A series of short films, including one made by Michael Keaton, have been commissioned by Google with the aim of making AI seem less terrifying.
Google wants us all to stop worrying and learn to love artificial intelligence. That, at least, is the stated aim behind a new initiative announced by the tech giant, named ‘AI on screen’. The Silicon Valley company has partnered with a firm called Range Media Partners to produce a series of short films intended to “portray AI in a less nightmarish light,” according to the LA Times.
Among the first to be made is Sweetwater, which will be directed by (and star) Michael Keaton, while his son Sean Douglas has written the script. It’s said to be about “a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother.” In other words, it sounds like a Black Mirror episode without Charlie Brooker’s cynicism.
Speaking to the LA Times, Sean Douglas said that Google’s “looking for stories that were not doomsday tales about AI.” Instead, he says, they’re “not overly positive – but sort of middle-ground stories.”
Although these short films won’t be made using gen-AI themselves, news of Google’s initiative emerges amid what seems like a new wave of AI ventures in the film industry. Requiem For A Dream director Darren Aronofsky now has his own AI studio, Primordial Soup, which has recently signed a deal with Google DeepMind. The idea is for the two entities to partner and “take an open-minded look at AI as a creative tool, rather than a replacement of the artist,” according to Deadline.
The VFX industry’s leading studio, Industrial Light and Magic, has also taken an open-minded approach to generative AI, though it could be argued that its early proof of concept – a Star Wars short featuring alien peacock snails and bukakke sloths – isn’t hugely mind-blowing.
It’s a technology that is evidently developing at pace, however. At the time of writing, Google has recently launched Veo 3, a text-to-video generation platform to rival OpenAI’s Sora. It’s only a few days old, but users have already figured out that it’s possible to make a Fortnite lets-play video, complete with voice over – the sort of thing you’d see on Twitch – that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
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Another demonstration of Veo 3, doing the rounds on Twitter/X, shows members of the public being interviewed at a car show. The realism is quiet eerie; although there are telltale signs that it’s fake (such as the gibberish text on signs and shirts), a casual viewer could easily fail to spot them.
Google may want to sooth our fears about AI, but there are certain facts that are inescapable. If the technology lives up to its creators’ lofty claims, then we’re rushing into a society where bogus footage, real-looking footage can be generated in a matter of seconds.
Even if we leave aside gen-AI’s likely impact on jobs, its sky-high ecological cost (which is said to rival the aviation industry), and the ethical question of artists’ work being used to ‘train’ AI models, there’s still the question of how the technology will affect the way we consume media. After all, if news footage of war atrocities and clips of politicians saying awful things can be so easily faked, how can we trust anything we see?
According to Google executive Mira Lane, however, it’s important to consider the ‘nuance’ when it comes to AI.
“Narratives about technology in films are overwhelmingly characterized by a dystopian perspective,” Lane told the LA Times. “When we think about AI, there’s so much nuance to consider, which is what this program is about. How might we tell more deeply human stories? What does it look like to coexist? What are some of those dilemmas that are going to come up?”
