As promised (or threatened) in my last post, I recently took a short course in AI filmmaking. What a cool subject. I then spent only six hours to work with Chat GPT, Claude AI, ElevenLabs, and Google Flow to create this “masterpiece”:

All the while, I struggled with my and others’ feelings about artificial intelligence — fellow creators’ complaints about copyright infringement, appropriation, misinformation, the dumbing down of quality, and the impact on labor. In a way, I felt naughty even creating a tongue-in-cheek little entertainment like this. And I’m still not sure I reached any conclusions.

I can tell you that it was a lot of fun. It’s also not as devoid of creative brainpower as you might think. I employed these tools as the film’s director, and I thought of the different AIs as my crew.

I took the (not very original) concept that aliens created the pyramids and added in my own twist that they used the pyramids as power generators. Chat and Claude helped me write the script quickly, and we continued in a constant conversation to generate and edit prompts that I fed into Google Flow to make the video assets, which I then had to stitch together in my film editor. The ElevenLabs AI voiceover (the personality I chose was “Beezle Wheezelby”), while completely serviceable, also presented challenges to integrate it with the visuals. But that was all part of the creative process.

In any case, I learned something new and was glad to do it. I don’t know if I’ll make more short films like this, or if I might just use it on occasion to enhance my work flow with motion-capture animation and Unreal Engine. I hope you enjoy it!