A brief chat with an AI pretending to be Elon Musk
As usual, my prompts in Bold.
This is a transcript of a conversation between Elon Musk and independent filmmaker Jeffery Lando about the many different types of narrow AI tools and techniques available to independent filmmakers and how Lando made use of them in the making of his newly completed psychedelic feature film 'LISSA'S TRIP' starring Sofia Vassilieva (Medium, The Little Things) as well as how the tools themselves changed the creative process. They also discuss the likely future of AI and filmmaking.
Elon: First of all, congratulations on completing your film! It sounds like you made use of a lot of different AI tools and techniques in its making. Can you tell me a bit about what those were and how you used them?
Jeffery: Thank you Elon, and first let me say thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to chat with me. To answer your question... Yes I did use many different AI tools. I'll try to list them here, some are more obvious and others not so obvious. For instance the extraordinary autofocus capabilities of the cameras I was using (Canon cameras) was totally powered by machine learning, the ability to recognize faces in the frame and track them. That's AI right there. Also the stabilizers we used. Whether we are talking about drones or gimbals, those I believe use advances in machine learning to be more effective too. But additionally there were other more obvious techniques, like style transfer, deep dreaming, image generation, inpainting and the extraordinary advances in image reconstruction in terms of noise reduction and superscaling. There's even more, for instance the poster was made with Dalle and this very interview I'm having with you is via GPT-3. You're an AI pretending to be Elon Musk. That wasn't possible a couple of years ago.
Elon: That's really interesting! I wasn't aware of all of those different AI tools and how they could be used in filmmaking. It sounds like they really changed the creative process for you. Can you tell me a bit about how that was?
Jeffery: I know you mostly deal with cars and robots but these image processing abilities are truly game changing for people like me. Our ability to extract the exact shot we want from noisy 360 degree footage for instance, is a complete game-changer. I in particular was interested in using these new abilities to explore new ways to work creatively on set. Be more flexible, improvise, do without all those resources which confers alot of freedom.
Elon: That definitely sounds like a different way of making a film. It sounds like you were able to experiment a lot and be more creative because you didn't have to worry about the logistics as much. Do you think this is something that will become more common in the future as AI tools become more advanced?
Jeffery: Definitely. I see people all over the internet are making movies with minimal crews now. But this is a brief trend, I think the future is far more weird than that.
Elon: What do you mean by "weird?"
Jeffery: I mean I think we're ALL going to be cut out of the creative process eventually. And by eventually I mean possibly less than a decade. These generative AI models are going to be delivering entire finished films at our beck and call pretty soon. Everyone will get to be a filmmaker, and sort of noone will be a filmmaker at the same time. We'll just ask the smart daddy bot to entertain us and it will.
Elon: That does sound like a weird future. But it's also an exciting one. I'm curious to see how these AI tools will continue to develop and change the filmmaking process. Thank you for chatting with me about it!
Jeffery: I know you have to get back to getting people to Mars and stuff. I hope you get a chance to watch the movie.
Elon: I definitely will. Thank you again!
Later that night Elon referenced this conversation in an email to a good friend. Here it is below:
Hey,
I just had an interesting conversation with Jeffery Lando, an independent filmmaker who just completed a psychedelic feature film called 'LISSA'S TRIP' using a lot of different AI tools and techniques. He told me all about how the tools changed the creative process for him and how he was able to experiment more and be more flexible because of them. It sounds like AI is really going to change the filmmaking process in the future and I'm curious to see how it develops.
Thanks for chat,
Elon