Artificial intelligence, led by an engineer from Google, independently made the first motion picture. Not just put parts of other people's films with each other, or gave out the letters of the script, but created a full-fledged short film. He wrote the plot himself, he wrote all the dialogues, he chose the scenes and determined the facial expressions of the actors (and even, apparently, he himself wrote the title for the newspaper shown in the film - although it turned out to be so ironic that it is difficult to believe). Voice acting, music and editing - of course, also for AI. But the resulting black-and-white science fiction doesn't seem cute.
In the new short film, Zone Out, Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch plays a scientist trying to stop the spread of the virus that changes people's faces. His own face can’t stay in a normal position, shaking back and forth on his head. The mouth sometimes disappears completely. His co-star, actress Elizabeth Gray, is no better off. Above her lips, for example, sometimes someone else's mustache appears. It looks pretty creepy. It seems that they can no longer be saved.
The director of the film, Benjamin, is unlikely to explain to you what's what, and what meaning he put into his creation. The fact is that this is AI, artificial intelligence, which made a short film in 48 hours, using thousands of hours of old films, hundreds of thousands of short stories and the faces of real actors (with their permission). If not for the newspaper headline at the beginning of the second minute, the plot of the film probably could not have been deciphered by Einstein.
The actors' faces were superimposed on the necessary scenes, and showed exactly the emotions that AI wanted, thanks to the same technology used to shoot Deepfakes porn. About this system, about its really serious danger and about funny (for now) memes.
Benjamin can already do this - he does not care whose faces he uses to create his masterpieces. And the script of the film can also be changed “on the fly”: it is enough to “feed” the AI with romantic comedies, and not sci-fi and noir, and you will have a completely different product for your target audience. In 48 hours.
Benjamin training faces set.
Responsible for the project is Ross Goodwin, who develops "creative technologies" and works on machine intelligence at Google. But he is fond of filming separately from work in an IT company, this is his "passion". Goodwin is assisted by director Oscar Sharp, a couple of familiar actors and a small team of researchers who collect texts for the AI in the right format.
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Together, they are notoriously trolling "real" filmmakers - sending Benjamin's films to traditional film festivals. Actually, that's why the production of Zone Out took 48 hours: these are the requirements of the Sci-Fi London Film Festival, where the jury determines the winners, and the first place gets a contract for a full-length film. One of the early works of Goodwin, Sharpe and AI, a short called Sunspring, entered the top 10 at this festival (out of hundreds of films and short stories). And the film It's No Game, for which Benjamin composed all the dialogues based on the works of Shakespeare, received bronze in 2017. If the requirements of the festival were not so severe, or the machine had more powerful hardware, perhaps the faces of the heroes of the new film Zone Out would not be so distorted. The team managed on their own, without the help of Google,and Deepfakes technology takes time to create the perfect shot.
AI in Goodwin's laptop.
During the production of their first film, Sharpe and Goodwin named their AI "Jetson." Then Jetson renamed himself "Benjamin" - in a rather creepy manner. During the presentation of the first Sunspring film at the 2016 London Film Festival, someone asked AI what he would do after that. He replied:
Go. The staff are separated by the machine building train in sweat. Nobody will see your face. The children enter the stove, but the light still glides across the floor. The world is in turmoil. The party goes with your staff.
My name is Benjamin.
After that, no one called the car "Jetson".
For Zone Out this year, Sharpe and Goodwin gave Benjamin full control for the first time. Script, actors' faces, dialogues, scenes - the AI was responsible for every aspect of the film. He even generated the music himself. Since Benjamin does not yet have a camera, and he cannot run and shoot, he himself chose scenes from old films - those that managed to become public domain and can now be freely used by everyone. At first, the team recorded the voices of the actors reading Benjamin's script, but in the end they decided to try even this stage to provide the machine. So all the dialogues in the film are also played by robots. They are still very tight with intonations.
Goodwin, Sharpe and Middleton watch one of the opening scenes of the new film.
The neural networks that make up Benjamin were trained through Amazon Web Services ("essentially the AWS version of Nvidia's DGX-1," as Goodwin says), and 11 different GANs (generative adversarial networks that try to control creations each other). The AI also used Google's TensorFlow machine learning library.
This year, the film did not make it to the list for showing at the London Film Festival. But the team is not worried - they are already happy that their AI managed to independently create something, even remotely resembling a movie. Ross Goodwin says that he will definitely continue his work, and will try to understand whether it is possible to endow the machine with creativity, or it will always be just an enumeration of options (and whether people can tell one from the other).
So far, they will definitely be able to.
To questions about the massive distribution of deepfakes, the main "actor" of the film, Thomas Middleditch, answers:
At this stage, people just want to create AI. How it will then be used by others, especially in the field of face replacement, is difficult to predict here.
Elizabeth Gray, who is assigned the main (and only) female role, is optimistic:
If this technology doesn't take off, then I will have a job for the rest of my life. And if this is the future, I probably won't be able to work as an actress, but at least I was there at the moment when we realized that we would be replaced by computers.
And here, in fact, the film itself (here is far from Hitchcock, although the ending is really creepy):
As already mentioned, the same team in 2016, using AI, made the film Sunspring - about a future in which, due to a lack of jobs, young people are forced to sell their blood in order to somehow earn money (well, or something like that)., it's hard to say). The script of the film was 100% written by artificial intelligence, but the actors themselves acted out their roles, and a professional director was responsible for editing and sound.
It came out more watchable, and for a film made in 48 hours, even quite worthy. The plot is quite serious, but it all looks more like a comedy - with actors who, with an important face, are trying to speak complete nonsense. Such dark overtones and the feeling of closeness of Skynet, which you feel when watching Zone Out, do not arise here. Perhaps people just prevented the car from doing everything the way it would like …
