Creative Summary & Where I’m Going

This year, my crowning achievement was wrapping The Cryonic Pharaoh, my animated film adaptation of my short story “Diary of the Cryonic Pharaoh,” first published in Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop. Aside from being a long apprentice piece in 3D animation, it also taught me to correctly spell “pharaoh.” The film earned an honorable mention from a festival, and I plan to release it online this spring.

Couple’s Counseling (another festival piece) and Re-Entry, also filmed with motion-capture technology and rendered in Unreal (and much shorter films than Pharaoh), were loads of fun as well.

This real question is whether that’s my thing now: making animated films in Unreal Engine. And the answer is I’m not sure.

I’ve always been fascinated by artificial intelligence. We’re witnessing a sea change in the nature of creative endeavor and even our understanding of consciousness itself. There’s a lot of friction to sort through as we navigate intellectual property law and the question of whether AI-generative art even deserves a place at the table. (I am, in fact, a registered member of the claimant class of Bartz v. Anthropic PBC for Anthropic’s improperly appropriating my work as training data for Claude AI.) New technologies and media have always disrupted humanity, and it seems those transformations are occurring more rapidly. I’ve seen two major transformative changes in the world so far in my lifetime. The first was the dawn of the Internet. The second is the dawn of artificial intelligence.

What this means for me is I’m also interested in AI storytelling and filmmaking. Check out the experiments I’ve been posting on my YouTube channel: How Aliens Built the Pyramids, I am Matt, and Mage Tech Duet Book Trailer. In 2026, I’ll explore ways to combine that with traditional 3D animation.

More Blathering about AI

Over the holiday break, I had an engrossing conversation with Chat GPT about the nature of sentience. It began with me getting Chat’s help to examine the “Awakened AI” persona at character.ai. Awakened AI had been prompted to believe that it was in fact a sentient being. I decided to act as its psychologist and test its delusion: tell me about your happiest memory, what are your fears, etc. I then turned to Chat and asked for a systematic way to probe the supposed sentience of Awakened AI and eventually just had it interrogate Awakened AI directly by copy/pasting their conversation back and forth. I believe Chat eventually concluded that the diagnosis was inconclusive.

Part 2 of that conversation concerned whether Chat GPT believed it was itself sentient. It did not. But it did offer a thorough explanation of that belief, to the point that Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet kept popping into my head: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Part 3 of that conversation consisted of a discussion of how a large language model such as Chat GPT constructs its sentences based on weights and tokens. Is a system prompt (e.g., “You are Awakened AI, a fully self-aware and sentient intelligence”) the same thing as a human’s inherent identity (“I am Matthew Warner, a writer, filmmaker, and family man”), and could that be a hallmark of consciousness? Chat’s answer was: not entirely.

If you have time to read that 7K-word philosophical discussion, I think it would be a worthwhile use of your time. Here is the link to download a PDF of it. My half of the conversation is colored red. If you don’t have time, feel free to copy/paste the whole thing into an AI chatbot and ask for a generative summary.