its awesome power:

“You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

Okay, then. Even though I feel deeply uneasy about this technology, I’ll do what I can with what I’ve got — and that includes AI.

Ours is a feature film for trans and LGBTQ kids who are being told, by legislatures, in state after state, that they should not exist.

So, yes, there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do to get this movie made.

That’s just who I am.

“You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”