W.When robots finally conquer Earth, their first target seems to be the slightly blemished box set of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Why not? Who wouldn’t want to see Frodo and his companions reimagined by his AI “filmmaker” in the style of Wes Anderson or Pixar?
Well, after all, most of us are, even if the animated versions of our favorite Hobbit adventurers are pretty cute. On Instagram, you can find the “cast” of The Lord of the Rings by Pixar thanks to his AI called Midjourney (don’t worry, it’s not real). However, some Disney animated stills are mistakenly taken from the machine, especially since Aragorn and Arwen look like they’re drawn from the world of Rapunzel on the Tower or Frozen instead of Toy Story or Up. I doubt it was sent to Come on, Midjourney, if he can’t tell the difference between his two Disney-owned studios, Miles can’t convince Dyson to cooperate with the annihilation of humanity.
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Going even deeper into the uncanny valley is Curious Refuge’s latest effort. The company appears to specialize in his AI screenwriters. This is the trailer for The Lord of the Rings, directed by Wes Anderson, and, to be fair, it hints at possible future careers in the caricature of the machines that invented it. There’s plenty of tan and teal, and it captures Anderson’s weird, still-camera style well, and there’s even a nice joke that combines the indie dude’s love of visual lists with Hobbity’s Second Breakfast dialogue. Timothée Chalamet is certainly a tad taller to play Frodo, but Tilda Swinton as Galadriel fits the bill and Willem Dafoe as Gollum is an inspiration. The colors really impressed me.
Still, while a very good attack for a machine given a lot of relevant information by humans, no one would believe this was an actual movie trailer. It’s funny, but it still looks crude. It looks like it was put together by a team of gifted sixth-form media studies students who probably ate too many naughty mushrooms. Bill Murray as Gandalf can be recognized as Bill Murray as Gandalf, but that’s because the only thing behind that soulless staring eye is an algorithm from Hades’ seventh layer Clearly not the real Bill Murray.
But companies like Curious Refuge probably aren’t worried. Because, as recently picked up by the Writers Guild of America, their aim isn’t necessarily to convince us that machines can (yet) finish entire scripts. Rather, it’s about selling AI scripting equipment to studios, which may only need the more expensive human option to polish.
Anderson doesn’t really need an algorithm that can badly pastiche himself, so imagining AI being used in an actual Wes Anderson movie (or anything really artistic) is difficult. And there’s no point in releasing a Wes Anderson lookalike in Hollywood without naming the filmmaker.
It seems far more likely that AI will be used to put together the story of, say, Paw Patrol season 17, or produce a cheap, streamable movie sequel. After all, it’s already possible to find material in the dark corners of Netflix or Amazon Prime that feels like it’s been churned out by lifeless, soulless beings using repetitive formulas and algorithms. Have you seen Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus?
On the one hand, we are just getting started. If we embrace AI at all now, the future will surely be destined for a dystopia when robots get better at their jobs. Soon you’ll be snuggling up with popcorn and coke coke as the new Terminator, as good as his first two films, unfolds before your eyes. Written entirely by machine, he lacks just one key element of the original film. An AI scriptwriter perfectly transcribed human resistance.
