This is a concept trailer for A.I. filmmaker Rodrigo Soares' Remains: The Only Survivors. He describes it as film about "an empty world destroyed by machines...a dystopian cyberpunk future where only machines remain, and young hybrid/android girl survives by repairing broken machines. Whatever your feels about generative A.I., it's a very impressive piece of work.
And it raises the question, what happens when A.I. films become just as impressive - or even more impressive - than traditionally made ones? That's a question that Rodrigo himself seems to be wrestling with:
"Do you think a creator who uses A.I. can also be considered a real artist?When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type and the printing press to Europe in the 1400s, the immediate reaction from academics and professional scribes was a mix of awe and absolute horror, not unlike the reaction to Generative A.I. today. Before Gutenberg, books were copied by hand. It was a sacred, slow, highly artistic process. Critics of the printing press argued that mass production would ruin the human mind and that the flood of new books flooded the world with "foolish, ignorant, malignant... and impious" texts.
For me, the real challenge in A.I. filmmaking is not generating the most impressive frame. It is shaping those frames in to something meaningful. A.I. can open the door to incredible worlds, but the filmmaker still needs to decide what the audience should feel, where they should look, and why each image matters."
- Rodrigo Soares, Fableforge.ai
They were complaining about, essentially, 15th-century print slop.
This happened again in the 19th century with the invention of the camera. Painters were horrified by cameras. The critic Charles Baudelaire famously called photography "art's most deadly enemy," fearing that a machine requiring "only a chemical process and a button push" would destroy the livelihood of true artists. But the camera didn't kill painting, just as the printing press didn't kill scholarship. Neither form was destroyed, but the goalposts shifted, from preservation to critical thinking and original synthesis.
In fine art, painters no longer had to act as human photocopiers documenting reality, they were forced to ask themselves what can a brush do that a lens cannot? The resulting existential crisis gave birth to Impressionism, Cubism, and virtually all modern art.
This is, of course, well worn ground in the ongoing debate over generative A.I. Likewise, The observation that A.I. doesn't automatically make you a great filmmaker — any more than a printing press automatically made you a great author — isn't a particularly new one. However, Rodrigo is suggesting that the goalposts in filmmaking are rapidly shifting from execution to curation.
When generative A.I. models produce work this impressive, we have to directly engage with the question: why do we need traditional forms like puppetry?
Rodrigo's argument illuminates something important: notwithstanding the complex legal and ethical issues raised by generative A.I., it is a technology that ultimately removes barriers and rewards people who actually know how to perform and direct. When he says 'the filmmaker still needs to decide what the audience should feel, where they should look, and why each image matters' - that's a description of what puppeteers and other artists already do. Generative A.I. creates the possibility of doing it with fewer restrictions.
Personally, I think that just like filmmaking, generative A.I. is going to ultimately push puppetry - both traditional and digital - to exciting new places. The transition won't be smooth, and will likely be more than a little terrifying...but it could also be terribly exciting.
