The AI saved getting issues unsuitable. In a single shot, Tiggy regarded inexplicably jacked. In one other, his again was too dry. When the filmmaker instructed one piece of software program to offer the again of Tiggy’s head “frog-like pores and skin,” it superimposed a complete frog’s face. The AI appeared to withstand depicting Tiggy bare, however Tiggy doesn’t put on garments. When the director requested for a “brief shirtless alien,” he obtained an error message, presumably due to the instrument’s safeguards. “As a result of I stated the phrase shirtless,” he guessed.
Narratives round AI are typically all-or-nothing: Both we’re cooked or it’s all hype. Watching the filmmaker work with AI software program—morning iced espresso in hand, brown hair and beard flippantly unkempt—is quirkier and fewer dramatic than all that. It’s like dropping in on puppy school. The instruments preserve ignoring directions, making odd decisions, or veering fully off-course. However with care and endurance, he reins them in, finally coaxing out eight minutes of densely scripted unique TV.
On this case, these eight minutes constituted the most recent episode within the sci-fi cinematic universe that the filmmaker has created below the identify Neural Viz. The challenge began in 2024 with a mockumentary internet collection known as Unanswered Oddities, a talking-head TV present from a future the place the Earth is inhabited by creatures known as glurons, who have interaction in Historic Aliens–fashion hypothesis about their human predecessors. Every episode explores a special (and badly mispronounced) side of “hooman” civilization, like America, train, or the NFL. At first it appeared like a humorous, self-contained bit.
However then the universe, generally known as the Monoverse, began to develop. Neural Viz churned out episodes of various collection from the identical gluron TV community, Monovision: a documentary cop present, a UFC-style present about combating bugs. Then got here podcasts, road interviews. Subplots and arcs began to emerge between movies, with romances forming, spiritual cults lurking within the background, and grainy archival footage surfacing concerning the true circumstances that worn out humanity. Earlier than lengthy, the filmmaker had constructed a complete world with its personal language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.
