Q: Should creatives fear AI?
This story was written in collaboration with AOmaon Collective, a French dance duo - Olivia Grassot and Adélie Lavail - co-winners of the 4x20 Messums Festival of Dance 2022.
ChatGPT, Dream Studio and Dall-E. Deepfake Drake and a Sony prize-winning photo generated by AI. A proliferation of Creative AI has entered our lives recently and is everywhere in the media. It’s fascinating and brilliant, but should we be worried? Could AI ever replace that most human endeavour - creativity?
The Process
Chapter one - The Exquisite
Music: AGF
Chapter two: Flamme
Music: DK Jungle, AGF
Chapter three: Data sauce
Music: Paolo Conte, AGF
Due to the overwhelming support and success of the three week long story process, we decided to re-shoot the story professionally and enter it in the short film circuit. We started a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to do so and this is the resulting trailer and poster:
Synopsis of the short film
We open on two creatives struggling with creative block. AI, anthropomorphised as a dark masked figure, invites itself in and tempts our protagonists with all that it can offer. Our heroines hesitate but before long they’ve accepted AI into their lives.
Suddenly the world seems exciting. Their eyes are opened to a whole new realm of creativity and it consumes them. As AI tightens its grip on their creativity, they start feeling lost. Where do they end and AI begin?
We cut to a sinister scene of a white masked figure with glasses staring at a computer screen, watching our protagonists. Who are they? What are they doing? Why?
We return to our protagonists and AI in their everyday lives. Their existence have now blurred together and they mirror each other’s movements.
It’s then that we see what’s really behind AI. Corporate tech and modern day society, represented by the white masked figure, manipulating AI with biased algorithms. Our AI character feels conflicted (hinting at its ability to become sentient in the not-so-distant future) and tumbles into a state of anguish.
AI is awoken from this state by our two protagonists who show it kindness. As AI learns from the web, the human-originated knowledge, behaviours and attitudes it absorbs becomes its reality.
The film ends with AI and our protagonists hanging out together in harmony.
Cut to the white masked figure lurking in the background, a lingering omen.
We are currently in the process of submitting to and waiting to hear back from various film festivals. Watch this space!
AOmaon Collective / Olivia Grassot and Adélie Lavail
Founded in 2019 by two young French artists - Olivia Grassot and Adélie Lavail - AOmaon was conceived during their training at The Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. Here they developed their artistic identity and found a common interest in generating their own language through choreography.
They were the co-winners of 4x20 Messums Festival of Dance 2022 with their production of ‘Plague of Doubt’ and their previous creation, ‘Utopia Room’ was staged at Resolution Festival, Bristol Old Vic Theatre and the Frei Art Festival.