AI Made a Movie—and the Results Are Horrifyingly Encouraging

Benjamin, as the AI is known, assembled Zone Out from thousands of hours of old films and green-screen footage of professional actors—in 48 hours.

There’s really no nice way to put this: In his new film, Zone Out, Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch makes you want to do just that. It’s not simply that he talks about having sex with a jar of salsa, it’s also that he looks absolutely ghastly. His face appears to flicker in and out of the head that houses it; his mouth, normally in a wry downturn, droops and then disappears. His co-star, Elisabeth Gray, doesn’t fare much better: a mustache—someone else’s—finds a home above her lips.

The director of the film, who goes by “Benjamin,” was not available for comment. Benjamin is an AI—one that created Zone Out in a matter of 48 hours, piecing it together out of thousands of hours of old films and green-screen footage of professional actors. The resulting movie, created for a two-day AI filmmaking challenge, is not going to win awards.

But it’s still impressive. And the real live humans who made Benjamin are taking steps toward automating video creation at a time when artificial intelligence and face-swapping technology are enabling a sketchy line-blur between what’s real and what’s not. Fictional narratives, you could say, are never real, but the people who write them, direct them, and portray characters in them are. Benjamin changes that.

Learning on the Job

Zone Out isn’t the first film that LA-based director Oscar Sharp and his team have made together. (Sharp calls himself “director of the director,” since auteur credit goes to Benjamin.) Benjamin’s debut was back in 2016. Sharp and Ross Goodwin, a creative technologist at Google, entered the 48-hour challenge as part of the Sci-Fi London film festival, and fed a bunch of sci-fi movie scripts to a neural network to see what it would spit out. It was also the first collaboration with actors Middleditch, Gray, and Humphrey Ker, who all gamely read the lines that the AI had written. The film, Sunspring, secured a top-ten spot at the challenge.

At the time, Sharp and Goodwin called the AI “Jetson.” Eventually, though, Jetson named itself—in a stunning display of creepiness. “What’s next for you, Jetson?” someone asked the AI during a live stage interview at the fest that year. “Here we go,” it replied. “The staff is divided by the train of the burning machine building with sweat. No one will see your face. The children reach into the furnace, but the light is still slipping to the floor. The world is still embarrassed. The party is with your staff.”

“My name is Benjamin,” it concluded.

It was this sort of poetic gibberish that encouraged Sharp and Goodwin to enter the contest again the following year, this time with a new set of actors (including David Hasselhoff) and with the intent to actually collaborate with the AI. “We wanted to do a lot of what Oscar and I talked about from the beginning, which is technology as augmentation rather than replacing humans,” says Goodwin. This time, Benjamin generated a scene's dialogue from the works of Shakespeare and subtitle tracks from other films, while Sharp wrote the passages the framed each scene. The result, It’s No Game, ended up winning third place.

For this year’s Zone Out, Sharp and Goodwin re-engaged the cast from the first film and decided to take it in another direction: letting Benjamin do everything. Utilizing face-swapping and voice-generating technologies, the crew not only commissioned Benjamin to write the script, but also to select scenes, place actors’ faces on existing characters—i.e., putting Middleditch’s face over Vincent Price’s—and string sentences together using voice recordings from the actors.

“What I was really trying to do is attempt to automate each part of the human creative process,” Sharp says, “to see if we learn anything about what it really is to be a human person creating films.”

In just two days they produced a film. Goodwin used a laptop to monitor Benjamin and occasionally sample scenes, but the AI is entirely cloud-based. Goodwin and Sharp trained the neural networks on Amazon Web Services – “basically the AWS version of Nvidia’s DGX-1,” Goodwin says—and at one point were using 11 different GANs for the face-swapping. (A “GAN” is a generative adversarial network, a pair of neural networks where one is generating content and the other is judging content.) They also used TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning network.

The end result is unpolished, and mostly nonsensical. The team also ran out of time to generate dialogue from the actors’ own voices, so they plugged in robo-voices. But while Zone Out didn’t place in this year’s London Sci-Fi 48-hour challenge, both Sharp and Goodwin are buoyed by the fact Benjamin got the film done at all, even if it didn’t win the love of judges this time around. (Like Sharp and Goodwin's previous two AI films, Zone Out was acquired by our sister publication Ars Technica.)

Besides, even if the result isn’t spectacular, it’s spectacularly timely—especially given the recent rise of “deepfakes,” fake porn created by using open-source machine learning software to put a celebrity’s face on the body of an adult film actor. “Face-swapping has been used for very horrifying, non-consensual porn, which speaks a lot to this technology,” Sharp said. “And I said, well, let’s have this story be about consensual usage.”

It’s not just porn that AI and machine learning are fundamentally changing. In the past year, researchers have shown how high-profile figures—like, say, a president—can be manipulated to make it seem as though they’re saying something he or she never really said. A couple weeks ago, Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele released a PSA in which he puppeted Barack Obama using Adobe After Effects and FakeApp.

The Zone Out actors are aware of Benjamin’s implications, too. As far back as 1994’s The Crow, technology has been used to digitally recreate or extend an actor’s presence after she or he is no longer available. That might be enjoyable for audiences who just want to see the thing they want to see, but Middleditch says these artificial renderings are “weird,” and, in some cases have the potential to be dangerous.

“With all this stuff, it starts out with people just wanting to do this cool thing,” Middleditch says. “Like Mark Zuckerberg made a platform to connect with friends—and now, fast forward several years, and he’s in senate hearings discussing the destruction of the fabric of our society.”

“So, now people just want to make AI,” Middleditch continued, “but as with everything that people create, others will come around and infiltrate it with their own mysterious means and intent, especially facial technology.”

His Zone Out costar Elisabeth Gray has a slightly more optimistic view. “If this fails, I’ll be employable for the rest of time,” Gray says. “And if it in fact works, then I may not be employable as an actor, but at least I will have been there at the moment when we realized we were going to be replaced by computers.” There's no need for her to worry; Benjamin may be an auteur in title, but the finer points of the artistic process continue to elude him.

At least, for now.


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